R.S. Peters, Psychology and Ethical Development

The 3 Rs Principle – Mind the Ethical Gap !

the goals of the 3Rs (replacing animals with non-animals (or animals of lower sentience), reduction in the number of animals used, and refining procedures so less harm is caused to the animals that are used) have gained wide acceptance over the 50 years since they were first proposed. These goals are now widely known and generally well accepted, both among institutions using animals in research...

The Social Psychology of Ordinary Ethical Failures

After the collapse of Enron, the fraud at Worldcom, and a host of other corporate scandals at the start of the new millennium, the media immediately began a search for the underlying cause of the failure of ethics that caused these scandals. These searches led to answers such as regulatory failure, a few bad apples, and the poorly created incentives of the gatekeepers. The scandals led to decli...

Jan Peters and Jens

Reinforcement Learning is an essential ability for robots to learn new motor skills. Nevertheless, few methods scale into the domain of anthropomorphic robotics. In order to improve in terms of efficiency, the problem is reduced onto reward-weighted imitation. By doing so, we are able to generate a framework for policy learning which both unifies previous reinforcement learning approaches and a...

and Jörg Peters

Ethical Theory of Utilitarianism and Human Rights Development

Background: Utilitarianism is a school whose founders have justified it by emphasizing consequentialism as a public interest. The school of utilitarianism is a moral and naturalistic school that justifies principles such as justice and individual and collective freedoms. For utilitarian, one cannot rely solely on individual interests and neglect the collective interest or group interest. Human ...