Adala Vithesh Reddy supervised by Dr. Radhika KrishnaAshwin Jayantin received his Master of Science – Dual Degree  in Computing and Human Sciences (CHD). Here’s a summary of his research work on Questioning Moral Decision Making in AI: A Philosophical Perspective:

Recent efforts to embed ethical reasoning into AI and machine learning systems have focused on training deep learning models to generate moral judgments in response to situational inputs. Parallel developments in the criminal justice system illustrate the application of such technologies, where risk assessment tools are employed to predict defendants’ risk scores. These scores are then used by legal institutions to make decisions related to parole, policing, and sentencing. Together, these approaches reflect a growing trend towards integrating AI into moral decision-making and as a potential replacement for human decision-making. In our work, we critically evaluate moral decision-making in AI systems through a philosophical lens, with particular emphasis on virtue ethics. First, we evaluate Delphi (Jiang et. al., 2021 [1]), which attempts to use the Rawlsian decision procedure as a bottom-up approach to capture abstract moral principles from crowdsourcing moral opinions across a diverse demographic. We critically evaluate this model on the basis of the effectiveness of (a) the current bottom-up approach of incorporating Rawlsian decision procedure, and (b) the proposed hybridization of the former with a top-down approach leading to reflective equilibrium. We argue against (a) on the grounds that the system fails to satisfy the criteria for being a competent moral judge as outlined by Rawls (Rawls, 1971 [2]); further, we argue against (b) on the grounds that reflective equilibrium requires phronesis or practical wisdom, which cannot be embedded into AI systems. We critically evaluate (b) in the light of Irikefe’s neo-Aristotelian, agentbased account of reflective equilibrium (Irikefe, 2019 [3]) to argue against the possibility of AI-ML systems to incorporate phronesis in order to attain reflective equilibrium. We then evaluate COMPAS, a risk assessment software that predicts the risk of recidivism of defendants based on responses to a questionnaire. We investigate COMPAS from a virtue ethics perspective by (1) discussing how punishment in the criminal justice system can be implemented as a practice, as defined within the framework of MacIntyre’s virtue ethics (MacIntyre, 2007 [4]) and (2) analyzing why such a practice cannot be implemented by tools like COMPAS.

October 2025