Automated ethical decision, value-ladenness, and the moral prior problem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Part of the literature on machine ethics and ethical artificial intelligence focuses on the idea of defining autonomous ethical agents able to make ethical choices and solve dilemmas. While ethical dilemmas often arise in situations characterized by uncertainty, the standard approach in artificial intelligence is to use rational choice theory and maximization of expected utility to model how algorithm should choose given uncertain outcomes. Motivated by the moral proxy problem, which proposes that the appraisal of ethical decisions varies depending on whether algorithms are considered to act as proxies for higher- or for lower-level agents, this paper introduces the moral prior problem, a limitation that, we believe, has been genuinely overlooked in the literature. In a nutshell, the moral prior problem amounts to the idea that, beyond the thesis of the value-ladenness of technologies and algorithms, automated ethical decisions are predetermined by moral priors during both conception and usage. As a result, automated decision procedures are insufficient to produce ethical choices or solve dilemmas, implying that we need to carefully evaluate what autonomous ethical agents are and can do, and what they aren’t and can’t.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".