Moral Psychology And Artificial Agents (Part 1): Ontologically Categorizing Bio-Cultural Humans

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laakasuo ◽  
Anton Berg ◽  
Jukka Sundvall ◽  
Marianna Drosinou ◽  
Volo Herzon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Ontological Categories

In this chapter, we will provide theoretical background of discussion on issues related to AIs. Some of the main topics, theories and frameworks are mind perception and moral cognition, moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, trans-humanism and ontological categories shaped by evolution.

Moral Psychology And Artificial Agents (Part 2): The Transhuman Connection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laakasuo ◽  
Jukka Sundvall ◽  
Anton Berg ◽  
Jussi Palomäki ◽  
Marianna Drosinou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Wide Range

In this chapter we focus on some of the problems that novel trans-humanistic technologies pose to our moral cognition. We use an interdisciplinary approach for analyzing these problems and use a wide range of theories from e.g evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, anthropology and cognitive science.

Moral Psychology and Artificial Agents (Part One)

2021 ◽  
pp. 166-188
Author(s):  
Michael Laakasuo ◽  
Jukka R. I. Sundvall ◽  
Anton Berg ◽  
Marianna Drosinou ◽  
Volo Herzon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Ontological Category ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Future Technologies ◽  
Blind Spots

This is the first of two chapters introducing the moral psychology of robots and transhumanism. Evolved moral cognition and the human conceptual system has naturally embedded difficulties in coping with the new moral challenges brought on by emerging future technologies. The reviewed literature outlines our contemporary understanding based on evolutionary psychology of humans as cognitive organisms. The authors then give a skeletal outline of moral psychology. These fields together suggest that there are many innate and cultural mechanisms which influence how we understand technology and have blind spots in recognizing the moral issues related to them. They discuss human tool use and cognitive categories and show how tools have shaped our evolution. The first part closes by introducing a new concept: the new ontological category (NOC i.e. robots and AI), which did not exist in our evolution. They explain how the NOC is fundamentally confounding for our moral cognitive machinery. In part two, they apply the background provided here on recent empirical studies in the moral psychology of robotics and transhumanism.

scholarly journals Précis of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua May
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Commonsense Morality

Abstract Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind argues that a careful examination of the scientific literature reveals a foundational role for reasoning in moral thought and action. Grounding moral psychology in reason then paves the way for a defense of moral knowledge and virtue against a variety of empirical challenges, such as debunking arguments and situationist critiques. The book attempts to provide a corrective to current trends in moral psychology, which celebrate emotion over reason and generate pessimism about the psychological mechanisms underlying commonsense morality. Ultimately, there is rationality in ethics not just despite but in virtue of the neurobiological and evolutionary materials that shape moral cognition and motivation.

Moral Psychology and the Unity of Morality

Utilitas ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES G. QUIGLEY
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Evolutionary Account ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Force

Jonathan Haidt's research on moral cognition has revealed that political liberals moralize mostly in terms of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives moralize in terms of those plus loyalty to Ingroup, respect for Authority, and Purity (or IAP). Some have concluded that the norms of morality encompass a wide variety of subject matters with no deep unity. To the contrary, I argue that the conservative position is partially debunked by its own lights. IAP norms’ moral relevance depends on their tendency to promote welfare (especially to prevent harm). I argue that all moral agents, including conservatives, are committed to that claim at least implicitly. I then argue that an evolutionary account of moral cognition partially debunks the view that welfare-irrelevant IAP norms have moral force. Haidt's own normative commitments are harmonized by this view: IAP norms are more important than liberals often realize, yet morality is at bottom all about promoting welfare.

scholarly journals Implicit mind perception alters vigilance performance due to cognitive conflict processing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Wiese ◽  
Arielle Mandell ◽  
Tyler Shaw ◽  
Melissa Smith
Keyword(s):  
General Characteristic ◽  
Vigilance Task ◽  
Cognitive Conflict ◽  
Automatic Process ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Conflict Processing ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Negative Effect

Knowing the internal states of others is essential to predicting behavior in social interactions and requires that the general characteristic of ‘having a mind’ is granted to our interaction partners. Mind perception is a highly automatic process and can potentially cause a cognitive conflict when interacting with agents whose mind status is ambiguous, such as artificial agents. We investigate whether mind perception negatively impacts performance on tasks involving artificial agents due to cognitive conflict processing caused by a potentially increased difficulty to categorize them as human versus non-human. Experiment 1 shows that an ambiguous humanoid stimulus negatively impacts performance on a vigilance task that is known to be sensitive to the drainage of cognitive resources. This negative effect on performance vanishes when participants are pre-exposed to the stimulus be-fore the vigilance task (Experiment 2 and 3). The effect of pre-exposure on performance recovery is independent of whether participants explicitly resolve the cognitive conflict by answering mind-related questions (Experiment 2) or implicitly by judging the stimuli on a set of physical features (Experiment 3). Together, the findings suggest that mind perception is so automatic that it cannot be suppressed even if it has negative effects on cognitive performance.

scholarly journals A Commentary Reflection of Moral Psychology Based on Embodied Cognition

