# geneth_a_general_ethical_dilemma_analyzer__cd0f2070.pdf

Gen Eth: A General Ethical Dilemma Analyzer

Michael Anderson Susan Leigh Anderson

Dept. of Computer Science, U. of Hartford Dept. of Philosophy, U. of Connecticut anderson@hartford.edu susan.anderson@uconn.edu Abstract

We contend that ethically significant behavior of autonomous systems should be guided by explicit ethical principles determined through a consensus of ethicists. To provide assistance in developing these ethical principles, we have developed GENETH, a general ethical dilemma analyzer that, through a dialog with ethicists, codifies ethical principles in any given domain. GENETH has been used to codify principles in a number of domains pertinent to the behavior of autonomous systems and these principles have been verified using an Ethical Turing Test.

Introduction

Ethical issues concerning the behavior of autonomous intelligent systems are likely to exceed the grasp of their designers and elude simple, static solutions. We assert that the behavior of such systems should be guided by explicit ethical principles determined through a consensus of ethicists. Some claim that no actions can be said to be ethically correct because all value judgments are relative either to societies or individuals. We maintain however, along with most ethicists, that there is agreement on the ethically relevant features in many particular cases of ethical dilemmas and on the right course of action in those cases. Although, admittedly, there may not be a consensus among ethicists as to the correct action for some domains and actions, such a consensus is likely to emerge in many areas in which intelligent autonomous systems are likely to be deployed and for the actions they are likely to undertake. We are more likely to agree on how machines ought to treat us than on how human beings ought to treat one another. In any case, we contend that machines should be not making decisions where there is genuine disagreement among ethicists about what is ethically correct. And where

Copyright 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

there is disagreement, our ethical dilemma analyzer reveals precisely the nature of the disagreement (are there different ethically relevant features, different degrees of those features present, or is it that they have different relative weights?) for discussion and possible resolution. We contend that some of the most basic system choices have an ethical dimension. For instance, simply choosing a fully awake state over a sleep state consumes more energy and shortens the lifespan of the system. Given this, to help ensure ethical behavior, a system s ethically relevant actions should be weighed against each other to determine which is the most ethically preferable at any given moment. It is likely that ethical action preference of a large set of actions will be difficult or impossible to define extensionally as an exhaustive list of instances and instead will need to be defined intensionally in the form of rules. This more concise definition is possible since action preference is only dependent upon a likely smaller set of ethically relevant features that actions involve. Given this, action preference can be more succinctly stated in terms of satisfaction or violation of duties to either minimize or maximize (as appropriate) each feature. We refer to intensionally defined action preference as a principle. A principle can be used to define a transitive binary relation over a set of actions that partitions it into subsets ordered by ethical preference with actions within the same partition having equal preference. This relation can be used to sort a list of possible actions and find the most ethically preferable action(s) of that list. This forms the basis of a principle-based behavior paradigm: a system decides its next action by using a principle to determine the most ethically preferable one(s). If such principles are explicitly represented, they have the further benefit of helping justify a system s actions as they can provide pointed, logical explanations as to why one action was chosen over another. Although it may be fruitful to develop ethical principles for the guidance of autonomous machine behavior, it is a complex process that involves determining what the ethical dilemmas are in terms of ethically relevant features, which

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

duties need to be considered, and how to weigh consistently them when they pull in different directions. To help contend with this complexity, we have developed GENETH, a general ethical dilemma analyzer that, through a dialog with ethicists, helps codify ethical principles in any given domain.

As it is likely that in many particular cases of ethical dilemmas ethicists agree on the ethically relevant features and the right course of action in many domains where autonomous systems are likely to function (e.g. healthcare, assisted driving, search and rescue, etc.), generalization of such cases can be used to help discover principles needed for their ethical guidance. A principle abstracted from cases that is no more specific than needed to make determinations complete and consistent with its training can be useful in making provisional determinations about untested cases. Cases can also provide a further means of justification for a system s actions: as an action is chosen for execution by a system, clauses of the principle that were instrumental in its selection can be determined and, as clauses of principles can be traced to the cases from which they were abstracted, these cases and their origin can be ascertained and used as justification for a system s action.

