A Prima Facie Duty Approach to Machine Ethics and Its Application to Elder Care

Having discovered a decision principle for a well-known prima facie duty theory in biomedical ethics to resolve particular cases of a common type of ethical dilemma, we developed three applications: a medical ethics advisor system, a medication reminder system and an instantiation of this system in a Nao robot. We are now developing a general, automated method for generating from scratch the ethics needed for a machine to function in a particular domain, without making the assumptions used in our prototype systems.