Abstract In this study, we focus on ethical education as a means to improve artificial companion’s conceptualization of moral decision-making process in human users. In particular, we focus on automatically determining whether changes in ethical education influenced core moral values in humans throughout the century. We analyze ethics as taught in Japan before WWII and today to verify how much the pre-WWII moral attitudes have in common with those of contemporary Japanese, to what degree what is taught as ethics in school overlaps with the general population’s understanding of ethics, as well as to verify whether a major reform of the guidelines for teaching the school subject of “ethics” at school after 1946 has changed the way common people approach core moral questions (such as those concerning the sacredness of human life). We selected textbooks used in teaching ethics at school from between 1935 and 1937, and those used in junior high schools today (2019) and analyzed what emotional and moral associations such contents generated. The analysis was performed with an automatic moral and emotional reasoning agent and based on the largest available text corpus in Japanese as well as on the resources of a Japanese digital library. As a result, we found out that, despite changes in stereotypical view on Japan’s moral sentiments, especially due to historical events, past and contemporary Japanese share a similar moral evaluation of certain basic moral concepts, although there is a large discrepancy between how they perceive some actions to be beneficial to the society as a whole while at the same time being inconclusive when it comes to assessing the same action’s outcome on the individual performing them and in terms of emotional consequences. Some ethical categories, assessed positively before the war, while being associated with a nationalistic trend in education have also disappeared from the scope of interest of post- war society. The findings of this study support suggestions proposed by others that the development of personal AI systems requires supplementation with moral reasoning. Moreover, the paper builds upon this idea and further suggests that AI systems need to be aware of ethics not as a constant, but as a function with a correction on historical and cultural changes in moral reasoning.

中文翻译：

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伦理教育的变化会影响核心道德价值观吗？面向历史和文化意识的道德模型在自动道德推理中的应用

摘要 在这项研究中，我们将伦理教育作为一种手段来改善人工伴侣对人类用户道德决策过程的概念化。特别是，我们专注于自动确定整个世纪伦理教育的变化是否影响了人类的核心道德价值观。我们分析了日本在二战前和今天所教授的伦理学，以验证二战前的道德态度与当代日本的道德态度有多少共同点，学校所教授的伦理学与一般民众对伦理学的理解在多大程度上重叠，如以及验证 1946 年以后在学校教授“伦理”学科的指导方针的重大改革是否改变了普通人处理核心道德问题（例如关于人类生命的神圣性的问题）的方式。我们选取了 1935 年至 1937 年间用于学校道德教育的教科书，以及今天（2019 年）在初中使用的教科书，并分析了这些内容产生了哪些情感和道德联想。该分析是使用自动道德和情感推理代理进行的，基于最大的可用日语文本语料库以及日本数字图书馆的资源。结果，我们发现，尽管对日本道德情感的刻板印象发生了变化，特别是由于历史事件，过去和现代日本人对某些基本道德概念的道德评价是相似的，尽管他们如何看待某些行为对整个社会有益，同时在评估相同行为对个人执行这些行为的结果以及情感后果方面没有定论，但两者之间存在很大差异。一些战前评价正面的伦理范畴，虽然与教育的民族主义趋势相关，但也从战后社会的利益范围中消失了。这项研究的结果支持其他人提出的建议，即个人人工智能系统的发展需要补充道德推理。此外，该论文建立在这一想法的基础上，并进一步表明，人工智能系统需要意识到道德不是一个常数，而是一个功能，对道德推理中的历史和文化变化进行修正。