Ethically Compliant Planning within Moral Communities

Abstract

Ethically compliant autonomous systems (ECAS) are the state-of-the-art for solving sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty while respecting constraints that encode ethical considerations. This paper defines a novel concept in the context of ECAS that is from moral philosophy, the moral community, which leads to a nuanced taxonomy of explicit ethical agents. We then propose new ethical frameworks that extend the applicability of ECAS to domains where a moral community is required. Next, we provide a formal analysis of the proposed ethical frameworks and conduct experiments that illustrate their differences. Finally, we discuss the implications of explicit moral communities that could shape research on standards and guidelines for ethical agents in order to better understand and predict common errors in their design and communicate their capabilities.