Ethical considerations for a decision making system for autonomous vehicles during an inevitable collision

The automotive industry is heading towards the introduction of fully autonomous vehicles. However before these type of vehicles are commercially available at mass scale, some issues need to be solved. A major issue is the ethics involved in the decision-making during an accident; this paper presents an analysis of how to solve this issue. The proposal is a pre-programmed system with different ethical settings based on six formal ethical theories. For the implementation, eight ethical concerns are defined and ordered according to each theory. These concerns are defined in terms of harm to self and harm to others. The ethical concerns are used as a guideline to define the level of importance of each person or object in an accident scenario. With the proposed system, the vehicle will be partially tailored to the preferences of different users while still being bounded by legal requirements to avoid any misuse.