Toward equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories

Abstract: Artificial Moral Agents (AMA's) is a field in computer science with the purpose of creating autonomous machines that can make moral decisions akin to how humans do. Researchers have proposed theoretical means of creating such machines, while philosophers have made arguments as to how these machines ought to behave, or whether they should even exist. Of the currently theorised AMA's, all research and design has been done with either none or at most one specified normative ethical theory as basis. This is problematic because it narrows down the AMA's functional ability and versatility which in turn causes moral outcomes that a limited number of people agree with (thereby undermining an AMA's ability to be moral in a human sense). As solution we design a three-layer model for general normative ethical theories that can be used to serialise the ethical views of people and businesses for an AMA to use during reasoning. Four specific ethical norms (Kantianism, divine command theory, utilitarianism, and egoism) were modelled and evaluated as proof of concept for normative modelling. Furthermore, all models were serialised to XML/XSD as proof of support for computerisation.