Agent-Centred Approach for Assuring Ethics in Dependable Service Systems

As the world enters the information era, more and more dependable services controlling and even making our decisions are moved to the ubiquitous smart devices. While various standards are in place to impose the societal ethical norms on decision-making of those devices, the rights of the individuals to satisfy their own moral norms are not addressed with the same scrutiny. Hence, the right of the individuals to reason on their own and evaluate morality of certain decisions is at stake. In this work we propose an agent-centred approach for assuring ethics in dependable technological service systems. We build upon assurance of safety and security and propose the notion of ethics assurance case as a way to assure that individual users have been made aware of all the ethically challenging decisions that might be performed or enabled by the service provider. We propose a framework for identifying and categorising ethically challenging decisions, and documenting the ethics assurance case. We apply the framework on an illustrative example.