Ethical Judgment of Agents' Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems

The increasing use of multi-agent technologies in various areas raises the necessity of designing agents that judge ethical behaviors in context. This is why several works integrate ethical concepts in agents’ decision making processes. However, those approaches consider mainly an agent-centered perspective, letting aside the fact that agents are in interaction with other artificial agents or human beings that can use other ethical concepts. In this article, we address the problem of producing ethical behaviors from a multi-agent perspective. To this end, we propose a model of ethical judgment an agent can use in order to judge the ethical dimension of both its own behavior and the other agents’ behaviors. This model is based on a rationalist and explicit approach that distinguishes theory of good and theory of right. A proof-of-concept implemented in Answer Set Programming and based on a simple scenario is given to illustrate those functionalities.