Moral AI without advice or preferences: a reply to Lindblom and Gustavsson

Lindblom and Gustavsson argue that our proposed moral artificial intelligence (AI) would be improved by recognising three distinctions: prediction versus advice and judgement, preference versus reason and ranking versus deliberation. In response to the first, we argue that a moral AI can be very useful as a decision aid by making predictions without issuing advice of any kind that requires moral judgement, and this limited function avoids controversial meta-ethical issues. In response to the second, we clarify that our moral AI has always been based on human moral judgements rather than preferences, which would be too unstable for reliability. In response to the third, we agree that reflective equilibrium provides a better model of human moral deliberation, and we show how our methods could be extended to capture the creative potential of reflective equilibrium.