Epistemic Reasoning for Machine Ethics with Situation Calculus

Abstract

With the rapid development of autonomous machines such as selfdriving vehicles and social robots, there is increasing realisation that machine ethics is important for widespread acceptance of autonomous machines. Our objective is to encode ethical reasoning into autonomous machines following well-defined ethical principles and behavioural norms. We provide an approach to reasoning about actions that incorporates ethical considerations. It builds on Scherl and Levesque's [29, 30] approach to knowledge in the situation calculus. We show how reasoning about knowledge in a dynamic setting can be used to guide ethical and moral choices, aligned with consequentialist and deontological approaches to ethics. We apply our approach to autonomous driving and social robot scenarios, and provide an implementation framework.