Ethics by Design: Necessity or Curse?

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason aboutthe ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent’s behavior remains withingiven moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in whichthey operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in theemerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomousagents?. But overall, the central question is: “Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?".