Skip to main content

Extracting Reasons for Moral Judgments Under Various Ethical Principles

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
KI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11793))

  • 1124 Accesses

Abstract

We present an approach to the computational extraction of reasons for the sake of explaining moral judgments in the context of an hybrid ethical reasoning agent (HERA). The HERA agent employs logical representations of ethical principles to make judgments about the moral permissibility or impermissibility of actions, and uses the same logical formulae to come up with reasons for these judgments. We motivate the distinction between sufficient reasons, necessary reasons, and necessary parts of sufficient reasons yielding different types of explanations, and we provide algorithms to extract these reasons.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 74.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    www.hera-project.com.

References

  1. Lindner, F., Bentzen, M.M.: The hybrid ethical reasoning agent IMMANUEL. In: HRI 2017, pp. 187–188 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Lindner, F., Bentzen, M.M., Nebel, B.: The HERA approach to morally competent robots. In: IROS 2017, pp. 6991–6997 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Halpern, Y.: Causality. MIT Press, Cambridge (2016)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Kuhnert, B., Lindner, F., Bentzen, M.M., Ragni, M.: Perceived difficulty of moral dilemmas depends on their causal structure: a formal model and preliminary results. In: CogSci 2017, pp. 2494–2499 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Anderson, M., Anderson, S.L.: Machine Ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2011)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  6. Wachter, S., Mittelstadt, B., Floridi, L.: Transparent, explainable, and accountable AI for robotics. Sci. Robot. 2(6) (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Mittelstadt, B., Russel, C., Wachter, S.: Explaining explanations in AI. In: FAT* 2019, pp. 279–288 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Miller, T.: Explanation in artificial intelligence: insights from the social sciences. Artif. Intell. 267, 1–38 (2019)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Mackie, J.L.: Causes and conditions. Am. Philos. Q. 12, 245–65 (1965)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Lewis, D.: Causation. J. Philos. 70, 556–567 (1973)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Dannenhauer, D., Floyd, M.W., Magazzeni, D., Aha, D.W.: Explaining rebel behavior in goal reasoning agents. In: ICAPS 2018 Workshop on Explainable Planning, pp. 12–18 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Langley, P., Meadows, B., Sridharan, M., Choi, D.: Explainable agency for intelligent autonomous systems. In: Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 4762–4763 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Russell, C.: Efficient search for diverse coherent explanations. In: FAT* 2019, pp. 20–28 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Shih, A., Choi, A., Darwiche, A.: A symbolic approach to explaining Bayesian network classifiers. In: IJCAI/ECAI 2018 Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), pp. 144–150 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Ignatiev, A., Morgado, A., Marques-Silva, J.: PySAT: a Python toolkit for prototyping with SAT oracles. In: Beyersdorff, O., Wintersteiger, C.M. (eds.) SAT 2018. LNCS, vol. 10929, pp. 428–437. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94144-8_26

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Jabbour, S., Marques-Silva, J., Sais, L., Salhi, Y.: Enumerating prime implicants of propositional formulae in conjunctive normal form. In: Fermé, E., Leite, J. (eds.) JELIA 2014. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 8761, pp. 152–165. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11558-0_11

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  17. Rosenthal, S., Selvaraj, S. P., Veloso, M.: Verbalization: narration of autonomous robot experience. In: IJCAI 2016, pp. 862–868 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Baum, K., Hermanns, H., Speith, T.: From machine ethics to explainability and back. In: International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics (ISAIM 2018) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Hölldobler, S.: Ethical decision making under the weak completion semantics. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between Human and Automated Reasoning, pp. 1–5 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Pereira, L.M., Saptawijaya, A.: Programming Machine Ethics. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29354-7

    Book  Google Scholar 

  21. Shanahan, M.: Prediction is deduction but explanation is abduction. In: IJCAI 1989, pp. 1055–1060 (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Borgo, R., Cashmore, M., Magazzeni, D.: Towards providing justifications for planner decisions. In: Proceedings of IJCAI 2018 Workshop on Explainable AI (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Previti, A., Ignatiev, A., Morgado, A., Marques-Silva, J.: Prime compilation of non-clausal formulae. In: IJCAI 2015, pp. 1980–1987 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Stocker, M.: The schizophrenia of modern ethical theories. J. Philos. 73(14), 453–466 (1976)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Felix Lindner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Lindner, F., Möllney, K. (2019). Extracting Reasons for Moral Judgments Under Various Ethical Principles. In: Benzmüller, C., Stuckenschmidt, H. (eds) KI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11793. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30179-8_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30179-8_18

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30178-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30179-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics