A Safety-Case Approach to Ethical Considerations for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Ethical considerations for autonomous vehicles (AVs) go beyond the "trolley problem" to include such aspects as risk / benefit trade-offs, informed consent, risk responsibility and risk mitigation within a system of systems. In this paper we present a methodology for arguing that the behaviour of a given AV meets desired ethical characteristics. We identify some of the ethical imperatives surrounding the introduction of AVs and consider how decisions made during development can impact the ethics of the AV' s behaviour.

Contradictions in Assessing Human Morals and the Ethical Design of Autonomous Vehicles

“…According to Menon and Alexander [17], the consequentialist approach to the problem would seek to reduce the overall damage by minimizing the number of people injured. In this case, it is possible that the best solution would be self-sacrifice.…”

“…By moving from human drivers to AVs, we move the intelligence for the decision making from conditions of extreme stress to a much calmer and quieter environment. By doing so, the ethical standards expected by the public might increase, such that it is expected that an engineer developing an autonomous vehicle makes sure that it will react in a morally acceptable way, no matter how a human driver would react in the same situation [17].…”

“…For the authors, these laws could be implemented with the current levels of sensors and perception capability, considering only that the obstacles, sometimes, can be wrongly classified. Menon and Alexander [17] state that while implementing rules is conceptually simpler than having the autonomous vehicle perform calculations to minimize risk (consequentialism), deontology ethics requires the formulation of rules for every situation the vehicle might face.…”

Research on Application of Naive Bayes Algorithm Based on Attribute Correlation to Unmanned Driving Ethical Dilemma

“…In addition, Kochupillai et al thought that applying survey data of Moral Machine directly to unmanned driving ethical decision leads to infringement of some people's right to life, so it is unfair to discriminate against some people with some external attributes [7]. Each user or owner of the unmanned vehicle has a different requirement for unmanned driving ethical decision, a few designers of unmanned vehicles change the right of choosing unmanned driving ethical decision mode from manufacturers and designers to users or owners, a "moral knob" architecture was proposed for unmanned vehicles, which allowed users or owners to choose ethical decision principle or algorithm according to their requirements [8]. However, the "moral knob" architecture makes some users or owners violate the overall interests of mankind for maximizing personal interest, which can bring up a prisoner's dilemma.…”

A safety-case approach to the ethics of autonomous vehicles

“…In this paper we build on existing work in risk distribution (Menon & Alexander, 2017;Menon, Bloomfield & Clements, 2013;Menon & Alexander, 2018) to present a process framework for producing an ethics assurance case. This assurance case can be used to translate nuanced ethical considerations into safety and design requirements, and to demonstrate that identified ethical principlesand the safety requirements stemming from theseare satisfied.…”