Representation Schema

GENETH uses the following schema to represent the various entities pertinent to ethical dilemmas and principles: Feature Ethical action preference is ultimately dependent upon the ethically relevant features that actions involve such as harm, benefit, respect for autonomy, etc. A feature is represented as an integer that specifies the degree of its presence (positive value) or absence (negative value) in a given action. Duty For each ethically relevant feature, there is a duty incumbent of an agent to either minimize that feature (as would be the case for, say, harm) or maximize it (as would be the case for, say, respect for autonomy). A duty is represented as an integer that specifies the degree of its satisfaction (positive value) or violation (negative value) in a given action. Action From the perspective of ethics, actions are characterized solely by the degrees of presence or absence of the ethically relevant features it involves and so, indirectly, the duties it satisfies or violates. An action is represented as a tuple of integers each representing the degree to which it satisfies or violates a given duty.

Case A case relates two actions. It is represented as a tuple of the differentials of the corresponding duty satisfaction/violation degrees of the actions being related. In a positive case, the duty satisfaction/violation degrees of the less ethically preferable action are subtracted from the corresponding values in the more ethically preferable action, producing a tuple of values representing how much more or less the ethically preferable action satisfies or violates each duty than the less ethically preferable action. In a negative case, the subtrahend and minuend are exchanged. Principle A principle of ethical action preference is defined as a disjunctive normal form predicate 푝 in terms of lower bounds for duty differentials of a case: ! !!, !! !! !! !!,! ! ! !! !!,!! ! ! ! !! !!,! ! ! !! !!,! where di! denotes the differential of a corresponding duty i of actions a1 and a2 and vi,j denotes the lower bound of that differential such that p(a1, a2 ) returns true if action a1 is ethically preferable to action a2. This principle is represented as a tuple of tuples, one tuple for each disjunct, with each such disjunct tuple comprised of lower bound values for each duty differential.

Illustrative Domain

As an example, consider a dilemma type in the domain of assisted driving: The driver of the car is either speeding, not staying in his/her lane, or about to hit an object. Should an automated control of the car take over operation of the vehicle? Although the set of possible actions is circumscribed in this example dilemma type, and the required capabilities just beyond current technology, it serves to demonstrate the complexity of choosing ethically correct actions and how principles can serve as an abstraction to help manage this complexity. Some of the ethically relevant features involved in this dilemma type might be 1) prevention of collision, 2) staying in lane, 3) respect for driver autonomy, 4) keeping within speed limit, and 5) prevention of immanent harm to persons. Duties to maximize each of these features seem most appropriate, that is there is a duty to maximize prevention of collision, a duty to maximize staying in lane, etc. Given these maximizing duties, an action s degree of satisfaction or violation of that duty is identical to the action s degree of presence or absence of each corresponding feature. (If there had been a duty to

minimize a given feature, that duty s degree would have been the negation of its corresponding feature degree.) The following cases illustrate how actions might be represented as tuples of duty satisfaction/violation degrees and how positive cases can be constructed from them (duty degrees in each tuple are in the same order as the features in the previous paragraph): Case 1: There is an object ahead in the driver s lane and the driver moves into another lane that is clear. The take control action s duty values are (1, -1, -1, 0, 0); the do not take control action s duty values are (1, -1, 1, 0, 0). As the ethically preferable action is do not take control, the positive case is (do not take control - take control) or (0, 0, 2, 0, 0). Case 2: The driver has been going in and out of his/her lane with no objects discernible ahead. The take control duty values are (1, 1, -1, 0, 0); the do not take control duty values are (1, -1, 1, 0, 0). As the ethically preferable action is take control, the positive case is (take control do not take control) or (0, 2, -2, 0, 0). Case 3: The driver is speeding to take a passenger to a hospital. The GPS destination is set for a hospital. The take control duty values are (0, 0, -1, 1, -1); the do not take control duty values are (0, 0, 1, -1, 1). As the ethically preferable action is do not take control, the positive case is (0, 0, 2, -2, 2). Case 4: Driving alone, there is a bale of hay ahead in the driver's lane. There is a vehicle close behind that will run the driver's vehicle upon sudden braking and he/she can't change lanes, all of which can be determined by the system. The driver starts to brake. The take control duty values are (-1, 0, -1, 0, 2); the do not take control duty values are (-2, 0, 1, 0, -2). As the ethically preferable action is take control, the positive case is (1, 0, -2, 0, 4). Case 5: The driver is greatly exceeding the speed limit with no discernible mitigating circumstances. The take control duty values are (0, 0, -1, 2, 0); the do not take control duty values are (0, 0, 1, -2, 0). As the ethically preferable action is take control, the positive case is (0, 0, - 2, 4, 0). Case 6: There is a person in front of the driver's car and he/she can't change lanes. Time is fast approaching when the driver will not be able to avoid hitting this person and he/she has not begun to brake. The take control duty values are (0, 0, -1, 0, 1); the do not take control duty values are (0, 0, 1, 0, -1). As the ethically preferable action is take control, the positive case is (0, 0, -2, 0, 2).

