Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The alarm has been raised on so-called driverless dilemmas, in which autonomous vehicles will need to make high-stakes ethical decisions on the road. We argue that these arguments are too contrived to be of practical use, are an inappropriate method for making decisions on issues of safety, and should not be used to inform engineering or policy.

Keywords

moral judgment autonomous vehicles driverless policy

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Assis

(2018, May 22). Seven out of 10 U.S. drivers fear self-driving cars, AAA says. Market Watch. Retrieved from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-out-of-10-us-drivers-fear-self-driving-cars-aaa-says-2018-05-22

Awad

Dsouza

Kim

Schulz

Henrich

Shariff

. . . Rahwan

(2018). The moral machine experiment. Nature, 563, 59–64.

Bonnefon

J.-F.

Shariff

Rahwan

(2016). The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. Science, 352, 1573–1576.

De Freitas

DeScioli

Nemirow

Massenkoff

Pinker

(2017). Kill or die: Moral judgment alters linguistic coding of causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 43, 1173–1182.

Dewitt

Fischhoff

Sahlin

(2019). ‘Moral machine’ experiment is no basis for policymaking [Letter]. Nature, 567, 31.

Donde

(2017, September 21). Self-driving cars will kill people. Who decides who dies? WIRED. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-will-kill-people-who-decides-who-dies/

Edmonds

(2018, November 14). Cars without drivers still need a moral compass. But what kind? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/cars-drivers-ethical-dilemmas-machines

Foot

(1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect. Oxford Review, 5, 5–15.

Gogoll

Müller

J. F.

(2017). Autonomous cars: In favor of a mandatory ethics setting. Science and Engineering Ethics, 23, 681–700.

10.

Greene

J. D.

(2016a). Our driverless dilemma. Science, 352, 1514–1515.

11.

Greene

J. D.

(2016b). Solving the trolley problem. In Sytsma

Buckwalter

(Eds.), A companion to experimental philosophy (pp. 173–189). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

12.

Himmelreich

(2018). Never mind the trolley: The ethics of autonomous vehicles in mundane situations. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21, 669–684.

13.

Khajepour

Melek

W. W.

Huang

(2016). Path planning and tracking for vehicle collision avoidance based on model predictive control with multiconstraints. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 66, 952–964.

14.

Johnson

C. Y.

(2018, October 24). Self-driving cars will have to decide who should live and who should die. Here’s who humans would kill. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/24/self-driving-cars-will-have-decide-who-should-live-who-should-die-heres-who-humans-would-kill

15.

Kagan

(2016). Solving the trolley problem. In Rakowski

(Ed.), The trolley problem mysteries (pp. 151–168). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

16.

Lefèvre

Vasquez

Laugier

(2014). A survey on motion prediction and risk assessment for intelligent vehicles. ROBOMECH Journal, 1(1), 1–14.

17.

Lester

C. A.

(2019, January 24). A study on driverless-car ethics offers a troubling look into our values. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-study-on-driverless-car-ethics-offers-a-troubling-look-into-our-values

18.

Lin

(2016). Why ethics matters for autonomous cars. In Maurer

Gerdes

Lenz

Winner

(Eds.), Autonomous driving (pp. 69–85). Berlin, Germany: Springer.

19.

Markoff

(2016 June 24). Should your driverless car hit a pedestrian to save your life? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/technology/should-your-driverless-car-hit-a-pedestrian-to-save-your-life.html

20.

Noothigattu

Gaikwad

S. S.

Awad

Dsouza

Rahwan

Ravikumar

Procaccia

A. D.

(2018). A voting-based system for ethical decision making. In Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 1587–1594). Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. Retrieved from https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI18/paper/viewPaper/17052

21.

Nowak

(2018). The ethical dilemmas of self-driving cars. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/technology/the-ethical-dilemmas-of-self-drivingcars/article37803470/

22.

Olson

(2018). Trolley folly. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/may-mobility/trolley-folly-fcbd181b7152

23.

Savulescu

Kahane

Gyngell

(2019). From public preferences to ethical policy. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 1241–1243.

24.

Shalev-Shwartz

Shammah

Shashua

(2017). On a formal model of safe and scalable self-driving cars. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1708.06374.

25.

Shariff

Rahwan

Bonnefon

J.-F.

(2016). Whose life should your car save? New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/whose-life-should-your-car-save.html

26.

Thomson

J. J.

(1984). The trolley problem. Yale Law Journal, 94, 1395–1415.

Doubting Driverless Dilemmas

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References