How Ethical Frameworks Answer to Ethical Dilemmas: Towards a Formal Model

This paper is a first step towards a formal model that is intended to be the basis of an artificial agent’s reasoning that could be considered by a human as an ethical reasoning. This work is included in a larger project aiming at designing an authority-sharing manager between a robot and a human being when the human-robot system faces decision making involving ethical issues. Indeed the possible decisions in such a system will have to be considered in the light of arguments that may vary according to each agent’s points of view. The formal model allows us to translate in a more rigourous way than in natural language what is meant by various ethical frameworks and paves the way for further implementation of an ”ethical reasoning” that could put forward arguments explaining one judgement or another. To this end the ethical frameworks models will be instantiated on some classical ethical dilemmas and then analyzed and compared to each other as far as their judgements on the dilemmas are concerned.