Agents making moral decisions

As the environments that intelligent agents operate in become more reflective of the real world, agent’s decision-making processes must become more nuanced. In this paper, we present a decision-making model for an intentional agent which has been inspired by Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and the appraisal theory of emotion. Agents utilising this model anticipate how undertaking actions will make both themselves and other agents feel, with the agent’s sense of right and wrong helping to determine which emotions are evoked in which circumstances. We proceed to present some initial findings from runs of our agent implementation over situations from well known children’s stories.