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This article explores the challenges in collaboration between engineers and philosophers due to their differing methods and perspectives. It discusses the Judge and Agent perspectives in ethical debates, the concept of constraints in ethical reasoning, the computability of moral theories, and the importance of defining ethical success and failure conditions. It also presents top-down and bottom-up approaches for integrating ethics into engineering practices.
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EECS 690 April 13
Issues in the collaboration of engineering and morality • At some level, engineers and philosophers are schooled to follow intuitively incompatible methods. • “While engineers generally believe that there is more than one solution to every problem, they are trained to converge on a satisfactory solution for the problem at hand. Ethicists, however, are trained to diverge from each other, arguing separate positions so as to describe as completely as possible the range of considerations and theories that may be relevant to a problem” (p.75)
Judge versus agent perspectives • The Judge Perspective: This is a stance taken in ethical debates when ethical principles are applied to specific cases or scenarios, forcing a choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives, and defense of the choice. This is useful in clarifying philosophical argument, but not useful in AMA design • The Agent Perspective: This is a way of representing ethical reasoning as a set of constraints that may or may not be able to be simultaneously satisfied. This involves much of what has previously been termed “Value Pluralism”
Constraints • One idea might be to imagine ethical concerns as sets of constraints. This leads to questions of what these constraints should be, and how specific/abstract.
Computability • Perhaps it is true that ethics really consists in being able to generate constraints from other principles (i.e. deontological or utilitarian principles). This leads to the question of how computable some of these received moral theories are.
Whose morality? • While trained ethicists will tell you that their field is not in specifying a bounded list of what is and is not ethical (rather that theirs is the field of discovering what constitutes ethical reasoning and justification) an engineered ethical system should come with some variety of success and failure conditions, and these amount to a partial list of what is and is not ethical. Questions about who should supply these conditions and how are very important questions.
Top-down Takes an Ethical Theory and analyzes the informational and procedural requirements necessary to implement this theory in a computer system. Examples: The Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, Utilitarianism, Hammurabi’s code, The Yana and Niyama, lists of Aristotelian virtues, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Asimov’s Three (Four) Laws for Robots Bottom-up Do not explicitly rely on prior theory, but only on performance criteria, with the most basic method a way of creating an environment in which a machine explores courses of action, and is rewarded for morally praiseworthy behavior (and presumably punished for immoral behavior) Models: Childhood development, evolution Two general approaches for moving forward
