A Generalized Framework for Moral Dilemmas Involving Autonomous Vehicles: A Commentary on Gill[The Moral Machine Experiment]

By using scenarios based on moral dilemmas, Gill (2020) found that when consumers are riding in an autonomous vehicle (AV), they are more willing to harm a pedestrian than when they, themselves, are driving a regular car. By taking a first-person perspective, in contrast to most prior research that has taken a third-person perspective, the problem is framed in a personal way that allows identification of a mechanism of responsibility attribution. In this commentary, a generalized framework is developed in which we can locate the work of Gill (2020), as well as prior research that uses moral dilemmas, to understand how consumers believe that AVs should respond when faced with competing life-and-death alternatives. The framework shows the distinct positions that research to date has adopted, points out gaps in research, and suggests a family of four research agendas that can be pursued going forward, driven in large part by the perspective taken to the moral dilemma. Research employing these different perspectives, including the unresearched problem of taking the perspective of the object, holds promise for using moral dilemmas for enabling our understanding of consumer experience and consumer–object relationships with AVs.