An assurance case is a structured argument, typically produced by safety engineers, to communicate confidence that a critical or complex system, such as an aircraft, will be acceptably safe within its intended context. Assurance cases often inform third party approval of a system. One emerging proposition within the trustworthy AI and autonomous systems (AI/AS) research community is to use assurance cases to instil justified confidence that specific AI/AS will be ethically acceptable when operational in well-defined contexts. This paper substantially develops the proposition and makes it concrete. It brings together the assurance case methodology with a set of ethical principles to structure a principles-based ethics assurance argument pattern. The principles are justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, and respect for human autonomy, with the principle of transparency playing a supporting role. The argument pattern, shortened to the acronym PRAISE, is described. The objective of the proposed PRAISE argument pattern is to provide a reusable template for individual ethics assurance cases, by which engineers, developers, operators, or regulators could justify, communicate, or challenge a claim about the overall ethical acceptability of the use of a specific AI/AS in a given socio-technical context. We apply the pattern to the hypothetical use case of an autonomous robo-taxi service in a city centre.

翻译：保障案是一种结构化论证，通常由安全工程师撰写，旨在传达对关键或复杂系统（如飞机）在其预期情境中可接受安全的信心。保障案常为系统的第三方审批提供依据。可信赖人工智能与自主系统（AI/AS）研究领域的新兴主张之一是，利用保障案来确证在明确界定的情境下运行的特定AI/AS在伦理上可被接受的正当信心。本文对该主张进行了实质性发展并使其具体化。它将保障案方法论与一套伦理原则相结合，构建了基于原则的伦理保障论证模式。这些原则包括正义、善行、非恶意以及尊重人类自主性，透明度原则则起辅助作用。该论证模式简称为PRAISE（基于原则的伦理保障论证模式缩略词）。所提出的PRAISE论证模式旨在为个体伦理保障案提供可复用的模板，使工程师、开发者、运营者或监管者能够证明、沟通或质疑关于特定AI/AS在特定社会技术情境下使用整体伦理可接受性的主张。我们将该模式应用于城市中心自主机器人出租车服务的假设用例中。