How should autonomous vehicles behave in moral dilemmas? Human judgments reflect abstract moral principles

Derek Powell, Patricia Cheng, Michael R. Waldmann

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Self-driving autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to make the world a safer and cleaner place. A challenge confronting the development of AVs is how these vehicles should behave in traffic situations where harm is unavoidable. It is important that AVs behave in ethically appropriate ways to mitigate harm. Ideally, they should obey a system of principles that both concur with human moral judgments and are ethically defensible. Here we compare people's moral judgments of AV programming with their judgments about the behavior of human drivers, with the goal of beginning to identify such principles. As many debates within ethics remain unresolved, empirical investigations like ours may guide the development of ethical AVs (Bonnefon et al., 2015). In addition, people's judgments about the behavior of AVs may serve as a window into the abstract principles people apply in their moral reasoning.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016
EditorsAnna Papafragou, Daniel Grodner, Daniel Mirman, John C. Trueswell
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages307-312
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196739
StatePublished - 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016 - Philadelphia, United States
Duration: Aug 10 2016Aug 13 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016

Conference

Conference38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhiladelphia
Period8/10/168/13/16

Keywords

  • Ethics
  • Moral Judgment
  • Robotics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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