# Toward the Engineering of Virtuous Machines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03868/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Artificial virtuous agents in a multiagent tragedy of the commons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02769/) (2022)
- [On the Computational Complexity of Ethics: Moral Tractability for Minds and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04218/) (2023)
- [Intuitions of Compromise: Utilitarianism vs. Contractualism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05496/) (2024)
- [AI Can Stop Mass Shootings, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09343/) (2021)
- [Virtue Ethics For Ethically Tunable Robotic Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16361/) (2024)
- [AI Ethics and Social Norms: Exploring ChatGPT's Capabilities From What to How](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18044/) (2025)
- [Fog of Love: Engineering Virtuous Agent Behavior with Affinity-based Reinforcement Learning in a Game Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04750/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been studied extensively and advocated by ethicists, it has not been clear that there exists a version of virtue ethics rigorous enough to be a target for machine ethics (which we take to include the engineering of an ethical sensibility in a machine or robot itself, not only the study of ethics in the humans who might create artificial agents). We begin to address this by presenting an embryonic formalization of a key part of any virtue-ethics theory: namely, the learning of virtue by a focus on exemplars of moral virtue. Our work is based in part on a computational formal logic previously used to formally model other ethical theories and principles therein, and to implement these models in artificial agents.