Is Computer Ethics Computable?
Gaetano Aurelio Lanzarone Federico Gobbo Attempting to formalize ethical knowledge and reasoning serves two purposes: understanding human ethics and designing computer ethics. While the former is descriptive, subject to the intricacies of human behaviors and scarcely prone to systematic experimentation, the latter is prescriptive, can be experimented with little limitations and has to do with ideal ethical behavior, which restricts the class of models we are interested in. The need to instill ethical guidance into artificial agents, besides its speculative interest, is related to the practical problems arising from the building of (semi-)autonomous intelligent robots, to be deployed not only in special environments inaccessible to humans but also living within the human environment. Logical and computational formalization of ethics could be useful for both artificial agents and human agents designing them. Roughly, two main approaches are possible. In the axiomatic approach, a set of r
