Scholars@Duke
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Chauncey Stillman Distinguished Professor of Practical Ethics
Philosophy
Duke Box 90743, Durham, NC 27708-0743
Duke University Box 90432, 203B West Duke Bldg, Durham, NC 27708

Scholarly Works - Conferences

Moral Change or Noise? On Problems of Aligning AI With Temporally Unstable Human Feedback

Conference Proceedings of the Aaai Conference on Artificial Intelligence · January 1, 2026 Alignment methods in moral domains seek to elicit moral preferences of human stakeholders and incorporate them into AI. This presupposes moral preferences as static targets, but such preferences often evolve over time. Proper alignment of AI to dynamic hum ... Full text Cite

Can AI Model the Complexities of Human Moral Decision-making? A Qualitative Study of Kidney Allocation Decisions

Conference Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings · April 26, 2025 A growing body of work in Ethical AI attempts to capture human moral judgments through simple computational models. The key question we address in this work is whether such simple AI models capture the critical nuances of moral decision-making by focusing ... Full text Cite

On The Stability of Moral Preferences: A Problem with Computational Elicitation Methods

Conference Proceedings of the 7th Aaai ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society Aies 2024 · January 1, 2024 Preference elicitation frameworks feature heavily in the research on participatory ethical AI tools and provide a viable mechanism to enquire and incorporate the moral values of various stakeholders. As part of the elicitation process, surveys about moral ... Cite

On the Pros and Cons of Active Learning for Moral Preference Elicitation

Conference Proceedings of the 7th Aaai ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society Aies 2024 · January 1, 2024 Computational preference elicitation methods are tools used to learn people's preferences quantitatively in a given context. Recent works on preference elicitation advocate for active learning as an efficient method to iteratively construct queries (framed ... Cite

On the Pros and Cons of Active Learning for Moral Preference Elicitation

Conference PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTH AAAI/ACM CONFERENCE ON AI, ETHICS, AND SOCIETY, AIES-24, VOL 7 NO 1 · 2024 Link to item Cite

On The Stability of Moral Preferences: A Problem with Computational Elicitation Methods

Conference PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTH AAAI/ACM CONFERENCE ON AI, ETHICS, AND SOCIETY, AIES-24, VOL 7 NO 1 · 2024 Link to item Cite

Indecision Modeling.

Conference AAAI · 2021 Cite

When Do People Want AI to Make Decisions?

Conference Aies 2018 Proceedings of the 2018 Aaai ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society · December 27, 2018 AI systems are now or will soon be sophisticated enough to make consequential decisions. Although this technology has flourished, we also need public appraisals of AI systems playing these more important roles. This article reports surveys of preferences f ... Full text Cite

Adapting a Kidney Exchange Algorithm to Align with Human Values

Conference Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · December 27, 2018 Full text Cite

Moral decision making frameworks for artificial intelligence

Conference International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics Isaim 2018 · January 1, 2018 The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lackin ... Cite

Adapting a kidney exchange algorithm to align with human values

Conference 32nd Aaai Conference on Artificial Intelligence Aaai 2018 · January 1, 2018 The efficient allocation of limited resources is a classical problem in economics and computer science. In kidney exchanges, a central market maker allocates living kidney donors to patients in need of an organ. Patients and donors in kidney exchanges are ... Cite

Moral decision making frameworks for artificial intelligence

Conference Aaai Workshop Technical Report · January 1, 2017 The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lackin ... Cite

Explanation and justification in moral epistemology

Conference PROCEEDINGS OF THE TWENTIETH WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL 1 · January 1, 1999 Link to item Cite

Moral Decision Making Frameworks for Artificial Intelligence

Conference The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lackin ... Cite