Automated Driving Without Ethics: Meaning, Design and Real-World Implementation

The ethics of automated vehicles (AV) has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. After a discussion about the pertinence and cogency of the term 'artificial moral agent' to describe AVs that would accomplish these sorts of decisions, and starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable in some situations, a strategy for AV decision making is proposed using only pre-defined parameters to characterize the risk of possible accidents and also integrating the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation, into multiple possible decision rules to determine the most suitable action given the specific environment and decision context. The goal of this approach is not to define how moral theory requires vehicles to behave, but rather to provide a computational approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a number of human 'moral positions' concerning what morality demands and what road users may expect, offering an evaluation tool for the social acceptability of an automated vehicle's decision making.