Philosophy and Computing by Thomas M. Powers

Author:Thomas M. Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Keywords

Artificial autonomous moral agentMoral-behavioral patternsSoft computingNeural networksMoral cognitionMoral functionalismLifeboat ethicsMoral particularism

7.1 The Ethics and the Epistemology of the Artificial and Autonomous Moral Agent (AAMA)

How much can we know about the world? How limited is our ability to represent it? How special are we, human beings? How limited is our ability of making the world a better place? One of the most important aims of philosophy is to inquire about the limits of our “given” human condition. Philosophy scrutinizes the universality and uniqueness of our knowledge, power of understanding, freedom, creativity and, ultimately, morality.

Ethics and epistemology, it is assumed here, are among the most active areas of philosophy. While the core tenets of ethics might change at a slower pace, the dynamics of the social, religious, and cultural structures, the rapid transformation of new technologies, and scientific discoveries, all create new perspectives on applying ethics to everyday life. Some talk about a computational turn in traditional epistemology, and refer to the computational model of the mind, at least. This paper assumes that both ethics and epistemology will include new directions of research on artificial agents (moral, cognitive, social, etc.), similar to philosophical investigations in Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnologies, etc.

One way to extend our given morality is by “human enhancing”: improving our given faculties beyond their natural limits. Săvulescu and Malsen recently argued that an artificial system that can monitor, prompt, and advise our moral behavior, “could help human agents overcome some of their inherent limitations” (Săvulescu and Maslen 2015). This paper explores philosophically another path to extending moral cognition and agency beyond ourselves, and addresses this question: can we apply ethics, “as we know it,” to non-individual agents—human or non-human alike?1 Can groups of people, companies, governments, nations, military units, highly intelligent animals, be moral agents? What about artificially created agents: computers, algorithms, robots, etc.? Can they be moral agents? Enters “machine ethics” (aka “computational ethics”), a discipline that addresses this latter question.2

The present proposal is foremost a philosophical effort: seeking some human faculties, moral cognition included, in “other” beings, which is not an empirical issue, and cannot be solved only by anthropological, or sociological, or historical, investigations. The prospect of artificial moral agents moves the discussion well beyond actual moral agency, into the realm of possible moral agency, including those agents that we can in principle construct. Designing artificial moral agents is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor, as it involves artificial intelligence, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy (with a swarm of issues from philosophy of mind, ethics, and metaphysics), together with the ethics of emergent technologies. Moral cognition is taken here as a central component of moral agency, such that the argument for artificial agency becomes entwined with claims for the possibility, and the plausibility, of artificial moral cognition. “Dispositional moral functionalism” is discussed in some details, together with a form of virtue ethics, to propose a concrete artificial moral agent that meets some minimal desiderata from the perspective of ethics, cognitive science, and moral psychology. The model uses an “agent-centric”

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