Administrative information

Title	Duty Ethics - Debate
Duration	55
Module	A
Lesson Type	Interactive Session
Focus	Ethical - Ethics Fundamentals
Topic	Ethics of self-driving cars

Keywords

Duty ethics,self-driving cars,moral trade-off,

Learning Goals

Learner can apply the knowledge about Duty Ethics, as gained in the lectures, in a debate.
Learner is able to explore and evaluate the moral dilemma's regarding a practical example, like autonomous vehicles, from this ethical perspective and can take a stand from different viewpoints (e.g. passenger, pedestrian, programmer).

Expected Preparation

Learning Events to be Completed Before

Lecture: Duty Ethics

Obligatory for Students

Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, J., Henrich, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, F. & Rahwan, I. (2018). The moral machine experiment. Nature, 563(7729), 59-64. [1]
Duty ethics - Kant: School of Life - Kant & Categorical Imperatives: Crash Course Philosophy#35.

Optional for Students

Alexander, Larry, and Michael Moore "Deontological Ethics" on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 21 Nov. 2007. [2]
Panza, C., & Potthast, A. (2010). Ethics for dummies. John Wiley & Sons.

References and background for students:

None.

Recommended for Teachers

Any paper exploring the Ethics Behind Self-Driving Cars
The Moral Machine project page
Greene, J. D. (2016). Our driverless dilemma. Science, 352(6293), 1514-1515. [3]

Lesson Materials

Slides: Interactive session on duty ethics

The materials of this learning event are available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Instructions for Teachers

Students should form a group of 3-4 and try to discuss about a fake scenario case, trying to stress-out positives and failures of designing a self-driving vehicle following duty ethics principles from different viewpoints (e.g. passenger, pedestrian). You should try helping them answering to several questions regarding this topic, for example:

What do you think?

Do you think that duty ethics should be the operating principle of an autonomous vehicle?
Is it more important that the car is ethical or that it can be sold?

It is important to have a debate beside a guided discussion.

In the end, you may help your students with a final exercise. Using moral machine platform, students will face moral dilemmas, where a driverless car must choose the lesser of two evils in an inevitable collision scenario. As an outside observer, the two groups will judge which outcome is more acceptable and confront their results.

Topics to cover

Introduction (5 min)
Discussion (moderated) (40 min)
Wrap-up (10 min)

More information

Click here for an overview of all lesson plans of the master human centred AI

Please visit the home page of the consortium HCAIM

Acknowledgements

The Human-Centered AI Masters programme was co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union Under Grant №CEF-TC-2020-1 Digital Skills 2020-EU-IA-0068.

The materials of this learning event are available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The HCAIM consortium consists of three excellence centres, three SMEs and four Universities