The following survey will help explain some of the goals and methods in this young field.
Ethics in the Abstract
Consider first the easiest goal: to understand ethics in the abstract context provided by computer programs. Robert Axelrod (1984) made a breakthrough in the field when he organized tournaments by asking experts in decision and game theory to submit programmed agents to play a well-known game: the iterated prisoner's dilemma. That challenge entailed the basic computational assumption that everything relevant to such a player could be specified in a computer program. Although games-playing programs figured in the early history of artificial intelligence (for example, A. L. Samuel's [1959] checkers program), the prisoner's dilemma is a mixed motive game that models morally significant social dilemmas such as the tragedy of the commons. In such situations one alternative—overfishing or creating more greenhouse gas—is rational yet morally defective because it is worse for all.
These models have generated considerable interest in the question of the ways rational choice relates to ethics. By focusing on an abstract game Axelrod was able to avoid trying to model full human moral decision making.
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