Are there decisions computers should never make?
Ethical issues in the use of computers
Communications of the ACM
A softbot-based interface to the Internet
Communications of the ACM
Android epistemology
The ethics of autonomous learning systems
Android epistemology
Internet agents: spiders, wanderers, brokers, and bots
Internet agents: spiders, wanderers, brokers, and bots
The media equation: how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places
Human values and the design of computer technology
Interface agents: metaphors with character
Human values and the design of computer technology
Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games
Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games
Is it an Agent, or Just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents
ECAI '96 Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Agents III, Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages
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Traditional approaches to computer ethics regard computers as tools, andfocus, therefore, on the ethics of their use. Alternatively, computer ethicsmight instead be understood as a study of the ethics of computationalagents, exploring, for example, the different characteristics and behaviorsthat might benefit such an agent in accomplishing its goals. In this paper,I identify a list of characteristics of computational agents that facilitatetheir pursuit of their end, and claim that these characteristics can beunderstood as virtues within a framework of virtue ethics. This frameworkincludes four broad categories – agentive, social, environmental, and moral– each of which can be understood as a spectrum of virtues rangingbetween two extreme subcategories. Although the use of a virtue frameworkis metaphorical rather than literal, I argue that by providing a frameworkfor identifying and critiquing assumptions about what a `good' computer is,a study of android arete provides focus and direction to the developmentof future computational agents.