Ethics Of Self Driving Cars

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Our world is changing more and more every day, technology is evolving and we find ourselves being sucked into the newest technology. Picture this, you are sitting around a table in comfortable leather chairs with a few friends drinking cocktails and playing cards. No, you are not at a friend’s house on a Friday night but you are riding in your driverless car heading to the mountains for a weekend away. This is the future of the automobile in the 21st century and it is just around the corner. This paper will discuss the ethical dilemmas created from the use of self-driving cars, by explaining the different ways that a utilitarian and a deontologist would view the situation. It is no secret that technological advancement fascinates society and …show more content…
However, there are other view points on this new age in technology. Self- driving cars brought this sense of safety to the future ensuring that these vehicles would reduce traffic fatalities. The ethics behind this concept arose when they concept of decision making during spontaneous situations that require ethics and not just technology. This problem suggests that a self- driven car would not be able to ethically react to a scenario where a problem such as: someone jumping in front of the vehicle, an animal crossing the road, or any other object that could cause a sever crash. These kinds of problems need values, morals and human instinct. This interests me because it gives an example where we need humans to do a job that technology cannot. Technological advancement is huge and positive usually, but in this case there is a problem in this idea of new vehicle technology because of lack of …show more content…
In the case of any accidents, lawyers could blame the car manufacturers for the way they "programmed morality into the machine." (Jun). The deontologists would ask if it was morally wrong to put the program and machine driving around if someone were harmed because they can’t think and are not human. We don’t sue trains when they hit human beings because trains cannot think like humans or have morality like humans. However, this article also explains the benefits of having a self-driving car that initially hooked in consumers because it sounded like the “right” means of transportation. Deontological ethics and how they feel rely on if the action is right or wrong. In the light of positivity, a deontologist could look at the situation to be a good thing. Unlike human drivers, they don 't get distracted, they don 't fall asleep or text behind the wheel, and they don 't drive drunk (Lee). This promotes the idea that having these machine transport us around is the morally right thing to do because it is the

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