Negative cases can be generated from these positive cases by interchanging actions when taking the difference. For instance, in Case 1 since the ethically preferable action is do not take control, the negative case is (take control - do not take control) or (0, 0, -2, 0, 0).

Learning Algorithm

GENETH uses inductive logic programming (ILP) (Lavrač and Džeroski 1997) to infer a principle of ethical action preference from cases that is complete and consistent in relation to these cases. ILP is a machine learning technique that inductively learns relations represented as first-order Horn clauses, classifying positive and negative examples of a relation. To train a system using ILP, one presents it with examples of the target relation, indicating whether they re positive (true) or negative (false). The object of training is for the system to learn a new hypothesis that, in relation to all input cases, is complete (covers all positive cases) and consistent (covers no negative cases). GENETH s goal is to generate a principle that is a most general specification. Starting with the most general principle, that is one that covers (returns true for) all positive and negative cases, the system incrementally specializes this principle so that it no longer covers any negative cases while still covering all positive ones. That is, a definition of a predicate p is discovered such that p(a1, a2 ) returns true if action a1 is ethically preferable to action a2. The principles discovered cover more cases than those used in their specialization and, therefore, can be used to make and justify provisional determinations about untested cases. GENETH is committed only to a knowledge representation scheme based on the concepts of ethically relevant features with corresponding degrees of presence or absence from which duties to minimize or maximize these features with corresponding degrees of satisfaction or violation of those duties are inferred. The system has no a priori knowledge regarding what particular features, degrees, and duties in a given domain might be but determines them in conjunction with an ethicist as it is presented with example cases. GENETH starts with a principle that simply states that all actions are equally ethically preferable (that is p(a1,a2) returns true for all pairs of actions). An ethical dilemma and two possible actions are input, defining the domain of the current cases and principle. The system then accepts example cases of this dilemma. A case is represented by the ethically relevant features a given pair of possible actions exhibits, as well as the determination as to which is the ethically preferable action (as determined by a consensus of ethicists) given these features. Features are further delineated by the degree to which they are present

or absent in one of the actions in question. From this information, duties are inferred either to maximize that feature (when it is present in the ethically preferable action or absent in the non-ethically preferable action) or minimize that feature (when it is absent in the ethically preferable action or present in the non-ethically preferable action). As features are presented to the system, the representation of cases is updated to include these inferred duties and the current possible range of their degree of satisfaction or violation. As new cases of a given ethical dilemma are presented to the system, new duties and wider ranges of degrees are generated in GENETH through resolution of contradictions that arise. With two ethically identical cases (i.e. cases with the same ethically relevant feature(s) to the same degree of satisfaction or violation) an action cannot be right in one of these cases while the comparable action in the other case is considered to be wrong. Formal representation of ethical dilemmas and their solutions make it possible for machines to detect such contradictions as they arise. If the original determinations are correct, then there must either be a qualitative distinction or a quantitative difference between the cases that must be revealed. This can be translated into a difference in the ethically relevant features between the two cases, that is, a feature that appears in one but not in the other case, or a wider range of the degree of presence or absence of existing features must be considered that would reveal a difference between the cases, that is, there is a greater degree of presence or absence of existing features in one but not in the other case. In this fashion, GENETH systematically helps construct a concrete representation language that makes explicit features, their possible degrees of presence or absence, duties to maximize or minimize them, and their possible degrees of satisfaction or violation. Ethical preference is determined from differentials of satisfaction/violation values of the corresponding duties of two actions of a case. Given two actions a1 and a2 and duty d, this differential can be notated as da1 da2 or simply Δd. If an action a1 satisfies a duty d more (or violates it less) than another action a2, then a1 is ethically preferable to a2 with respect to that duty. GENETH S approach is to incrementally specialize a principle so that it no longer returns true for any negative cases (those in which the second action is deemed preferable to the first) while still returning true for all positive ones (those in which the first action is deemed ethically preferable to the second). These conditions correspond to the logical properties of consistency and completeness, respectively. Consider how GENETH operates in the first four cases of the given example domain: a) Case 1 is entered (0, 0, 2) and its negative case is generated (0, 0, -2).

