Epistemic Infrastructures of Moral Decision-Making in the Ethics of Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Abstract How should an autonomous vehicle be programmed to make decisions in the case of a crash that potentially jeopardizes multiple human lives? Can these human lives be considered equally worthy of saving? These questions have animated a recently popular academic field of inquiry, the ethics of autonomous driving. The adoption of customer-driven autonomous vehicles is concentrated in certain geographical areas and industrial sectors, yet ethics and moral decision-making in highly automated, algorithmically shaped social environments is a compelling site of social inquiry. This chapter is a case study about the epistemic and discursive transformations in ethics anchored to the trolley problem, a popular thought experiment, and to the Moral Machine project, which reframes the ethical in statistical and game-theoretical terms. Central to this shift is a reinvestment in utilitarianism to reframe ethics and morality through modes of gamification and algorithmic decision-making. This chapter takes an epistemic-infrastructural perspective and demonstrates how various intellectual genealogies eventually advance ethics, morality, and humanity to center computation rather than the social, infrastructural, and relational dimensions of automobility.