The new field of machine ethics is concerned with giving machines ethical principles, or a procedure for discovering a way to resolve the ethical dilemmas they might encounter, enabling them to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making. Developing ethics for machines, in contrast to developing ethics for human beings who use machines, is by its nature an interdisciplinary endeavor. The essays in this volume represent the first steps by philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers toward explaining why it is necessary to add an ethical dimension to machines that function autonomously, what is required in order to add this dimension, philosophical and practical challenges to the machine ethics project, various approaches that could be considered in attempting to add an ethical dimension to machines, work that has been done to date in implementing these approaches, and visions of the future of machine ethics research.

Dr. Michael, Anderson is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut. His interest in further enabling machine autonomy led him first to investigate how a computer might deal with diagrammatic information - work that was funded by the National Science Foundation - and has currently resulted in his establishing machine ethics as a bona fide field of scientific inquiry with Susan Leigh Anderson. He maintains the Machine Ethics Web site (http://www.machineethics.org). Dr. Susan Leigh Anderson is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her specialty is applied ethics, most recently focusing on biomedical ethics and machine ethics. She has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and, with Michael Anderson, from NASA and the NSE She is the author of three books in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series, as well as numerous articles.