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Shaogang Yang
Keyword(s):  
Character Education ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Cognitive Domain ◽  
Theoretical Interpretation ◽  
The Social

 The rise of embodied cognition in recent ten years has brought about significant influence on the research of moral psychology. On the one hand, the development of neuro-cognitive science has facilitated the research of morality deeply into the mirror neurons of brain, no longer being limited simply on the philosophical speculation; and on the other hand the experimental research of embodied cognition has provided new evidence for some traditional and philosophical moral issues and even made some new recognition of the issues which are different from the traditional interpretations. Tracing back to the research of the Western moral psychology, we find that cognitive rationality and virtual ethics are the two main research lines for moral psychology.（1）J. Piaget and L. Kohlberg opened a way for the research of cognitive development of morality, and their successors have formed new Kohlbergian School, such as the moral judgment theory based on DIT proposed by J. Rest and his colleagues, G. Lind’s dual-aspect theory based on his MCT and KMDD®; the social cognitive domain theory proposed by E. Turiel and his colleagues; the feminine caring ethics advocated by C. Gilligan and N. Noddings; the Social Intuitionist Theory proposed by J. Haidt based on evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology and neuro-cognitive science and so on. (2) The traditional moral philosophy and ethics have opened another way to the research of character education and virtues, such as the American movement of character education facilitated by W, Bennett and T. Lickona and others; the argument between J. Rawls and R. Nozick on moral problems; A. C. MacIntyre’s moral critique to the Western societies and his virtue ethics and so on. Since 21st century the research of embodied cognition has broken through the limitation of the traditional research on moral psychology, attempting to realize the new synthesis of intellect, human body and its environment, and therefore started the embodied research of moral judgment which is unfolded around the three dimensions of physical cleanliness, disgust, body temperature and body movements. I has also assimilated Piaget and Vygotsky’s ideas of psychological development, the theory of conceptual metaphor in cognitive semantics and the theory of evolutionary psychology, and made its theoretical interpretation and exploration for the embodied effect of moral judgment. Since the variable of physical body could have its influence on individual moral judgment by means of one’s emotion and cognitive elements, the moral judgment based on embodied cognition should be integrated with the theories of moral judgment, especially with moral competencies that are the core of moral judgment, and meanwhile the relationship between the embodied cognition and moral intuition should be deeply explored, and the issues such as chronergy, that is, time efficiency, and dynamics taken place when there is the embodied effect should be further examined, the regulated variables of embodied effects while making moral judgment and the individual differences should also be found out through detailed research. And finally we should check out the embodied effects of moral judgment through the cross-cultural comparison.

Biology and Evolutionary Moral Psychology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Fedyk
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Late Pleistocene ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Evolutionary Moral Psychology

This chapter argues that it is not possible to make meaningful progress in moral psychology by attempting to derive conclusions about moral cognition from premises describing patterns of human behaviour that could have been adaptive in the late Pleistocene. The reason these inferences fail is that it is not possible to derive proximate explanations from ultimate explanations and vice-versa.

Distrust of strangers: a theoretical background for a multidisciplinary research programme

1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-538
Author(s):  
Klaus Atzwanger ◽  
Katrin Schäfer ◽  
Alain Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Multidisciplinary Research ◽  
Ethical Evaluation ◽  
Scientific Finding ◽  
Human Ethology ◽  
Economic Foundations

Starting with an epistemological discussion of the distinction between a scientific finding and its moral/ethical evaluation, we try to present briefly the basic standpoints of human ethology and evolutionary psychology on the topic of distrust of strangers. We then discuss whether such distruct could be a biopsychic universal which, under certain historical, ecological, political and socioeconomic conditions, could turn into xenophobia and ethnocentricity with all their malevolent destructiveness. This underscores the importance of a broad interdisciplinary approach to the study of the roots of xenophobia, since only a comprehensive programme of enquiry producing knowledge on the biopsychic, social and economic foundations of this phenomenon will make it possible to propose appropriate countermeasures.

Designing Artificial Agents as Social Companions

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 1604-1608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Wiese ◽  
Tyler Shaw ◽  
Daniel Lofaro ◽  
Carryl Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Social Robotics ◽  
Social Connection ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Social Partners ◽  
Internal States ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Machine Interaction ◽  
Do So

When we interact with others, we make inferences about their internal states (i.e., intentions, emotions) and use this information to understand and predict their behavior. Reasoning about the internal states of others is referred to as mentalizing, and presupposes that our social partners are believed to have a mind. Seeing mind in others increases trust, prosocial behaviors and feelings of social connection, and leads to improved joint performance. However, while human agents trigger mind perception by default, artificial agents are not automatically treated as intentional entities but need to be designed to do so. The panel addresses this issue by discussing how mind attribution to robots and other automated agents can be elicited by design, what the effects of mind perception are on attitudes and performance in human-robot and human-machine interaction and what behavioral and neuroscientific paradigms can be used to investigate these questions. Application areas covered include social robotics, automation, driver-vehicle interfaces, and others.

The difference between ice cream and Nazis: Moral externalization and the evolution of human cooperation

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Kyle Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Moral Norm ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Moral Demands

AbstractA range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place.

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