Moral mechanisms

dc.citation.epage60en_US
dc.citation.issueNumber1en_US
dc.citation.spage47en_US
dc.citation.volumeNumber27en_US
dc.contributor.authorDavenport, D.en_US
dc.date.accessioned2016-02-08T11:03:18Z
dc.date.available2016-02-08T11:03:18Z
dc.date.issued2014en_US
dc.departmentDepartment of Computer Engineeringen_US
dc.description.abstractAs highly intelligent autonomous robots are gradually introduced into the home and workplace, ensuring public safety becomes extremely important. Given that such machines will learn from interactions with their environment, standard safety engineering methodologies may not be applicable. Instead, we need to ensure that the machines themselves know right from wrong; we need moral mechanisms. Morality, however, has traditionally been considered a defining characteristic, indeed the sole realm of human beings; that which separates us from animals. But if only humans can be moral, can we build safe robots? If computationalism - roughly the thesis that cognition, including human cognition, is fundamentally computational - is correct, then morality cannot be restricted to human beings (since equivalent cognitive systems can be implemented in any medium). On the other hand, perhaps there is something special about our biological makeup that gives rise to morality, and so computationalism is effectively falsified. This paper examines these issues by looking at the nature of morals and the influence of biology. It concludes that moral behaviour is concerned solely with social well-being, independent of the nature of the individual agents that comprise the group. While our biological makeup is the root of our concept of morals and clearly affects human moral reasoning, there is no basis for believing that it will restrict the development of artificial moral agents. The consequences of such sophisticated artificial mechanisms living alongside natural human ones are also explored.en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1007/s13347-013-0147-2en_US
dc.identifier.issn2210-5433
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11693/26680
dc.language.isoEnglishen_US
dc.publisherKluwer Academic Publishersen_US
dc.relation.isversionofhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0147-2en_US
dc.source.titlePhilosophy and Technologyen_US
dc.subjectAIen_US
dc.subjectComputationalismen_US
dc.subjectMoral agenten_US
dc.subjectMoral patienten_US
dc.subjectSafetyen_US
dc.titleMoral mechanismsen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Moral mechanisms.pdf
Size:
221.81 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Full printable version