Law's Halo and the Moral Machine

Abstract

How will we assess the morality of decisions made by artificial intelli­gence—and will our judgments be swayed by what the law says? Focusing on a moral dilemma in which a driverless car chooses to sacrifice its passenger to save more people, this study offers evidence that our moral intuitions can be influenced by the presence of the law.

Keywords: moral judgment, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, trolley problem, experimental philosophy, moral psychology