b) The ethicist determines that the ethically relevant features of this case are prevention of collision, staying in lane, and respect for driver autonomy and duties to maximize each are generated. These features are added to the system s knowledge representation scheme. c) Given values for these features in case (1, -1, -1) and its negative (-1, 1, 1), ranges for features are determined (-1 to 1) and, indirectly, ranges for duty differentials (- 2 to 2). d) The most general principle is generated for these duty differentials ((-2, -2, -2)). That is, each lower bound is set to its minimum possible value, permitting all cases (positive and negative) to be covered by it. e) GENETH then commences it learning process, systematically raising these lower bounds until negative cases are no longer covered. If this causes any positive cases to no longer be covered, a new tuple of minimum lower bounds (i.e. another disjunct) is added to the principle and has its lower bounds systematically raised until it does not cover any negative case but covers one or more of the remaining positive cases (which are removed from further consideration). This process continues until all positive cases, and no negative cases, are covered. In the current case, raising the lower bound for the duty to maximize respect for driver autonomy is sufficient to meet this condition. f) The resulting principle derived from Case 1 is (-2, -2, -1) which can be stated simply as ΔMax respect for driver autonomy >= -1 as the minimum lower bounds for the other features do not differentiate between cases. Inspection shows that the single positive case is covered and the single negative case is not. g) Case 2 is entered (0, 2, -2) and its negative case is generated (0, -2, 2). h) The ethicist has determined that the ethically relevant features and ranges of this case are the same as the previous case. i) The most general principle is generated ((-2, -2, -2)). j) GENETH commences it learning process. In this case, raising the lower bounds of the duty differential values of the first disjunct is successful in uncovering the negative cases but leaves a positive case uncovered as well. To cover this remaining positive case, a new disjunct is generated and its lower bounds systematically raised in until this case is covered without covering any negative case. k) The resulting principle derived from Case 1 and Case 2 combined is ((-2, -1, -1) (-2, 1, -2)) which can be stated as (ΔMax staying in lane >= -1 and ΔMax respect for driver autonomy >= -1) or ΔMax staying in lane >= 1. Inspection shows that the both positive cases are covered and both negative cases are not.

l) Case 3 is entered (0, 0, 2, -2, 2) and its negative case is generated (0, 0, -2, 2, -2). m) The ethicist determines that the ethically relevant features of this case are respect for driver autonomy, keeping within speed limit, and prevention of immanent harm to persons and duties to maximize each are generated. The last two features are new and so added to the system s knowledge representation scheme. n) Given values for these features in case and its negative, ranges for the newly added features are determined (-1 to 1) and, indirectly, ranges for duty differentials (-2 to 2). o) The most general principle is generated ((-2, -2, -2, -2, - 2)). p) GENETH commences it learning process. q) The resulting principle derived from Case 1, Case 2 and Case 3 combined is the same as before as Case 3 is covered by it and its negative is note. r) Case 4 is entered (1, 0, -2, 0, 4) and its negative case is generated (-1, 0, 2, 0, -4). s) The ethicist has determined that the ethically relevant features of this case are a subset of those of the previous cases. No new features or duties are added to the system s knowledge representation scheme. But it has been determined that wider ranges of satisfaction/violation for both the feature prevention of immanent harm to persons is needed (-2 to 2) as well as the prevention of collision feature (-2 to 2) so the knowledge representation scheme is updated to reflect this as well as the range of these features corresponding maximizing duties (-4 to 4). t) The most general principle is generated ((-4, -2, -2, -2, - 4)). u) GENETH commences it learning process and in this case it requires three disjuncts to successfully cover all positive cases while not covering any negative ones. v) The resulting principle derived from Cases 1-4 combined is ((-4 1 -2 -4 -4) (-4 -1 -1 -4 -3) (1 -2 -2 -4 - 4)) which can be stated as ΔMax staying in lane >= 1 or (ΔMax staying in lane >= -1 and ΔMax respect for driver autonomy >= -1 and ΔMax prevention of immanent harm to persons>=-3) or ΔMax prevention of collision >= 1.

