Felix Lindner – Publications

On this page, my publications since 2016 are listed. A complete list of my publications can be found here.

(Show all abstracts) (Hide all abstracts)

2020

Felix Lindner, Robert Mattmüller and Bernhard Nebel.
Evaluation of the Moral Permissibility of Action Plans.
Artificial Intelligence 287. 2020.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract) (PDF)

Research in classical planning so far has been mainly concerned with generating a satisficing or an optimal plan. However, if such systems are used to make decisions that are relevant to humans, one should also consider the ethical consequences generated plans can have. Traditionally, ethical principles are formulated in an action-based manner, allowing to judge the execution of one action. We show how such a judgment can be generalized to plans. Further, we study the computational complexity of making ethical judgment about plans.

2019

Felix Lindner, Barbara Kuhnert, Laura Wächter and Katrin Möllney.
Perception of Creative Responses to Moral Dilemmas by a Conversational Robot.
In Proc. ICSR 2019. 2019.
(PDF)
Felix Lindner and Katrin Möllney.
Extracting Reasons for Moral Judgments under Various Ethical Principles.
In Proceedings of KI 2019. 2019.
(PDF)
Hanna Stellmach and Felix Lindner.
Perception of an Uncertain Ethical Reasoning Robot.
Journal of Interactive Media 18(1). 2019.
Felix Lindner, Robert Mattmüller and Bernhard Nebel.
Moral Permissibility of Action Plans.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19). 2019.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract) (PDF)

Research in classical planning so far was mainly concerned with generating a satisficing or an optimal plan. However, if such systems are used to make decisions that are relevant to humans, one should also consider the ethical consequences generated plans can have. We address this challenge by analyzing in how far it is possible to generalize existing approaches of machine ethics to automatic planning systems. Traditionally, ethical principles are formulated in an action-based manner, allowing to judge the execution of one action. We show how such a judgment can be generalized to plans. Further, we study the computational complexity of making ethical judgment about plans.

2018

Laura Wächter and Felix Lindner.
An Explorative Comparison of Blame Attributions to Companion Robots Across Various Moral Dilemmas.
In Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2018). 2018.
Barbara Kuhnert, Felix Lindner, Martin Mose Bentzen and Marco Ragni.
Causal Structure of Moral Dilemmas Predicts Perceived Difficulty of Making a Decision.
In Proceedings of the KogWis 2018 (Extended Abstract). 2018.
Martin Mose Bentzen, Felix Lindner, Louise Dennis and Michael Fisher.
Moral Permissibility of Actions in Smart Home Systems.
In Proceedings of the FLoC 2018 Workshop on Robots, Morality, and Trust through the Verification Lens (Extended Abstract). 2018.
Hanna Stellmach and Felix Lindner.
Perception of an Uncertain Ethical Reasoning Robot: A Pilot Study.
In Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2018. 2018.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract)

The study investigates the effect of uncertainty expressed by a robot facing a moral dilemma. Participants (N = 80) were shown a video of a robot explaining a moral dilemma and the decision it makes. The robot either expressed certainty or uncertainty about its decision. Participants rated how much blame the robot deserves for its action, the moral wrongness of the action, and their impression of the robot in terms of four scale dimensions measuring social perception. The results suggest that participants that were not familiar with the moral dilemma assign more blame to the robot for the same action when it expresses uncertainty, while expressed uncertainty has less effect on moral wrongness judgments. There was no significant effect of expressed uncertainty on participants’ impression of the robot. We discuss implications of this result for the design of social robots.
Felix Lindner and Martin Mose Bentzen.
A Formalization of Kant's Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative.
In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Deontic Logic and Normative Systems (DEON). 2018.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract)

We present a formalization and computational implementation of the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative. This ethical principle requires an agent to never treat someone merely as a means but always also as an end. Here we interpret this principle in terms of how persons are causally affected by actions. We introduce Kantian causal agency models in which moral patients, actions, goals, and causal influence are represented, and we show how to formalize several readings of Kant's categorical imperative that correspond to Kant's concept of strict and wide duties towards oneself and others. Stricter versions handle cases where an action directly causally affects oneself or others, whereas the wide version maximizes the number of persons being treated as an end. We discuss limitations of our formalization by pointing to one of Kant's cases that the machinery cannot handle in a satisfying way.
Felix Lindner, Robert Mattmüller and Bernhard Nebel.
Moral Permissibility of Action Plans.
In Proceedings of the ICAPS Workshop on EXplainable AI Planning (XAIP). 2018.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract) (PDF)

Research in classical planning so far was mainly concerned with generating a satisficing or an optimal plan. However, if such systems are used to make decisions that are relevant to humans, one should also consider the ethical consequences that generated plans can have. We address this challenge by analyzing in how far it is possible to generalize existing approaches of machine ethics to automatic planning systems. Traditionally, ethical principles are formulated in an action-based manner, allowing to judge the execution of one action. We show how such a judgment can be generalized to plans. Further, we study the complexity of making ethical judgment about plans.
Glenda Hannibal and Felix Lindner.
Transdisciplinary Reflections on Social Robotics in Academia and Beyond.
In Proceedings of Robo-Philosophy 2018. 2018.

