Abstract
Computational models for ethical autonomy, are crucial for building
trustworthy autonomous systems. While different paradigms of ethical
autonomy are pursued, comparing and contrasting these paradigms remains
a challenge. In this work, we present SPECTRA (Strategic Protocol
Evaluation and Configuration Testbed for Responsible Autonomy) a general
purpose multi-agent, message passing framework on top of which,
different models of computational ethics can be implemented. The paper
also presents our implementation of four paradigms of ethics on this
framework– deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics and a recently
proposed paradigm called computational transcendence. We observe that
although agents have the same goal, differences in their underlying
paradigm of ethics has a significant impact on the outcomes for
individual agents as well as on the system as a whole. We also simulate
a mixed population of agents following different paradigms of ethics and
study the properties of the emergent system.