From Logic Programming to Machine Ethics

This chapter investigates the appropriateness of Logic Programming-based reasoning to machine ethics, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that emerges from the need of imbuing autonomous agents with the capacity for moral decision making. The first part of the chapter aims at identifying morality viewpoints, as studied in moral philosophy and psychology, which are amenable to computational modeling, and then mapping them to appropriate Logic Programming-based reasoning features. The identified viewpoints are covered by two morality themes: moral permissibility and the dual-process model. In the second part, various Logic Programming-based reasoning features are applied to model these identified morality viewpoints, via classic moral examples taken off-the-shelf from the literature. For this purpose, our qualm system mainly employs a combination of the Logic Programming features of abduction, updating, and counterfactuals. These features are all supported jointly by Logic Programming tabling mechanisms. The applications are also supported by other existing Logic Programming-based systems, featuring preference handling and probabilistic reasoning, which complement qualm in addressing the morality viewpoints in question.

Throughout the chapter, many references to our published work are given, providing further examples and details about each topic. Thus, this chapter can be envisaged as an entry point survey on the employment of Logic Programming for knowledge modelling and technically implementing machine ethics.