Post 7

Summary: Computer-Assisted Warfare

The problem being discussed here is the ethical-ness of using robots in warfare. Primarily, the idea of whether or not autonomous armed robots are an ethical approach to warfare. The Aristotelian framework is primarily focused on the virtuousness of particular individuals and actions, and thus would find this problem significant because it explicitly questions the virtuousness of autonomous robots. The Aristotelian Framework would be of the opinion that using autonomous armed robots is probably a good thing. Firstly, the use of autonomous armed robots “may ultimately reduce non-combatant casualties and other forms of collateral damage by their ability to better adhere to the Laws of War than most soldiers possibly can.” If autonomous robots are programmed in such a way that they follow the Laws of War, they will most likely be able to act more virtuously that can humans because they do not have unconscious biases or fears of being hurt affecting their actions. Secondly, autonomous robots “can integrate more information from more sources far more quickly before responding with lethal force than can a human in real-time.” Thus, in many situations where a human might shoot before realizing that their target is not hostile an autonomous robot would be able to much more quickly make this significant distinction and stop itself from shooting, thereby reducing collateral damage. Finally, the use of autonomous robots would be ethical simply because the result would be more virtuous actions performed during warfare, and the prevention of unethical actions by soldiers who, due to their humanity, cannot always do better.

Summary: Job Automation

As robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence improve and are implemented in many different industries and companies, many corporations will see an opportunity to reduce labor costs and human error by replacing certain jobs with automated robot labor. Industries that are especially prone to this phenomenon are any that depend on a large amount of unskilled labor, such as the fast food industry. This issue is important to Aristotelian ethics because firing workers and replacing them with robots in the name of efficiency is a serious ethical dilemma. Aristotle’s position on this dilemma would be that a company should take advantage of automation to improve business processes, but not purely in pursuit of more money at the cost of their workers’ jobs. This goes back to Aristotle’s concept of a “golden mean” between the extremes of excess and vice, which is where virtue is found. In this case, one extreme would be replacing all workers with automated machines in the pursuit of greed, which is a vice, and the other would be refusing to take advantage of automation, which is excessive and wasteful. Aristotle would say that a balance between automation and human labor is the ideal solution because it exemplifies the “golden mean.” Along with this notion is the importance of ethical action in Aristotle’s ethical framework. Ensuring that workers have other jobs, opportunities, or education as a response to replacing their labor with automation would constitute ethical action, so even if a company is going to automate they could improve the decision from an ethical standpoint by assisting the displaced workers.

Summary: Corporate Personhood

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is often referred to as Teleological ethics. An object or individual’s telos is its ultimate end, or final cause in the language of his, Aristotle’s, Metaphysics. An individual’s or object’s ‘ethics’ is derived from whether or not an action will help achieve its telos. Humans are unique in the world as being able to make choices to guide themselves toward or away from their telos. The question of whether corporations are people, from the point of view of Aristotle’s Ethics, comes down to whether corporations as an entity have a telos and can makes choices to move towards or away from that telos. This is the heart of rationality according to Aristotle, and if corporations can make these decisions than that contradicts Aristotle’s belief that humans are unique, creating a whole new area of ethics to help corporations reach their telos. While corporations have been around for a long time, Aristotle did not say anything about them, presumably because they did not exist in anything near the same form as that which they take today. While there is no direct statement on personhood, we can extrapolate from Aristotle’s teachings on the motivation for the ethics of persons to decide on the personhood of corporations. The first question is whether there is a final cause of a corporation. For Aristotle, the final cause of an individual is a virtuous life. Similarly, it would follow that the final cause of a corporation is to be a good corporation, fulfilling the end of the corporation. That would seem to include making money, building up the community, protecting its employees and so on. The next question is whether the corporation itself makes choices to achieve this end. This gets into the question of whether a corporation can make decisions. Does the decision of a collection of humans, i.e. a board of directors, count as the ethical decision of the corporation or the rational decisions of the individual members of the board. To determine this, we must turn to examples. For instance, if a corporation makes a decision for which it must be punished the board or CEO is not the one fined, it is the company that is fined. The firing of the CEO is incidental for losing the company money or hurting its image. This would indicate that the corporation, as an entity, made the decision, not the people. Similarly, when a company endorses a political candidate, (say the New York Times endorsing Hillary Clinton) it is rarely said that the management of the company, the specific people, have endorsed that candidate. Instead the company has endorsed her as single entity, a corporation. These show that corporations exists as entities that make decisions that bring them closer or farther from a set goal or metric of what a good corporation should be. According to Aristotle, that makes them people.

Algorithm

Like all algorithms for analyzing ethics, we need both the situation at hand and the situation of the world as input. For instance, what is ethical today may not have been ethical a thousand years ago, so we need to know the framework of the world. When deciding what to do according to Aristotle, we must first see whether or not the action taking place falls into one of Aristotle’s concrete ethical wrongs of adultery, murder, and theft. These are never ethical under any circumstance. Next we must determine whether the decision is in line with a golden mean. To do this we must extrapolate to the two possible extremes. To get at these concepts, we need to take whatever concept being discussed and either completely eradicate it (e.g. no automation in any workplace) or completely accept it (e.g. no humans in any workplace). We then must decide whether or not the decision being made is too close to one of these vices or close to the golden mean. If it is the golden mean, then it is ethical, if it is close then it is probably ethical, and if it is far then it is unethical. Determining whether or not something is close to the golden mean would involve evaluating the space between the two vices and seeing how close to either vice the decision is.

If decision is in (adultery, murder, theft):
    Return unethical
vice1, vice2 = determine_vices(decision)
If golden_mean(decision, vice1, vice2):
    Return ethical
If close_to_golden_mean(decision, vice1, vice2):
    Return probably_ethical
Else:
    Return unethical