Deontology in AI
Thomas M. Powers · 2025
Deontology is an approach to ethics in which guidance on how we ought to act is given by duties, rules, or principles. While deontological ethics was first conceived as applying only to human actions, in the current fast-developing age of AI it has become apparent that humans are not the only things capable of intelligent action and in need of ethical guidance. The question naturally arises whether deontology has anything to contribute to the ethics of AI in terms of supplying this guidance, in the form of programmed constraints, guardrails, or the grounds of a post hoc ethical critique. This chapter will survey various conceptions of deontological AI ethics to better understand the forms it might take across different kinds of AI tools and models.