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AI & SOCIETY

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25.04.2020 | Original Article

Artificial virtue: the machine question and perceptions of moral character in artificial moral agents

verfasst von: Patrick Gamez, Daniel B. Shank, Carson Arnold, Mallory North

Erschienen in: AI & SOCIETY | Ausgabe 4/2020

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Abstract

Virtue ethics seems to be a promising moral theory for understanding and interpreting the development and behavior of artificial moral agents. Virtuous artificial agents would blur traditional distinctions between different sorts of moral machines and could make a claim to membership in the moral community. Accordingly, we investigate the “machine question” by studying whether virtue or vice can be attributed to artificial intelligence; that is, are people willing to judge machines as possessing moral character? An experiment describes situations where either human or AI agents engage in virtuous or vicious behavior and experiment participants then judge their level of virtue or vice. The scenarios represent different virtue ethics domains of truth, justice, fear, wealth, and honor. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that moral attributions are weakened for AIs compared to humans, and the reasoning and explanations for the attributions are varied and more complex. On “relational” views of membership in the moral community, virtuous machines would indeed be included, even if they are indeed weakened. Hence, while our moral relationships with artificial agents may be of the same types, they may yet remain substantively different than our relationships to human beings.

Vorheriger Artikel Ethics of engagement

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A fourth type discussed by Moor, “ethical-impact machines,” are not autonomous in the ways that would make them relevant to the discussion here.

The point of the distinction seems designed to mark a gap between machines that simply produce good outcomes or do not wrong us, and machines that approximate moral agency insofar as they are at least causally responsible for the decisions they make, actions they take, and consequences they produce, just as the further distinction between explicit and full moral agents seems intended to forestall intuitions about human (moral) exceptionality. But thinking about explicit ethical agency in terms of explicit ethical reasoning makes serious presumptions about the nature of ethics, ethical reasoning, and moral psychology. After all, it seems that human beings are capable of behaving ethically without anything like the explicit, conscious representation of ethical rules (Hitlin 2008). We seem to be able to respond morally to situations on the go without deliberation in all sorts of situations.

It might be the case that machine learning could allow for the instantiation of a utilitarian or deontological AMA; such an algorithm, properly trained, would act in ways that would be, in fact, the same as one would arrive at by the proper and consistent application of the principle of utility or, say, the Categorical Imperative, respectively. Thanks to an anonymous referee for making explicit this possibility. But insofar as the actual application of the rules is genuinely opaque—say, in the way that the behavior of AlphaGO was opaque—it seems to us that this would be, in appearance, similar enough to the acquisition of the virtues, i.e., responding reliably to salient features of a situation, as to be the same sort of moral agent we are interested in. In any case, we do not intend to claim that a moral machine must look like a virtuous agent, but only to suggest that it seems a plausible candidate, and to draw out some implications.

An analogous worry about the authenticity of care, or feelings in general, on the part of machines, can be found in Turkle (2011).

From a virtue ethics perspective, it might be that the very language of “full moral agents” isn’t quite adequate; it’s clearly beyond the scope of this paper to propose or defend a replacement concept, but it seems like the thrust of the argument of this paper doesn’t depend on these sorts of details.

For an example that sketches how this might be done in the case of environmental ethics, see Gamez (2018).

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Titel: Artificial virtue: the machine question and perceptions of moral character in artificial moral agents
verfasst von: Patrick Gamez
Daniel B. Shank
Carson Arnold
Mallory North
Publikationsdatum: 25.04.2020
Verlag: Springer London
Erschienen in: AI & SOCIETY / Ausgabe 4/2020
Print ISSN: 0951-5666
Elektronische ISSN: 1435-5655
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00977-1

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