Education, Ethical Dilemmas and AI: From Ethical Design to Artificial Morality.

Ethical dilemmas are complex scenarios involving a decision between conflicting choices related to ethical principles. While considering a case of an ethical dilemma in education presented in [ 17 ], it can be seen how, in these situations, it might be needed to take into consideration the student’s needs, preferences, and potentially conflicting goals, as well as their personal and social contexts. Due to this, planning and foreseeing ethically challenging situations in advance, which would be how ethical design is normally used in technological artifacts, is not enough. As AI systems become more autonomous, the amount of possible situations, choices and effects their actions can have grow exponentially. In this paper, we bring together the analysis of ethical dilemmas in education and the need to incorporate moral reasoning into the AI systems’ decision procedures. We argue how ethical design, although necessary, is not sufficient for that task and that artificial morality, or equivalent tools, are needed in order to integrate some sort of “ethical sensor” into autonomous systems taking a deeper role in an educational settings in order to enable them to, if not resolve, at least identify new ethically-relevant scenarios they are faced with.