Developing a General, Interactive Approach to Codifying Ethical Principles

Building on our previous achievements in machine ethics (Anderson et al. 2006a-b, 2007, 2008), we are developing and implementing a general interactive approach to analyzing ethical dilemmas with the goal to apply it toward the end of codifying the ethical principles that will help resolve ethical dilemmas that intelligent systems will encounter in their interactions with human beings. Making a minimal epistemological commitment that there is at least one ethical duty and at least two possible actions that could be performed, the general system will: 1) incrementally construct, through an interactive exchange with experts in ethics, a representation scheme needed to handle the dilemmas with which it is presented, and 2) discover principles implicit in the judgments of these ethicists in particular cases that lead to their resolution. The system will commit only to the assumption that any ethically relevant features of a dilemma can be represented as the degree of satisfaction or violation of one or more duties that an agent must take into account to determine which of the actions that are possible in that dilemma is ethically