Classes of Aggregation Rules for Ethical Decision Making in Automated Systems

Abstract: We study a class of {\em aggregation rules} that could be applied to ethical AI decision-making. These rules yield the decisions to be made by automated systems based on the information of profiles of preferences over possible choices. We consider two different but very intuitive notions of preferences of an alternative over another one, namely {\it pairwise majority} and {\it position} dominance. Preferences are represented by permutation processes over alternatives and aggregation rules are applied to obtain results that are socially considered to be ethically correct. In this setting, we find many aggregation rules that satisfy desirable properties for an autonomous system. We also address the problem of the stability of the aggregation process, which is important when the information is variable. These results are a contribution for an AI designer that wants to justify the decisions made by an autonomous system.\ \textit{Keywords:} Aggregation Operators; Permutation Process; Decision Analysis.