Ethics of autonomous vehicles: from moral dilemmas to social trade-offs

In the ethics of autonomous vehicles, dilemmatic frameworks have been widely used to discuss unavoidable collision scenarios. However, doubts have been raised on the opportunity of framing unavoidable collisions as moral dilemmas. We claim that dilemmatic frameworks take on new roles in this context and that acknowledging these changes is essential to any assessment of their methodological productivity. We suggest that in the ethics of autonomous vehicles dilemmatic frameworks are pointers to social deliberation issues and related trade-offs between competing values, helping one to identify ethically motivated policies and specifications for autonomous driving controllers.