Towards a Framework to Deal with Ethical Conflicts in Agents Systems

Autonomy is a central property in robotic systems, human-machine interfaces, e-business, ambient intelligence and assisted living applications. As the complexity of the situations the autonomous agents may encounter in such contexts is increasing, the decisions those agents make must deal with new issues, e.g. decisions involving contextual ethical considerations. Consequently contributions have proposed recommendations, advice or hard-wired ethical principles for autonomous agents. However, socio-technical systems are more and more open and decentralized, and involve autonomous artificial agents interacting with other agents, human operators or users. For such systems, novel and original methods are needed to address contextual ethical decision-making, as decisions are likely to interfere with one another. This paper aims at presenting the ETHICAA project (Ethics and Autonomous Agents) whose objective is to define what should be an autonomous entity that could manage ethical conflicts. As a first proposal, we present various practical case studies of ethical conflicts and highlight what their main contextual and decision features are.