Joshua W. Bronson

In anticipation of the market introduction of highly and fully automated vehicles, regulations for their behavior in public road traffic are emerging in various countries and regions. Yet, as we show using the example of EU and German regulations, these rules are both incomplete and exceptionally vague. In this paper we introduce three traffic scenarios highlighting conflicting ethical, legal, and utility-related claims, and perform a legal analysis with regards to the expected behavior of AVs in these scenarios. We show that the existing regulatory framework disregards the realities of algorithmic decision-making in automated vehicles, such as the incomplete and imprecise perception of their environment and the probabilistic nature of their predictions. Importantly, the current regulations are written in abstract language addressing human interpreters rather than the precise logical-numerical computer code. We argue that the required interpretation and translation of the abstract legal language into the logical-numerical domain is so ambiguous that the regulations as they stand fail to guide or limit automated vehicle behavior in any meaningful way. This comes with significant ethical implications, as the interpretation and translation is unavoidable and, if not provided by regulatory bodies, will have to be performed by manufacturers. We argue that ethical decisions with significant impact on public safety must not be delegated to private companies, and thus, regulatory frameworks need significant improvements.

We examine the following consequentialist view of virtue: a trait is a virtue if and only if it has good consequences in some relevant way. We highlight some motivations for this basic account, and offer twelve choice points for filling it out. Next, we explicate Julia Driver’s consequentialist view of virtue in reference to these choice points, and we canvass its merits and demerits. Subsequently, we consider three suggestions that aim to increase the plausibility of her position, and critically analyze them. We conclude that one of those proposed revisions would improve her account.