In this article, a concise argument for computational rationality as a basis for artificial moral agency is advanced. Some ethicists have long argued that rational agents can become artificial moral agents. However, most of their views have come from purely philosophical perspectives, thus making it difficult to transfer their arguments to a scientific and analytical frame of reference. The result has been a disintegrated approach to the conceptualisation and design of artificial moral agents. In this article, I make the argument (...) for computational rationality as an integrative element that effectively combines the philosophical and computational aspects of artificial moral agency. This logically leads to a philosophically coherent and scientifically consistent model for building artificial moral agents. Besides providing a possible answer to the question of how to build artificial moral agents, this model also invites sound debate from multiple disciplines, which should help to advance the field of machine ethics forward. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to proliferate into every area of modern life, there is no doubt that society has to think deeply about the potential impact, whether negative or positive, that it will have. Whilst scholars recognise that AI can usher in a new era of personal, social and economic prosperity, they also warn of the potential for it to be misused towards the detriment of society. Deliberate strategies are therefore required to ensure that AI can be safely integrated (...) into society in a manner that would maximise the good for as many people as possible, whilst minimising the bad. One of the most urgent societal expectations of artificial agents is the need for them to behave in a manner that is morally relevant, i.e. to become artificial moral agents (AMAs). In this article, I will argue that exemplarism, an ethical theory based on virtue ethics, can be employed in the building of computationally rational AMAs with weak machine ethics. I further argue that three features of exemplarism, namely grounding in moral exemplars, meeting community expectations and practical simplicity, are crucial to its uniqueness and suitability for application in building AMAs that fit the ethos of AI4SG. (shrink)

Scholarship on Aristotle’s NICOMACHEAN ETHICS (hereafter “the Ethics”) flourishes in an almost unprecedented fashion. In the last ten years, universities in North America have produced on average over ten doctoral dissertations a year that discuss the practical philosophy that Aristotle espouses in his Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics. Since the beginning of the millennium there have been three new translations of the entire Ethics into English alone, several more that translate parts of the work into English and other modern (...) languages, and half a dozen collections of new articles discussing Aristotle’s Ethics. Such an outpouring of scholarship has produced an almost unmanageable wave of books, articles, and reviews. Through my topical bibliography, I seek to organize this wealth of scholarly writing so as to make it manageable both to scholars working across the disciplines of philosophy, classics, history, and politics, and to scholars pursuing theses on specific topics within the Ethics. The bibliography takes as its model and is much indebted to that compiled by Barnes, Schofield, and Sorabji in their Articles on Aristotle, Volume 2: Ethics and Politics (1977), which was further updated and incorporated into the complete bibliography to all of Aristotle’s writings in Barnes’s Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (1995). Although I have taken guidance from their model, my bibliography differs in one main respect. Whereas Barnes et al. were more selective and annotated their bibliography, I have been more comprehensive in my inclusion of items. I have sought to include all books and journal articles concerned with the Ethics written in English over the last 120 years; additionally, I have sought to include representative and central works of scholarship written on the Ethics in French, German, and Italian during the same period of time. (shrink)