Navigating the Complexities of Artificial Moral Advisors in the Prospect of AI Moral Enhancement: A Moral Psychology Perspective

PhD Research

20 Dec

Written By CTMF Admin

Project dates (estimated):

Sep 2021 – Aug 2025

Name of the PhD student:

Yuxin Liu

View bio

Supervisors:

Shannon Vallor – School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (Philosophy)
Adam Moore - School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (Psychology)

Project aims:

Working at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, Yuxin’s project explores the complications underlying the concept of AI moral enhancement – the process of attempting to improve human moral capacity through external, technological means. Specifically, it focuses on 1) grounding various theoretical proposals and initial implementations of artificial moral advisors in empirical evidence of moral psychology and how this influences individuals' responses to AI moral advisors, and 2) the implications such moral-enhancing technologies might hold for human morality.

Disciplines and subfields engaged:

Social and cognitive psychology
Moral psychology
Moral philosophy
AI ethics
Human-computer interaction

Research Themes:

Ethics of Human-Machine Interactions
- Ethics of Automation
- Ethics of Artificial Agent and Robot Design
- Ethics of Knowledge Augmentation
Emerging Technology and Human Identity
- AI, Automation and Human Wisdom
Emerging Technology, Health and Flourishing
- Emerging Tech and Human Flourishing

Related outputs:

Grants and Awards:

ReproPsy fellowship programme: €1,000 for training in statistics and open science

Conferences:

Presented on Artificial Moral Advisors and Moral Enhancement at the AI Ethics and Human-Computer Interaction Conference in Graz, Austria, March 6-7, 2024.
Accepted to present Intuitive Judgements Towards AI verdicts of Moral Transgressions at the International Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Symposium 2023 in Edinburgh.
Presented on the Moral Psychology behind Artificial Moral Advisors at the Moral Psychology and AI Conference 2023 in Kent.
Organising committee member for the Postgraduate Bioethics Conference 2023 in Edinburgh.
Presented On Moral AIs on the Mobilising Technomoral Knowledge panel at the Society for Philosophy & Technology Conference 2023 in Toyko.
Invited to present Artificial moral advisor and moral enhancement at Artificial Intelligence and the Christian Churches workshop in Edinburgh, 2023.
Presented Moral intuitions regarding the use of artificial intelligence at the 19th BPS Cognitive Section Annual Conference in Brighton, 2023.
Presented Artificial moral advisors: A new perspective from moral psychology at the 5th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society in Oxford, 2023.
Presented A Bayesian multilevel analysis of belief alignment effect predicting human moral intuitions of artificial intelligence judgements at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Toronto, 2023.
Presented Human moral judgements towards artificial intelligence systems at the 1st Doctoral Colloquium of the AI Ethics and Society Group in Edinburgh, 2023.

Peer-reviewed Publications:

Artificial moral advisors: A new perspective from moral psychology, Yuxin Liu, Adam B. Moore, Jamie Webb and Shannon Vallor AIES ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 2022 🔗
A Bayesian multilevel analysis of belief alignment effect predicting human moral intuitions of artificial intelligence judgements, Yuxin Liu and Adam B. Moore, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2022 🔗
Skill and self-knowledge: Empirical refutation of the dual-burden account of the Dunning–Kruger effect, Robert D. Mackintosh, Adam B. Moore, Yuxin Liu and Sergio Della Sala, Royal Society Open Science, 2022 🔗