Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations
Moral Coherentism in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Project in Machine Moral Learning
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2025
Abstract
The current project focuses on models of “artificial moral learning” (as a type of moral cognition) and “moral coherentism.” It clarifies how artificial moral agency sheds light on some meta-ethical questions in the coherentism framework (Brink, Dorsey, Lynch, Sayre-McCord). In the current approach, data of artificial moral cognition is divided into two subspaces (representing facts and values, respectively) and contains complex, mixed machine-learnable patterns. Inspired by Lynch's “moral concordance,” some schematic models of this type of two-dimensional data are proposed and assessed. The last, more comprehensive model is premised on the theoretical concept of “distributed concordance” over a population of artificial moral agents. The paper concludes that coherentism, when generalized to machine ethics and artificial moral learning, has some advantages over foundationalist or reliabilist approaches in meta-ethics.
Publication Title
American Philosophical Quarterly
DOI
10.5406/21521123.62.3.06

Comments
Pending to receive accepted manuscript.