Oliver Bendel was born in 1968 in Ulm. He studied philosophy as well as information science at the University of Constance and wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of St. Gallen about anthropomorphic software agents. Bendel has been researching information ethics and machine ethics for years. He works as a professor at the School of Business FHNW in Basel, Olten and Brugg-Windisch. Since 1998 he has published over 300 articles, book chapters and books. In 2019, Bendel founded the platform robophilosophy.com in order to gain more attention for the research field of robot philosophy.
Machine ethics produces moral machines. The machine morality is usually fixed. Another approach is the morality menu (MOME). With this, owners or users transfer their own morality onto the machine, for example a social robot. The machine acts in the same way as they would act, in detail. A team at the School of Business FHNW implemented a MOME for the MOBO chatbot. In this article, the author introduces the idea of the MOME, presents the MOBO-MOME project and discusses advantages and disadvantages of such an approach. It turns out that a morality menu can be a valuable extension for certain moral machines.
