Independent Agents and Ethics

The development of Information Technology, systems, robots, etc., that are capable of processing information and acting independently of their human operators, has been accelerated as well as the hopes, and the fears, of the impact of those artifacts on environment, market, society, on human life generally. Many ethical issues are raised because of these systems being today, or in the future, capable of independent decision making and acting. In the present paper it is discussed how ethical decision support pro-grams can be integrated into robots and other relatively independent decision making systems to secure that decisions are made according to the basic theories of philosophy and to the findings of psychological research.