Matthias Uhl
Biographic Data
| ID | 4453667 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthias Uhl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthias |
| FAMILY NAME | Uhl |
| SIGNATURE | UHL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8838-4824 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A behavioral economics approach to programming autonomous systems in moral dilemmas
Autonomous systems (ASs) will eventually make many decisions in moral dilemmas without human oversight. How humans will respond to the presence of ASs and whether humans will accept them will crucially depend on how ASs’ decisions are programmed. For example, how moral dilemmas are approached in the programming of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is stated as an important factor by potential adopters of this technology. After all, how risks are assigned…
Amazing trace
Growing legal and societal attention to sustainability has driven the development of certification schemes that verify socially and environmentally responsible production. This study compares two such schemes: mass balancing (MB) and product segregation (PS). Both aim to achieve similar sustainability goals but differ in traceability - PS certifies individual products, while MB credits sustainable production without product-specific labeling. We …
The acceptability of AI in higher education
The ethical aspect of artificial intelligence is becoming more pressing. Besides consulting experts, various efforts have been undertaken to consult stakeholders and to understand under which terms the stakeholders consider AI-based systems acceptable. However, reasons in favor of or against AI-based systems in education do not depend solely on questions of usability or functionality, nor on the consideration of moral values. While most studies s…
The Folk Ethics of Commodification
Commodification is the process of transforming goods or services traditionally transferred without charge into commercially exchangeable commodities. Critics argue that this transformation often entails the loss of inherent value, rendering the resulting transactions morally problematic. In contrast, proponents of commodification contend that if it is morally acceptable to give something away for free, it should likewise be permissible to transfe…
Perceived responsibility in AI-supported medicine
In a representative vignette study in Germany with 1,653 respondents, we investigated laypeople’s attribution of moral responsibility in collaborative medical diagnosis. Specifically, we compare people’s judgments in a setting in which physicians are supported by an AI-based recommender system to a setting in which they are supported by a human colleague. It turns out that people tend to attribute moral responsibility to the artificial agent, alt…
The Inauthentic Online Self
People sometimes behave differently depending on whether they are interacting online (by email, social media, etc.) vs. interacting in person. Four studies test the hypothesis that when an agent’s behavior is different online vs. in person, people think that the online behavior is less reflective of who the agent truly is deep down. Study 1 found that the very same behavior is regarded as less reflective of the true self when it is performed onli…
Machine-Mediated Morality
Experimental studies on preferences towards human and robot agents in instrumental dilemmas suggest that people have higher utilitarian preferences for machines than for humans. However, these studies give participants only two options for the agent: either a utilitarian action or omission. It, thus, remains unclear whether a higher share of utilitarian preferences means that people become more utilitarian when considering robot agents or whether…
When Goliath sells to David
External shocks (e.g., due to a pandemic) may lead to price jumps in the short term. Rather than being read as a signal of increased scarcity, the resulting “price gouging” is often ascribed to sellers’ selfish exploitation of the crisis. In our experimental study, we investigate the drivers of fairness perceptions regarding voluntary transactions in situations of increased scarcity and explore how they pertain to the economic policy debate on pr…
Contagious humans
History has shown that attitudes toward new technologies can change abruptly following disruptive events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became apparent that care robots enable increased social isolation. This feature of robotic care usually raises strong ethical concerns about potentially decreased comfort for the care-dependent. In a large-scale online study, we tested the influence of the pandemic on people's affective attitudes toward care …
An interdisciplinary perspective on AI-supported decision making in medicine
Artificial intelligence (AI)-supported medical diagnosis offers the potential to utilize the collaborative intelligence of context-sensitive humans and narrowly focused machines for patients’ benefit. The employment of machine-learning-based decision-support systems (MLDSS) in medicine, however, raises important multidisciplinary challenges that cannot be addressed in isolation. We discuss three disciplinary perspectives on the topic and their in…
Genetically Engineered Foods and Moral Absolutism
There is an ongoing debate about genetic engineering (GE) in food production. Supporters argue that it makes crops more resilient to stresses, such as drought or pests, and should be considered by researchers as a technology to address issues of global food security, whereas opponents put forward that GE crops serve only the economic interests of transnational agrifood-firms and have not yet delivered on their promises to address food shortage an…
Algorithms as partners in crime
The human in the loop is often advocated as a panacea against concerns about AI-powered machines, which increasingly take decisions of consequence in all realms of life. However, can we rely on humans to prevent unethical decisions by machines? We run online experiments modeling both the case where the machine serves as a corrective to the human and where the human serves as a corrective to the machine. Our results suggest that, in the former cas…
The behavioral economics of dynamically inconsistent behavior
