Why a Virtual Assistant for Moral Enhancement When We Could have a Socrates?

Abstract

Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) be more effective than human instruction for the moral enhancement of people? The author argues that it only would be if the use of this technology were aimed at increasing the individual's capacity to reflectively decide for themselves, rather than at directly influencing behaviour. To support this, it is shown how a disregard for personal autonomy, in particular, invalidates the main proposals for applying new technologies, both biomedical and AI-based, to moral enhancement. As an alternative to these proposals, this article proposes a virtual assistant that, through dialogue, neutrality and virtual reality technologies, can teach users to make better moral decisions on their own. The author concludes that, as long as certain precautions are taken in its design, such an assistant could do this better than a human instructor adopting the same educational methodology.

Artificial moral experts: asking for ethical advice to artificial intelligent assistants

“…After that, in the third section, we defend that some AI systems could be in fact considered moral experts. To narrow our argument and to illustrate the previous claim with a particular example, we focus on the AI-based Socratic Assistant (or also called SocrAI) devised by Francisco Lara and Jan Deckers [6,7]. To conclude, we argue that SocrAI can be considered an artificial moral expert to whom people would have cause to ask for advice.…”

“…To support our first assertion that there could be AI systems with moral expertise, we will focus on a more promising AI moral assistant that has recently been devised by Francisco Lara and Jan Deckers. This theoretical (i.e., not already used) model has been called the Socratic Assistant [6] or, in a catchier way, SocraAI [7]. SocrAI is a conversational bot (in principle without a robotic body) that aims to enhance human moral decision-making processes.…”

“…SocrAI is a conversational bot (in principle without a robotic body) that aims to enhance human moral decision-making processes. 7 This deliberative system was conceived in the wake of the moral enhancement debate to overcome the shortcomings of bio-enhancement proposals through an AI model that would develop the dialogical Socratic method. Although the debate of moral enhancement through AI is highly stimulating, we cannot fairly address it here.…”

“…Lara and Deckers' justification is that rival models of moral assistants did not sufficiently protect users' autonomy through their counselling processes. Although this reason is understandable, we think that, if we broaden the notion of asking for advice 7 The discussion of the technical plausibility of developing this particular AI system from an engineering or computer science perspective is relevant, but beyond the scope of this article. However, the proponents give some general clues in this regard.…”

AiSocrates: Towards Answering Ethical Quandary Questions

“…Besides NLP and ML communities, the AI system involvement in the human moral decisionmaking process in an ethical quandary situation has been actively discussed among moral philosophers. Some moral philosophers have suggested a direction where AI systems can be utilized positively and practically in such ethical quandary situations (Savulescu and Maslen, 2015;Giubilini and Savulescu, 2018;Lara and Deckers, 2020;Lara, 2021). They suggest the direction is where the AI system serves as a moral advisor that enhances an individual's reflective process, so that humans can make better decision-making with a broader perspective while retaining the autonomy of their actions.…”