ACE modular framework for computational ethics : dealing with multiple actions, concurrency and omission

This paper presents the ACE modular framework (Action-Causality-Ethics), a modular and declarative logic-based framework for representing and applying multiple ethical principles. We clearly separate modeling concerns about dynamics and ethics, using reifica- tion to explicitly represent generic meta-rules to be con-trasted with specific domain knowledge. This allows us to formalize ethical principles as methods for ethical assessment of actions and plans and specify what addi- tional domain information are needed for each of them in addition to the factual description of the unfolding of events. The architecture presented here is based on an action model allowing concurrency and multiple agents and we discuss how this a ff ects the ethical assessment process and allows precise modelling of omission.