Writing a Moral Code: Algorithms for Ethical Reasoning by Humans and Machines

Machines are benchmarked by code, not algorithms

This article highlights how small modifications to either the source code of a benchmark program or the compilation options may impact its behavior on a specific machine. It argues that for evaluating machines, benchmark providers and users be careful to ensure reproducibility of results based on the machine code actually running on the hardware and not just source code. The article uses color ...

The ethical climate of and its relation to the nurses' moral reasoning and courage

Background & Aims: The ethical climate of nurses' work environment makes the nurse achieve higher levels of ethical reasoning by participating in decision making. Although making decisions is essential, responding appropriately to situations and overcoming fear requires moral courage. The study aimed to determine the nurses' understanding of the hospital's moral climate, reasoning, and moral co...

Moral Machines and the Threat of Ethical Nihilism

In his famous 1950 paper where he presents what became the benchmark for success in artificial intelligence, Turing notes that "at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted" (Turing 1950, 442). Kurzweil (1990) suggests that Turing's prediction was correct...

Modelling Moral Reasoning and Ethical Responsibility with Logic Programming

In this paper, we investigate the use of high-level action languages for representing and reasoning about ethical responsibility in goal specification domains. First, we present a simplified Event Calculus formulated as a logic program under the stable model semantics in order to represent situations within Answer Set Programming. Second, we introduce a model of causality that allows us to use ...

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