Citation

Keeling G. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 2017; 11: e247.

Affiliation

Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.

Comment On:

Front Behav Neurosci 2017;11:122.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Frontiers Research Foundation)

DOI

10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00247

PMID

29311864

PMCID

PMC5733039

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be on our roads soon. These cars will be designed so that passengers cannot take manual control in the event of a collision. These cars might encounter situations where a decision about how to allocate harm between different persons is required (Goodall, 2014; Lin, 2016). Consider,

The Moral Design Problem: How should manufacturers programme AVs to allocate harm in these collisions?

In a recent article, Sütfeld et al. (2017) argue that (1) human moral judgements are context dependent; such that (2) we have good reason to programme AVs to allocate harm in collisions in accordance with context-sensitive human moral judgements. Given (1) and (2), Sütfeld et al. conducted an empirical study in which participants were presented with virtual reality collisions, and data was collected on the participants' responses to these collisions. In this paper, I raise two objections to Sütfeld et al.'s approach to the moral design problem...

Language: en

Keywords

ethical decision-making; moral judgements; robot ethics; self-driving cars; virtual reality