The HERA approach to morally competent robots

Abstract

To address the requirement for autonomous moral decision making, we introduce a software library for modeling hybrid ethical reasoning agents (short: HERA). The goal of the HERA project is to provide theoretically well-founded and practically usable logic-based machine ethics tools for implementation in robots. The novelty is that HERA implements multiple ethical principles like utilitarianism, the principle of double effect, and a Pareto-inspired principle. These principles can be used to automatically assess moral situations represented in a format we call causal agency models. We discuss how to model moral situations using our approach, and how it can cope with uncertainty about moral values. Finally, we briefly outline the architecture of our robot IMMANUEL, which implements HERA and is able to explain ethical decisions to humans.