Resetting Machine Ethics: Rationalism, Hypocrisy, Disagreement, and the Skillful-Expert Model

Existing approaches to machine ethics harbor an unquestioned commitment to the development of ethical machines and an unreflective optimism that ethical principles can be executable by machines. The first part of this paper raises two challenges to such dogmas: the hypocrisy challenge and the disagreement challenge. The first challenge is that, aside from finding the right machine ethics program, machine ethicists must consider whether their development of such machines is consistent with the precepts of their adopted ethical theory. The second challenge concerns whether the focus on particular ethical theories (especially rationalist and codifiable ones) in the field of machine ethics involves a biased representation of ethical traditions that contradicts commitments to inclusion and pluralism. In the second part of the paper, we offer a possible candidate for machine ethics we call the “skillful-expert model.” This model is based on the assumption that, for machines that have well-defined functions, the requirement of ethical goodness is equivalent to the requirement of skillful performance. We argue that this model has strong support from the neglected, virtue-ethical and phenomenological traditions of ethics, and sidesteps the major challenges raised in the first part.