Kan en självkörande bil vara en etisk agent?

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to investigate important prerequisites for how self-driving cars should/can be programmed from an ethical point of view and to examine how individuals reason about how self-driving cars should act in situations where accidents are inevitable. Artificial intelligence is generally a major area where ethics and morals are important factors to relate to. As the area is so wide, a demarcation has been made for self-driving cars, with the aim of being able to generate increased understanding of the wider context. To answer the question "Can a self-driving car be an ethical agent?" a qualitative method approach has been used. Based on moral-philosophical theories, ethically difficult scenarios have been constructed that respondents have had to take a position on and motivate their positions in the form of semi-structured interviews. The result of the study shows that as different individuals reason differently about what is actually an ethical right act in different situations, it is difficult to determine how a car should act to be classified as an ethical agent. It also turns out that one and the same individual in different situations has different moral-philosophical theories as a starting point because of different influencing factors. This in turn shows that ethical positions are extremely situated, which contributes to an enormous complexity of the phenomenon.