Do Automated Vehicles Face Moral Dilemmas? A Plea for a Political Approach
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Do Automated Vehicles Face Moral Dilemmas? A Plea for a Political Approach Javier Rodríguez-Alcázar 1,2 Alberto Molina-Pérez 1,2
& Lilian
Bermejo-Luque 1,2
&
Received: 23 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract How should automated vehicles (AVs) react in emergency circumstances? Most research projects and scientific literature deal with this question from a moral perspective. In particular, it is customary to treat emergencies involving AVs as instances of moral dilemmas and to use the trolley problem as a framework to address such alleged dilemmas. Some critics have pointed out some shortcomings of this strategy and have urged to focus on mundane traffic situations instead of trolley cases involving AVs. Besides, these authors rightly point out the political nature of the most interesting debates involving AVs. However, in our view, they do not offer an adequate account of the distinction between ethics and politics and still see their proposals as contributions to the ethics of AVs. We argue that many of the interesting questions about how AVs should behave, both in emergency and other situations, are of political, and not moral, nature. This view is based on a conception of politics and political normativity that we have developed elsewhere and that we call “political minimalism.” Additionally, we show that this proposed perspective has significant consequences for the design, management, and regulation of transport systems. Keywords Automated vehicles . Trolley problem . Ethics . Politics . Political minimalism .
Political realism . Political moralism
1 Human Drivers and AVs Imagine a driver who, after a sudden brake failure, had to choose whether to run over a group of pedestrians or crash the car against a wall. In the latter option, people inside the vehicle would be put at risk. The choice would be difficult even if the driver had
* Javier Rodríguez-Alcázar [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy 1, University of Granada, Granada, Spain
2
FiloLab, University of Granada, Granada, Spain
J. Rodríguez-Alcázar et al.
time to meditate carefully on her or his decision. In real-world circumstances, drivers do what they can. In most cases, they experience a mixture of hesitation and dissatisfaction concerning the moral goodness of what they did. Now imagine a similar scenario1 involving a driverless automated vehicle (AV).2 The similarity between the two settings led some authors to talk about the moral dilemmas faced by AVs and wonder what the morally correct responses to such dilemmas would be. For instance, there is an article in Scientific American with the title “Driverless Cars Will Face Moral Dilemmas” (Greenemeier 2016), while Bonnefon et al. (2016) write: “some crashes will require AVs to make difficult ethical decisions in cases that involve unavoidable harm.”3 On what grounds are AVs supposed to make such decisions? The attempt to answer this question has prompted increasing literature in the last few years (see, for instance, Moor 2
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