Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self-driving autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential tomake the world a safer and cleaner place. A challengeconfronting the development of AVs is how these vehiclesshould behave in traffic situations where harm is unavoidable.It is important that AVs behave in ethically appropriate waysto mitigate harm. Ideally, they should obey a system ofprinciples that both concur with human moral judgments andare ethically defensible. Here we compare people’s moraljudgments of AV programming with their judgments aboutthe behavior of human drivers, with the goal of beginning toidentify such principles. As many debates within ethicsremain unresolved, empirical investigations like ours mayguide the development of ethical AVs (Bonnefon et al., 2015).In addition, people’s judgments about the behavior of AVsmay serve as a window into the abstract principles peopleapply in their moral reasoning.