Toward the engineering of virtuous machines

Abstract

While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been studied extensively and advocated by ethicists, it has not been clear that there exists a version of virtue ethics rigorous enough to be a target for machine ethics (which we take to include the engineering of an ethical sensibility in a machine or robot itself, not only the study of ethics in the humans who might create artificial agents). We begin to address this by presenting an embryonic formalization of a key part of any virtue-ethics theory: namely, the learning of virtue by a focus on exemplars of moral virtue. Our work is based in part on a computational formal logic previously used to formally model other ethical theories and principles therein, and to implement these models in artificial agents.