Ethics for artificial agents

Machine ethics is a nascent subfield of computer ethics that focuses on the ethical issues involved in the design of autonomous software agents ("artificial agents"). Chapter 1 of this thesis considers how best to understand the central projects of this new subfield, and reconstructs a prominent theory of how artificial agents ought to be designed. This theory, which I call the "agential theory" of machine ethics, says that artificial agents morally ought to be designed to behave only in ways that would be permissible for a human agent to behave, and that only artificial agents that have been designed in this way are morally permissible for human beings to use. Chapter 2 critically assesses two versions of the agential theory-one that assumes that artificial agents are moral agents, and another that does not. After considering arguments for both versions of the theory, I argue that both versions should be rejected. Chapter 3 sets out and analyzes a case study in machine ethics, focusing on the development of an artificial agent to assist with the planning of a public health social work intervention.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Gray, David Michael, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alex Byrne.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120677

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/120677