MBA 6315 – The Ethical Environment of Business

The Moral Machine

With the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence in many real world application such

self-driving technology, it also comes with concerns about how these machines will make moral

and ethical decisions. The Moral Machine by MIT had been created to address this challenge of

quantifying ethical expectation that should guide machines behavior. According to the creator,

“this project is to understand individual’s judgments about difficulty moral dilemmas that

involve life or death situation”.

By applying the ethical making decisions framework to each individual dilemmas, my

result shown that upholding the law mattered the most to my ethical standard. This is based on

justice and fairness approach where punishment and penalties are imposed on whose have done

wrong against the law. My gender preference also males with high education background and

species preference is human. This is based on the cost-benefit analysis to society as a whole.

Saving a life of a person with an educated background is more beneficial compared to whose do

not share the same story. When applying the ethical frame work and slow-thinking approach to

each of the dilemmas, I always outlined the pros and cons between each decision with the

distributive justice in mind.

Each dilemmas required us to make an ethical decision and it will harm one or another.

For example, I was given a choice to choose between a group of people with different age and

genders versus a group of animals that is crossing the red line illegally. In this dilemma, I chose

to sacrificed the life of the animals not because human are worth more, but due to the fact that

these animals had unlawfully crossed the street. In my thinking, this is a form of distributive

justice.
 The reason why justice and fairness approached had shaped my ethical decision

framework was due to my early hood education. When I was attending school in Vietnam, I was

taught to obey the laws, contributed meaningful behavior and actions to society as a whole.

These lessons had carried into my standard of making ethical decisions on many important

ethical problem. This also impacted many of the managerial decision I have to make when my

employee broke one of our company’s policy, even though their actions were justifiable based on

the applied situation. However, I had to follow my ethical standard to punish the employee

otherwise there would be any fairness to the entire team member.

Based on the result of this study, it had helped me gain a better understanding of my

moral and ethical standard. This also helped me in making decisions when it comes to difficulty

and challenging moral dilemmas by using ethical framework and cost-benefit approach make

determination. After all, the end justify the means.