On Representing Humans' Soft-Ethics Preferences As Dispositions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a dispositional approach to model humans' soft-ethical preferences in decision-making scenarios, aiming to integrate these preferences into autonomous systems to enhance human-AI interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for representing ethical preferences as dispositions, with practical examples and an application towards augmenting human capabilities in autonomous systems.

Findings

Dispositional properties can effectively model ethical decision-making.

The approach enables capturing individual ethical preferences.

Potential integration into software exoskeletons for ethical AI interactions.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to represent humans' soft-ethical preferences by means of dispositional properties. We begin by examining real-life situations, termed as scenarios, that involve ethical dilemmas. Users engage with these scenarios, making decisions on how to act and providing justifications for their choices. We adopt a dispositional approach to represent these scenarios and the interaction with the users. Dispositions are properties that are instantiated by any kind of entity and that may manifest if properly triggered. In particular, the dispositional properties we are interested in are the ethical and behavioural ones. The approach will be described by means of examples. The ultimate goal is to implement the results of this work into a software exoskeleton solution aimed at augmenting human capabilities by preserving their soft-ethical preferences in interactions with autonomous systems.