IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 80

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imperative). This is what has been called rule-based
consequentialism, that is, making ethical assessments
according to the consequences of the application
of certain rules of behavior, not so much of
concrete acts [23], [24]. Without denying the value
that this type of argumentation has in illuminating
our ethical reason, we cannot be satisfied with it
being the only type of acceptable ethical rationality.
The rational limitations of consequentialism are
clear and have been denounced long ago; here is
our version of the refutation [25]:
First, the consequences of a certain action extend
over a period of time that properly has no limit,
yet we cannot indefinitely wait to judge whether
an action is good or bad. Second, even if we put
a timely boundary to the consequences we want
to consider, they nevertheless belong to the time
to come, therefore they are rather uncertain; we
would have to employ some kind of prediction
technique to foresee the consequences and valuate
them; but these techniques will always be limited
by the very nature of things, which do not follow
perfectly known behavior rules (besides, consequences
will probably depend on the freedom of
others). Third, and most important, if we want to
avoid a priori rules to determine the goodness for
actions, and we make the goodness of an action
depend on the goodness of its consequences, then
we need rules to valuate the goodness of the consequences;
extreme consequentialism does not solve
the problem of goodness, but simply puts it off.
The Moral Machine asks you to " judge which outcome
you think is more acceptable. " It processes your
answers, together with those from millions of respondents,
and produces a model of behavior. But learned
ethics and programed ethics are different only at first
view, that is, if we consider only the way the behavior
rules have been produced. Actually, both are the
same kind of thing: a program that makes choices
based on rules aimed at achieving the " best " outcome.
A program made of rules that come either from
a priori speculation or from imitation of actual patterns
of human behavior. Not that big of a difference.
The problem is that an approach based on computing
outcomes and the reduction of ethics to the
compilation and application of a set of rules, either
a priori or learned, is a severe misconception of ethics.
Above all, the attempt to formalize ethics in a set
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of rules misses the point that a person is not only an
instance of a case, but a unique and unrepeatable
being. A person is a child, a student, a patient, a client,
a neighbor (your child, your student, your patient,
your client, your neighbor). A person's value cannot
be measured with a number, not even with an array
of numbers (age, sex, health status, social contribution...).
When it comes to people, our reason needs
to be trained to understand what we see not only as
cases of a general rule, but above all in their uniqueness.
We need to recover value rationality beyond
numbers, beyond logical and instrumental rationality.
We need to learn how to reason with values in a way
that does not convert them in numbers.
eThics should prevenT us from the error of converting
equity into mathematical equality, achieved
through the extraction of characteristics and the
computation of a value formula. Equity is not mathematical
equality, not even a weighted equality that
considers different factors. The first commandment
of ethics should be " thou shalt not treat a person as
a vector of numbers. " Does this demand a renewed
rationality of ethics? Be it welcome!

Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the RESTART
Project- " Continuous Reverse Engineering for Software
Product Lines/Ingeniería Inversa Continua
para Líneas de Productos de Software " under Grant
RTI2018-099915-B-I00 and the Convocatoria Proyectos
de I+D Retos Investigación del Programa Estatal
de I+D+i Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad 2018
under Grant 412122; in part by the ECSEL18 Project
" NewControl " (Project 6221/31/2018) and its National
PCI under Grant 449990; and in part by the CritiRed
Project- " Elaboración de un modelo predictivo para
el desarrollo del pensamiento crítico en el uso de las
redes sociales, " Convocatoria Retos de Investigación
del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
(2019-2022), under Grant RTI2018-095740-B-I00.
 References
[1] F. H. Hinsley and A. Stripp, Eds., Codebreakers: The
Inside Story of Bletchley Park. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1993.
[2] A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma. London, U.K.:
Burnett Books, 1983.
[3] A. M. Turing, " Computing machinery and intelligence, "
Mind, vol. 59, pp. 433-460, Oct. 1950.
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