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Non-monotonic Resolution of Conflicts for Ethical Reasoning

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A Construction Manual for Robots' Ethical Systems

Part of the book series: Cognitive Technologies ((COGTECH))

Abstract

This chapter attempts to specify some of the requirements of ethical robotic systems. It begins with a short story by John McCarthy entitled, “The Robot and the Baby,” that shows how difficult it is for a rational robot to be ethical. It then characterizes the different types of “ethical robots” to which this approach is relevant and the nature of ethical questions that are of concern. The second section distinguishes between the different aspects of ethical systems and attempts to focus on ethical reasoning. First, it shows that ethical reasoning is essentially non-monotonic and then that it has to consider the known consequences of actions, at least if we are interested in modeling the consequentialist ethics. The two last sections, i.e., the third and the fourth, present different possible implementations of ethical reasoners, one being based on ASP (answer set programming) and the second on the BDI (belief, desire, intention) framework for programming agents.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    \(\phi \prec \phi '\) means that ϕ′ is worse than ϕ.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, B.C. 169, 4, place Jussieu, Paris, F-75252 Cedex 05, France

    Jean-Gabriel Ganascia

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  1. Jean-Gabriel Ganascia
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Correspondence to Jean-Gabriel Ganascia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Brian Research Medical University of Vienna, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) of the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies (OSGK), Vienna, Austria

    Robert Trappl

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Ganascia, JG. (2015). Non-monotonic Resolution of Conflicts for Ethical Reasoning. In: Trappl, R. (eds) A Construction Manual for Robots' Ethical Systems. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21548-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21548-8_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21547-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21548-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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