Extracting Reasons for Moral Judgments Under Various Ethical Principles

Abstract

We present an approach to the computational extraction of reasons for the sake of explaining moral judgments in the context of an hybrid ethical reasoning agent (HERA). The HERA agent employs logical representations of ethical principles to make judgments about the moral permissibility or impermissibility of actions, and uses the same logical formulae to come up with reasons for these judgments. We motivate the distinction between sufficient reasons, necessary reasons, and necessary parts of sufficient reasons yielding different types of explanations, and we provide algorithms to extract these reasons.