Towards Computational Morality with Logic Programming

When autonomous agents are deployed in some field where moral dilemmas may arise, the need for imbuing them with some capacity of moral decision making becomes indispensable. Computational morality has emerged to address this issue, bringing together perspectives from different areas, including artificial intelligence. This PhD research investigates further the appropriateness of logic programming (LP) to model morality aspects studied in philosophy and psychology, those amenable to computational modeling, by exploiting appropriate LP features. The goals of the research are twofold: (1) to develop an LP based system with features needed in modeling moral settings, putting emphasis on modeling some morality aspects, and (2) to employ the developed system for modeling several moral situations and reasoning thereon, with respect to the morality aspects under consideration. We have currently co-developed two essential ingredients of the LP system, i.e., abduction and program updates, by exploiting the benefits of tabling features in logic programs. They serve as the basis for our whole system, into which other reasoning facets will be integrated, to model the identified morality aspects.