The ethics of automated vehicles (AV) has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. After a discussion about the pertinence and cogency of the term 'artificial moral agent' to describe AVs that would accomplish these sorts of decisions, and starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable in some situations, a strategy for AV decision making is proposed using only pre-defined parameters to characterize the risk of possible accidents and also integrating the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation, into multiple possible decision rules to determine the most suitable action given the specific environment and decision context. The goal of this approach is not to define how moral theory requires vehicles to behave, but rather to provide a computational approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a number of human 'moral positions' concerning what morality demands and what road users may expect, offering an evaluation tool for the social acceptability of an automated vehicle's decision making.

翻译：近年来，自动驾驶车辆（AV）的伦理问题受到广泛关注，特别是在事故情境中可能造成人类伤害的决策策略方面。在讨论"人工道德主体"这一术语用于描述执行此类决策的AV是否恰当与合理后，基于人类伤害在某些情况下不可避免的假设，提出了一种仅使用预定义参数表征可能事故风险，并将伦理价值理论（该理论将AV决策视为一种诉求调和）整合到多种可能的决策规则中，以根据特定环境和决策情境确定最合适行动的AV决策策略。该方法的目标并非定义道德理论要求车辆如何行为，而是提供一种足够灵活的计算机方法，能够容纳关于道德要求及道路使用者期望的多种人类"道德立场"，从而为评估自动驾驶车辆决策的社会可接受性提供工具。