DJ4ME.

Machine Ethics (ME) studies ethical reasoning in autonomous artificial agents, whose decisions will impact on the life, freedoms and wellbeing of people around them.

The moral dilemmas these agents face may affect their owners, manufacturers, users, law, or the general population. All these potentially affected stakeholders, it has been claimed, should have a say in the agent's decision-making. But then, whose norms should an agent obey? And for what reasons? How can the agent explain its decision to the people affected afterwards?

DJ4ME will develop a system called Dialogue Jiminy (DJ) to resolve agent's dilemmas via persuasion dialogues. Stakeholders cannot be consulted in real-time, but still they can have their views and interests represented by an avatar embedded in the agent. An avatar has full control in how to represent its stakeholder in the use of norms to pass a moral recommendation to the agent.

The DJ should also feature a two-sided language interface: from stakeholders to avatars, which norms to claim, and how to strategically build them into arguments; from the agent to stakeholders, how the final decision is to be explained in human terms.

As a proof of concept, different case studies will be used to estimate the effects of endowing agents with the DJ dialogue system.