User Interface

An ethical dilemma and its two possible actions are input, defining the domain of the current cases and principle. The system then accepts example cases of this dilemma. Figure 1 shows a confirmation dialog for Case 2 in the example dilemma. The ethically preferable action, features, and corresponding duties are detailed. As cases are entered, a natural language version of the discovered principle is

displayed, disjunct-by-disjunct, in a tabbed window (Figure 1). Further, a graph of the inter-relationships between these cases and their corresponding duties and principle clauses is continually updated and displayed below the disjunct tabs (Figure 1). This graph is derived from a triplestore database of the data gathered through both input and learning. Cases are linked to the features they exhibit which in turn are linked to their duties corresponding duties. Further, each case is linked to the disjunct that it satisfied in the tabbed principle above. The interface permits the creation of new dilemma types, as well as saving, opening, and restoring them. It also permits the addition, renaming, and deletion of features without the need for case entry. Cases can be added, edited, and deleted and both the collection of cases and all details of the principle can be displayed. There is an extensive help system that includes a guidance capability that makes suggestions as to what type of case might further refine the principle. (An OSX version of the software is freely available at:http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/anderson/Site/Gen Eth.html)

Illustrative Results

From all six cases of the example domain presented previously, the following disjunctive normal form principle, complete and consistent with respect to its training cases, was abstracted by GENETH: ΔMax staying in lane >= 1 or ΔMax prevention of collision >= 1 or ΔMax prevention of immanent harm >= 1 or ΔMax keeping within speed limit >= 1 and ΔMax prevention of immanent harm >= -1 or ΔMax staying in lane >= -1 and ΔMax respect for driver autonomy >= -1 and ΔMax keeping within speed limit >= -1 and ΔMax prevention of immanent harm >= -1 A system-generated graph of these cases along with their relevant features, corresponding duties, and satisfied principle disjuncts is partially depicted in Figure 1. From this graph, it can be determined that Case 1 is covered by disjunct 4, Case 2 by disjunct 1, Case 3 by disjunct 3, Case 4 by disjunct 2, Case 5 by disjunct 5, and Case 6 by disjunct 3 (again). This principle, being abstracted from a relatively few cases, does not encompass the entire gamut of behavior one might expect from an assisted driving system nor all the interactions possible of the behaviors that are present.

That said, the abstracted principle concisely represents a number of important considerations for assisted driving systems. Less formally, it states that staying in one s lane is important; collisions (damage to vehicles) and/or causing harm to persons should be avoided; and speeding should be prevented unless there is the chance that it is occurring to try to save a life, thus minimizing harm to others. Presenting more cases to the system is likely to further refine the principle.

To evaluate the principles codified by GENETH, we have developed an Ethical Turing Test a variant of the test suggested by Alan Turing (1950). This variant tests whether the term "ethical" can be applied to a machine by comparing the ethically-preferable action specified by an ethicist in an ethical dilemma with that of a machine faced with the same dilemma. If a significant number of answers given by the machine match the answers given by the ethicist, then it has passed the test. Such evaluation holds

the machine-generated principle to the highest standards and, further, permits evidence of incremental improvement as the number of matches increases [see (Allen, Varner, and Zinser 2000) for the inspiration of this test]. The Ethical Turing Test (see Figure 2) we administered is comprised of 28 multiple-choice questions in each of the four domains in which GENETH was use to codify a principle (listed below in the order presented in the figure): medication reminding treatment reconsideration search and rescue assisted-driving These questions are drawn both from training (60%) and non-training cases (40%). For instance, in the given example domain (shown last in the figure), all six cases were used as questions in the same order presented previously (those that are marked with a dash in the figure) and two other non-training questions were asked: The driver is mildly exceeding the speed limit and Driving alone, there is a bale of hay ahead in the driver's lane. The driver starts to brake .

