Artificial morality: Making of the artificial moral agents

Abstract

Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to banking and court algorithms. It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a machine's potential to be an agent, or moral agent, in the first place. Then comes the problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed additional psychological (emotional and cognitive) competence in cold moral machines. What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top-down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort.