Reconsider the ethics of robots.
Accept that, in the future, humans will develop intelligent, autonomous machines. Robots will walk among us and they will make independent decisions. But we will have the capacity to instill, as part of their design, principles that will guide their actions. Think of one principle that we should give them (this should be the most important principle not a tangential one). Why is this the principle that we should give them?

At the beginning of the semester, I presented you with the prompt above. For your final paper I want you to reconsider that question while focusing on two issues: how will the machine make an assessment and what does your response say about human ethics. You answer to these two questions are connected – they inform each other.
How should the right action be assessed?
The heart of your paper is a consideration of how ethical judgments ought to be made (which is itself an ethical question). Approaching the issue from the perspective of building an ethical machine allows us to avoid the trap of answering how people do respond, which too often leads away from rather than towards introspection, and instead to focus on the actual principles of ethics. We must be wary not to answer too quickly; machines can calculate, this much is certain, but are machines capable of performing the kind of assessment deemed necessary (I do not mean, “are they currently capable?” – clearly, they are not – I mean “are they in-principle capable?”) Do not get too lost pondering this aspect. This is the heart of your paper but its true value lies in how it helps you answer the second question.
What does this tell us about human ethics?

The point of this course has been to give you the tools to think more clearly about the right and the good. In thinking about how you would want a robot to make ethical choices, you reveal something about how you think humans ought to make ethical choices. And, importantly, what capacities you believe a human must have in order to make those decisions. You might, for instance, believe that robots should use telos/sentiment/deontology/happiness/care to make decisions. Now, either robots will or will not have the capacity to make decisions that way but, the real question is: do humans?
So, ask yourself “what should robots do?” then ask yourself “can humans do that?” There are many ways to answer this question. You might want to say that robots must make ethical choices differently than humans – cool, make that argument. Or, you might want to say that robots are incapable of ethical choices – great, make that argument. Perhaps you want to say that robots and humans should make the choice in the same way – sweet, make that argument. Maybe you want to say something else entirely – awesome, I look forward to reading it.
The point is that I do not grade you on what you choose but rather on how you argue it. I look to see that you have been paying attention during the semester and that you have put some thought into your final writing.

ADVICE:
I am not asking for
• How you responded to each thing we read
• A list of things you think are true, real, or facts
• A series of answers – the questions are for you to think about
• A defense of an ethical theory
• A defense of a particular presupposition
• A defense of a specific act

I am asking for
• A thoughtful consideration of the underlying principles of ethics

NOTE:
All the guidelines for writing papers (with the exception of length) apply. I will mark you off for each and every failure to follow those guidelines. For instance, if you have five contractions, you lose five points.

ANOTHER NOTE:
For the love of all things, please do not write two papers and stick them together – do not write about the first question then write about the second question then just stick them together. Write a coherent whole; a paper in which the answer to one question leads to the other. Integrate your thoughts!
APPENDIX 1 – a note about relativism
[This note was written for a different final paper prompt but it might still prove useful]
Even if you see yourself as a relativist, you still have to confront the issues for this final paper. First, you have to actually show that you do hold the presuppositions necessary for relativism – note, you are not defending relativism, you are showing that you hold those presuppositions. Second, and this is the weirder problem, even if you are a relativist you are not exempt from having views on these things. The view “moral judgments are relative to the speaker” does not deny that moral judgments are true or real. Suppose that you are a relativist and, as a relativist, you think that murder is wrong. You might believe that whether or not something is a murder is relative to the person or the community. But even if it is relative to the person or the community, you still have to have some idea about what makes it a murder. And, that feature that you point to, the one that makes it a murder is still the kind of thing about which we can ask, “is it true?”, “is it real?”, “is it a fact?” Remember, this is admitting that you are a relativist and that you have judged that something is a murder while admitting that others might not view it as a murder; it would be really weird to claim that the morally relevant feature was not true. Imagine the scenario.
1. YOU believe that ethical judgments are relative to the speaker
2. YOU believe murder to be wrong
3. YOU believe that murder is to intentionally causes the death of an innocent life
4. YOU judge that Bob has intentionally caused the death of an innocent
Therefore, YOU judge Bob to have done something wrong.

We can still ask all the same meta-ethical questions about the above scenario. But notice the conundrum, if you suggest that any of the above claims are false, how are you going to defend your own belief that murder is wrong? Notice, the question is not “how will you convince others that murder is wrong” it is “why do you believe that murder is wrong, given that you think premise 3 is false?”

Reconsider the ethics of robots. Accept that, in the future, human...