Why Machines Can't Be Moral: Turing's Halting Problem and the Moral Limits of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that explicit ethical machines, whose moral principles are inferred through a bottom-up approach, are unable to replicate human-like moral reasoning and cannot be considered moral agents. By utilizing Alan Turing's theory of computation, I demonstrate that moral reasoning is computationally intractable by these machines due to the halting problem. I address the frontiers of machine ethics by formalizing moral problems into 'algorithmic moral questions' and by exploring moral psychology's dual-process model. While the nature of Turing Machines theoretically allows artificial agents to engage in recursive moral reasoning, critical limitations are introduced by the halting problem, which states that it is impossible to predict with certainty whether a computational process will halt. A thought experiment involving a military drone illustrates this issue, showing that an artificial agent might fail to decide between actions due to the halting problem, which limits the agent's ability to make decisions in all instances, undermining its moral agency.