Performative Quantification: Design Choices Impact the Lessons of Empirical Surveys About the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles

In recent years, researchers have emphasized the relevance of data about commonsense moral judgments for ethical decision-making, notably in the context of debates about autonomous vehicles (AVs). As such, the results of empirical studies such as the Machine Moral Experiment have been influential in debates about the ethics of AVs and some researchers have even put forward methods to automatize ethical decision-making on the basis of such data. In this paper, we argue that data collection is not a neutral process, and the difference in study design can change participants’ answers and the ethical conclusions that can be drawn from them. After showing that participants’ individual answers are stable in the sense that providing them with a second occasion to reflect on their answers does not change them (Study 1), we show that different conclusions regarding participants’ moral preferences can be reached when participants are given a third option allowing AVs to behave randomly (Study 2), and that preference for this third option can be increased in the context of a collective discussion (Study 3). We conclude that design choices will influence the lessons that can be drawn from surveys about participants’ moral judgments about AVs and that these choices are not morally neutral.