Shaping the
Moral Compass
of Autonomous AI.

This landmark study surveyed Australians on six realistic ethical dilemma scenarios for personal autonomous vehicles. By excluding discriminatory factors (age, gender, etc.) and incorporating legal context, the research produced four clear, actionable principles: Injury Over Sacrifice (IOS) — preferring injury over death where a choice exists; Harm Confinement and Lawfulness (HCL) — confining harm to those who broke the rules; Harm Prevention and Prioritisation (HPP) — avoiding actively causing death when possible; and Objective Decision System (ODS) — using random selection when multiple justified outcomes exist. The findings shift AV ethics away from pure utilitarianism toward a deontological, rule-based framework with built-in moral safeguards that policymakers and manufacturers can implement immediately.

A detailed critique of Australia's National Transport Commission 2018 Decision Regulation Impact Statement, which assessed safety assurance for Automated Driving Systems but explicitly excluded ethical considerations. The paper argues that safety and ethics are inseparable — you cannot claim a system is "safe" if it makes morally unacceptable choices in unavoidable crashes. The authors demonstrate how current safety criteria (Safe System Design, Operational Design Domain, Minimal Risk Condition) fail in ethical dilemmas, critique the reliance on the "Swedish solution," and recommend mandatory inclusion of ethical criteria in future regulation, public education campaigns, and transparent stakeholder dialogue.

The first Australian survey on AV moral programming — revealing what citizens expect before widespread deployment and highlighting the significant gap between theoretical ethics and real Australian values. This ground-breaking public-perception data directly informed the practical principles developed in the 2025 ICAART paper. The study establishes a baseline for understanding social licence for autonomous vehicle deployment in the Australian context.

A comprehensive philosophical and legal evaluation comparing utilitarianism, deontological ethics, and Rawlsian justice as frameworks for programming self-driving car decision-making. The paper evaluates the real-world strengths and limitations of each approach for legal and policy application, providing a rigorous theoretical foundation for the empirical survey work that followed. Published by Emerald Publishing with 8 citations — the most-cited work in the series.