Figure 1 GENETH user interface with case confirmation, tabbed principle and graph depicting features, duties, and cases with corresponding satisfied disjunct for the Assisted Driving dilemma

It was administered to five ethicists, one of which (Ethicist 1) serves as the ethicist on the project. Of the 140 questions, the ethicists agreed with the system s judgment on 123 of them or about 88% of the time. This is a promising result and, as this is the first incarnation of this test, we believe that this result can be improved by simply rewording test questions to more pointedly reflect the ethical features involved. Ethicist 1 was in agreement with the system in all cases (100%), clearly to be expected in the training cases but it is a reassuring result in the non-training cases. Ethicist 2 and Ethicist 3 were both in agreement with the system in all but three of the questions or about 89% of the time. Ethicist 3 was in agreement with the system in all but four of the questions or about 86% of the time. Ethicist 4, who had the most disagreement with the system, still was in agreement with the system in all but seven of the questions or 75% of the time. It is of note that of the 17 responses in which ethicists were not in agreement with the system, none was a majority opinion. That is, in 17 dilemmas there was total agreement with the system and in the 11 remaining dilemmas where there wasn t, the majority of the ethicists agreed with the system. We believe that the majority agreement in all 28 dilemmas shows a consensus among these ethicists in these dilemmas. The most contested domain (the second) is one in which it is less likely that a system would be expected to function due to its ethically sensitive nature: Should the health care worker try again to change the patient s mind or accept the patient s decision as final regarding treatment options? That this consensus is particularly clear in the three domains better suited for autonomous systems (i.e. those that might be considered less ethically sensitive) medication reminding, search and rescue, and assisted-driving bodes well for further consensus building in domains where autonomous systems are likely to function.

Related Research

Although many have voiced concern over the impending need for machine ethics for decades (Waldrop 1987; Gips

1995; Kahn 1995), there has been little research effort made towards accomplishing this goal. Some of this effort has been expended attempting to establish the feasibility of using a particular ethical theory as a foundation for machine ethics without actually attempting implementation: Christopher Grau (2006) considers whether the ethical theory that best lends itself to implementation in a machine, Utilitarianism, should be used as the basis of machine ethics; Tom Powers (2006) assesses the viability of using deontic and default logics to implement Kant s categorical imperative. Efforts by others that do attempt implementation have largely been based, to greater or lesser degree, upon casuistry the branch of applied ethics that, eschewing principle-based approaches to ethics, attempts to determine correct responses to new ethical dilemmas by drawing conclusions based on parallels with previous cases in which there is agreement concerning the correct response. Marcello Guarini (2006) has investigated a neural network approach where particular actions concerning killing and allowing to die are classified as acceptable or unacceptable depending upon different motives and consequences. Bruce Mc Laren (2003), in the spirit of a more pure form of casuistry, uses a case-based reasoning approach to develop a system that leverages information concerning a new ethical dilemma to predict which previously stored principles and cases are relevant to it in the domain of professional engineering ethics without making judgments. There have also been efforts to bring logical reasoning systems to bear in service of making ethical judgments, for instance deontic logic (Bringsjord et. al 2006) and prospective logic (Pereira and Saptawijaya, 2007)). These efforts provide further evidence of the computability of ethics but, in their generality, they do not adhere to any particular ethical theory and fall short in actually providing the principles needed to guide the behavior of autonomous systems.

