Intelligent agents and medical moral dilemmas

Abstract

In this work Moral Dilemmas in Medicine will be analysed under the perspective of an emerging frame- work for problem solving, that bases its computational power on the concept of agent, under the Extended Logic Programming paradigm to knowledge representation and reasoning. Indeed, it is not always clear how to judge which consequences are the best, and how they are achieved. Which principles conflict and how to decide which should prevail. How to take account of the importance of the emotional element and the human experience. How moral ethics focuses on the character of the moral agent rather than the rightness of an action. Therefore, in con- sidering these relationships, emotional sensitivities, and motivations, it is understood that the role of computer based applications may be better studied in terms of a process of quantification of the quality of information that stems out the logical theories or programs that make and agent and will drive its behavior under a computational framework as the one referred to above.