Overview

James gips, in his seminal article “towards the ethical robot,” gives an overview of various approaches to capturing ethics for a machine that might be considered. He quickly rejects as too slavish the Three Laws of Robotics formulated by Isaac Asimov in “Runaround” in 1942:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second law.

After declaring that what we are looking for is an ethical theory that would permit robots to behave as our equals, Gips then considers various (action-based) ethical theories that have been proposed for persons, noting that they can be divided into two types: consequentialist (or teleological) and deontological. Consequentialists maintain that the best action to take, at any given moment in time, is the one that is likely to result in the best consequences in the future. The most plausible version, Hedonistic Utilitarianism, proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century, aims for “the greatest balance of pleasure over pain,” counting all those affected equally. Responding to critics who maintain that utilitarians are not always just because the theory allows a few to be sacrificed for the greater happiness of the many, Gips proposes that we could “assign higher weights to people who are currently less well-off or less happy.”