Ensuring that autonomous systems work ethically is both complex and
difficult. However, the idea of having an additional `governor' that assesses
options the system has, and prunes them to select the most ethical choices is
well understood. Recent work has produced such a governor consisting of a
`consequence engine' that assesses the likely future outcomes of actions then
applies a Safety/Ethical logic to select actions. Although this is appealing,
it is impossible to be certain that the most ethical options are actually
taken. In this paper we extend and apply a well-known agent verification
approach to our consequence engine, allowing us to verify the correctness of
its ethical decision-making.Comment: Presented at the 1st International Workshop on AI and Ethics, Sunday
25th January 2015, Hill Country A, Hyatt Regency Austin. Will appear in the
workshop proceedings published by AAA