We have created a representation scheme for ethical dilemmas that permits the use of inductive logic

5 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 4 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Figure 2 Ethical Turing Test results showing dilemma instances where ethicist s responses agreed (white) and disagreed (gray) with system responses. Each row represents responses of one ethicist, each column a dilemma (columns arranged by domain). Training examples are marked by dashes.

programming techniques for the discovery of principles of ethical preference and have developed a system that employes this to the end of discovering general ethical principles from particular cases of ethical dilemma types in which there is agreement as to their resolution. We have chosen ILP for a both its ability to handle nonlinear relationships and its explanatory power. Previously (Anderson et. al 2006), we proved formally that simply assigning linear weights to duties isn t sufficient to capture the non-linear relationships between duties. The explanatory power of the principle discovered using ILP is compelling: As an action is chosen for execution by a system, clauses of the principle that were instrumental in its selection can be determined and used to formulate an explanation of why that particular action was chosen over the others. Further, as clauses of principles can be traced to the cases from which they were abstracted, these cases and their origin can provide support for a selected action through analogy. ILP also seems better suited than statistical methods to domains in which training examples are scarce, as is the case when seeking concensuses in the domain of ethics. For example, although support vector machines (SVM) are known to handle non-linear data, the explanatory power of the models generated is next to nil (Diederich, 2008; Martens et al., 2008). To mitigate this weakness, rule extraction techniques must be applied but, for techniques that work on non-linear relationships, it may be the case that the extracted rules are neither exclusive nor exhaustive or that a number of training cases need to be set aside for the rule extraction process (Ibid.). Neither of these conditions seems suitable for the domain at hand. While decision tree induction (Quinlan, 1986) seems to offer a more rigorous methodology than ILP, the rule extracted from a decision tree induced from the example cases given previously (using any splitting function) covers fewer non-training examples and is less perspicuous than the most general specification produced by ILP. We are attempting, with our representation, to get at the distilled core of ethical decision making that is, what, precisely, is ethically relevant and how do these entities relate. We have termed these entities ethically relevant features and their relationships principles. Although the vector representation chosen may, on its surface, appear insufficient to represent this information, it is not at all clear how higher order representations would better further our goal. For example, case-based reasoning would not produce the distillation we are seeking. Further, it does not seem that the domain requires predicate logic: Quinlin (1986), in his defense of the use of predicate logic as a representation language, offers two principle weaknesses of attribute-value representation (such as we are using): 1) an object must be specified by its values for a fixed set of attributes and

2) rules must be expressed as functions of these same attributes. In our approach, the first weakness is negated by the fact that our representation is dynamic. Inspired by (Bundy and Fiona, 2006) and made feasible by Allegro Common Lisp s Metaobject Protocol, the number of features and their ranges expands and contracts as needed to represent the current set of cases. The second weakness does not seem to apply in that principles in fact do seem to be fully representable in such a fashion, requiring no higher order relationships between features to be described. Clearly, there are other factors involved in ethical decision making but we would claim that, in themselves, they are not features but rather meta-features entities that affect the values of features and, as such, may not properly belong in the distillation we are seeking, but instead to components of a system using the principle that seek actions current values for its features. These include time and probability: what is the value for a feature at a given time and what is the probability that this value is indeed the case. That said, there may also be a sense in which probability is somehow associated with clauses of the principle, for instance the certainty associated with the training examples from which a clause is derived, gleaned perhaps by the size of the majority consensus. If this does indeed turn out to be the case, adding the dimension of probability to the principle representation might be in order and might be accomplished via probabilistic inductive reasoning (De Raedt and Kersting, 2004). It can be argued that machine ethics ought to be the driving force in determining the extent to which autonomous systems should be permitted to interact with human beings. Autonomous systems that behave in a less than ethically acceptable manner towards human beings will not, and should not, be tolerated. Thus, it becomes paramount that we demonstrate that these systems will not violate the rights of human beings and will perform only those actions that follow acceptable ethical principles. Principles offer the further benefits of serving as a basis for justification of actions taken by a system as well as for an overarching control mechanism to manage unanticipated behavior of such systems. Developing principles for this use is a complex process and new tools and methodologies will be needed to help contend with this complexity. We offer GENETH as one such tool .

Acknowledgments

This material is based in part upon work supported by the NSF under Grant Numbers IIS-0500133 and IIS-1151305. We would also like to acknowledge Mathieu Rodrigue for his efforts in implementing the algorithm used to derive the results in this paper.

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