Includes bibliographical references and index.

Turing, functionalism and emergence -- Part I: The individual realm -- The individual realm of machine ethics: a survey -- Significant moral facets amenable to logic programming -- Representing morality in logic programming -- Tabling in abduction and updating -- Counterfactuals in logic programming -- Logic programming systems affording morality experiments -- Modeling morality using logic programming -- Part II: The collective realm -- Modeling collective morality via evolutionary game theory -- Bridging two realms of machine ethics -- Part III: Coda -- Conclusions and further work.

This book addresses the fundamentals of machine ethics. It discusses abilities required for ethical machine reasoning and the programming features that enable them. It connects ethics, psychological ethical processes, and machine implemented procedures. From a technical point of view, the book uses logic programming and evolutionary game theory to model and link the individual and collective moral realms. It also reports on the results of experiments performed using several model implementations. Opening specific and promising inroads into the terra incognita of machine ethics, the authors define here new tools and describe a variety of program-tested moral applications and implemented systems. In addition, they provide alternative readings paths, allowing readers to best focus on their specific interests and to explore the concepts at different levels of detail. Mainly written for researchers in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics, philosophy of technology and engineering of ethics, the book will also be of general interest to other academics, undergraduates in search of research topics, science journalists as well as science and society forums, legislators and military organizations concerned with machine ethics. .