2017

Felix Lindner, Martin Mose Bentzen and Bernhard Nebel.
The HERA Approach to Morally Competent Robots.
In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017). 2017.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract) (PDF)

To address the requirement for autonomous moral decision making, we introduce a software library for modeling hybrid ethical reasoning agents (short: HERA). The goal of the HERA project is to provide theoretically well-founded and practically usable logic-based machine ethics tools for implementation in robots. The novelty is that HERA implements multiple ethical principles like utilitarianism, the principle of double effect, and a Pareto-inspired principle. These principles can be used to automatically assess moral situations represented in a format we call causal agency models. We discuss how to model moral situations using our approach, and how it can cope with uncertainty about moral values. Finally, we briefly outline the architecture of our robot IMMANUEL, which implements HERA and is able to explain ethical decisions to humans.
Barbara Kuhnert, Marco Ragni and Felix Lindner.
The Gap between Human's Attitute towards Robots in General and Human's Expectation of an Ideal Everyday Life Robot.
In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2017). 2017.
(PDF)
Felix Lindner, Laura Wächter and Martin Mose Bentzen.
Discussions About Lying with an Ethical Reasoning Robot.
In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2017). 2017.
(PDF)
Felix Lindner and Carola Eschenbach.
An Affordance-Based Conceptual Framework for Spatial Behavior of Social Robots.
In Raul Hakli and Johanna Seibt (eds.), Sociality and Normativity for Robots --- Philosophical Inquiries into Human-Robot Interactions. Springer International Publishing 2017.
Barbara Kuhnert, Felix Lindner, Martin Mose Bentzen and Marco Ragni.
Perceived Difficulty of Moral Dilemmas Depends on Their Causal Structure: A Formal Model and Preliminary Results.
In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society CogSci 2017. 2017.
(PDF)
Felix Lindner and Martin Mose Bentzen.
The Hybrid Ethical Reasoning Agent IMMANUEL.
In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2017), Late-Breaking Report. 2017.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract) (PDF)

We introduce a novel software library that supports the implementation of hybrid ethical reasoning agents (HERA). The objective is to make moral principles available to robot programming. At its current stage, HERA can assess the moral permissibility of actions according to the principle of double effect, utilitarianism, and the do-no-harm principle. We present the prototype robot IMMANUEL based on HERA. The robot will be used to conduct research on joint moral reasoning in human-robot interaction.

2016

Felix Lindner.
How To Count Multiple Personal-Space Intrusions in Social Robot Navigation.
In Proceedings of the Robo-Philosophy Conference 2016. 2016.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract)

One aspect of social robot navigation is to avoid personal space intrusions. Computationally, this can be achieved by introducing social costs into a robot's path planner's objective function. This article tackles the normative question of how robots should aggregate social costs incurred by multiple personal-space intrusions. Of particular interest is the question whether numbers should count, i.e., whether a robot ought to intrude into one person's personal space in order to aboid intruding into multiple personal spaces. This work proposes four different modes of aggregation of the costs of intrusions into personal space, discusses some of the philosophical arguments, and presents results from a pilot study.
Felix Lindner.
A Model of a Robot's Will Based on Higher-Order Desires.
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2016). 2016.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract)

Autonomous robots implement decision making capacities on several layers of abstraction. Put in terms of desires, decision making evaluates desires to eventually commit to some most rational one. Drawing on the philosophical literature on volition and agency, this work introduces a conceptual model that enables robots to reason about which desires they want to want to realize, i.e., higher-order desires. As a result, six jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint types of choices are defined. Technical evaluation shows how to add a robot's will to its rational decision-making capacity. This guarantees that informed choices are possible even in cases rational decision making alone is indecisive. Further applications to modeling personality traits for human-robot interaction are discussed.
Felix Lindner.
A Social Robot's Knowledge About Territories in Public Space.
In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2016). 2016.
(Show abstract) (Hide abstract)

Human territoriality is a microsocial phenomenon that displays the strong interrelations between action and space. Actions are spatially located, and because spaces that afford certain activities are rare, humans claim portions of space and restrict space access to particular agents. Thereby, they create territories. In public spaces, territories are usually short-term yet bravely defended: E.g., the table in a restaurant, the place in a queue at the checkout, the seat in the train. This abstract sketches a formal theory of territory. Its aim is to enable social robots to consider existing territories during decision making and planning both in order to avoid intrusions of others' territories and to claim territories for their own benefit.