Combining Moral Theory, Modal Logic and Mas to Create Well-Behaving Artificial Agents

Witnessing a growing number of increasingly autonomous software agents we interact with or that operate on our behalf under circumstances that are not fully known in advance, we argue that there is a need to provide these agents with moral reasoning capabilities. Looking at the current literature on behaviour constraints and multi-agent (software) systems (MAS), one can distinguish various topics. The first topic concerns the analysis of various forms of restraint and their basis. This topic is at the core of moral philosophy. The second topic concerns the formalized specification of, and the reasoning about the constraints. The research on this topic focuses predominantly on the use of logic, mostly modal logic, and defeasible logic. The last topic is the MAS and implementation related topic of designing a working system in which there are rules that can be enforced and deviant behaviour be detected.