English

A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making

Artificial Intelligence 2018-12-20 v2 Computers and Society Computer Science and Game Theory

Abstract

We present a general approach to automating ethical decisions, drawing on machine learning and computational social choice. In a nutshell, we propose to learn a model of societal preferences, and, when faced with a specific ethical dilemma at runtime, efficiently aggregate those preferences to identify a desirable choice. We provide a concrete algorithm that instantiates our approach; some of its crucial steps are informed by a new theory of swap-dominance efficient voting rules. Finally, we implement and evaluate a system for ethical decision making in the autonomous vehicle domain, using preference data collected from 1.3 million people through the Moral Machine website.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.06692,
  title  = {A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making},
  author = {Ritesh Noothigattu and Snehalkumar 'Neil' S. Gaikwad and Edmond Awad and Sohan Dsouza and Iyad Rahwan and Pradeep Ravikumar and Ariel D. Procaccia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.06692},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

25 pages; paper has been reorganized, related work and discussion sections have been expanded

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:48:55.105Z