Modelling morality with prospective logic
by Luis Moniz Pereira, Ari Saptawijaya
International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems (IJRIS), Vol. 1, No. 3/4, 2009

Abstract: This paper shows how moral decisions can be drawn computationally by using prospective logic programs. These are employed to model moral dilemmas, as they are able to prospectively look ahead at the consequences of hypothetical moral judgments. With this knowledge of consequences, moral rules are then used to decide the appropriate moral judgments. The whole moral reasoning is achieved via a priori constraints and a posteriori preferences on abductive stable models, two features available in prospective logic programming. In this work, we model various moral dilemmas taken from the classic trolley problem and employ the principle of double effect as the moral rule. Our experiments show that preferred moral decisions, i.e., those following the principle of double effect, are successfully delivered. Additionally, we consider another moral principle, the principle of triple effect, in our implementation. We show that our prospective logic programs allow us to explain computationally different moral judgments that are drawn from these two slightly but distinctively different moral principles.

Online publication date: Thu, 27-Aug-2009

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