Preferences often change—even in short time intervals—due to either the mere passage of time (present-biased preferences) or changes in visceral or environmental conditions (state-dependent preferences). On the basis of empirical findings concerning state-dependent preferences, we critically discuss the “Aristotelian” view of unitary decision makers in economics. We illustrate that the conceptualization of preferences as “present-biased” as oppos…
The Care-Dependent are Less Averse to Care Robots
A growing gap is emerging between the supply of and demand for professional caregivers, not least because of the ever-increasing average age of the world’s population. One strategy to address this growing gap in many regions is the use of care robots. Although there have been numerous ethical debates about the use of robots in nursing and elderly care, an important question remains unexamined: how do the potential recipients of such care perceive…
Hiding Behind Machines
The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the imposition of harm by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest…
People Prefer Moral Discretion to Algorithms
We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained mainly by the fear of opaque decisions that are potentially biased. Using incentivized experiments, we study which role the desire for human discretion in moral decision-making plays. This seems justified in light of evidence suggesting that people might not doubt the quality of algorithmic decisions, but still reject them. In our first…
Zombies in the Loop? Humans Trust Untrustworthy AI-Advisors for Ethical Decisions
Departing from the claim that AI needs to be trustworthy, we find that ethical advice from an AI-powered algorithm is trusted even when its users know nothing about its training data and when they learn information about it that warrants distrust. We conducted online experiments where the subjects took the role of decision-makers who received advice from an algorithm on how to deal with an ethical dilemma. We manipulated the information about the…
Automated vehicles and the morality of post-collision behavior
We address the considerations of the European Commission Expert Group on the ethics of connected and automated vehicles regarding data provision in the event of collisions. While human drivers’ appropriate post-collision behavior is clearly defined, regulations for automated driving do not provide for collision detection. We agree it is important to systematically incorporate citizens’ intuitions into the discourse on the ethics of automated vehi…
The ethics of corporate hypocrisy
In the current landscape of management and business ethics scholarship, a prominent type of dissimulation is exemplified by corporate hypocrisy. The concept of corporate hypocrisy brings traditional morality to bear on the institutions of the modern society and thereby emphasizes the contested relationship between the research programs of individual and institutional ethics. Assuming that morality in the modern society resides in institutions rat…
Business Ethics
Einleitung
Die Mobilmachungs- und Kriegsvorbereitungen der Sowjetunion in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren
Der Aufsatz möchte eine Antwort darauf geben, wie die Wirtschaftsplaner der Staatlichen Plankommission der UdSSR (Gosplan) die sowjetischen Streitkräfte im Kriegsfall mit den vom Militär geforderten Waffen und Rüstungsgütern ausstatten wollten. Gefragt wird deshalb, welche Mengen von welchen Waffen für den Ernstfall bereitzustellen waren. Zudem wird versucht festzustellen, ob die Mobilmachungsplanungen mit der Militärstrategie der Sowjetunion in …
Leviathan for Sale
We experimentally test Hume’s hypothesis that people underappreciate the value of cooperation-enforcing institutions in impersonal interactions by relying on personal trust. Subjects played a game in groups of two or six. Each subject could defect at any time, leaving the others with zero payoff by unilaterally appropriating an amount of money that grew over a period of 5 minutes. All players received the maximum payoff only if nobody defected. B…
Wirtschaftsethik
Prof. Dr. Christoph Lütge ist Inhaber des Peter-Löscher-Stiftungslehrstuhls für Wirtschaftsethik und Global Governance an der TU München.
Competition-induced punishment of winners and losers
An interdisciplinary perspective on AI-supported decision making in medicine
Artificial intelligence (AI)-supported medical diagnosis offers the potential to utilize the collaborative intelligence of context-sensitive humans and narrowly focused machines for patients’ benefit. The employment of machine-learning-based decision-support systems (MLDSS) in medicine, however, raises important multidisciplinary challenges that cannot be addressed in isolation. We discuss three disciplinary perspectives on the topic and their in…
The Care-Dependent are Less Averse to Care Robots
A growing gap is emerging between the supply of and demand for professional caregivers, not least because of the ever-increasing average age of the world’s population. One strategy to address this growing gap in many regions is the use of care robots. Although there have been numerous ethical debates about the use of robots in nursing and elderly care, an important question remains unexamined: how do the potential recipients of such care perceive…
The ethics of corporate hypocrisy
In the current landscape of management and business ethics scholarship, a prominent type of dissimulation is exemplified by corporate hypocrisy. The concept of corporate hypocrisy brings traditional morality to bear on the institutions of the modern society and thereby emphasizes the contested relationship between the research programs of individual and institutional ethics. Assuming that morality in the modern society resides in institutions rat…
Contagious humans
History has shown that attitudes toward new technologies can change abruptly following disruptive events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became apparent that care robots enable increased social isolation. This feature of robotic care usually raises strong ethical concerns about potentially decreased comfort for the care-dependent. In a large-scale online study, we tested the influence of the pandemic on people's affective attitudes toward care …
Experimental Ethics
Competition-induced punishment of winners and losers
Wirtschaftsethik
Prof. Dr. Christoph Lütge ist Inhaber des Peter-Löscher-Stiftungslehrstuhls für Wirtschaftsethik und Global Governance an der TU München.
Einleitung
Die Mobilmachungs- und Kriegsvorbereitungen der Sowjetunion in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren
Der Aufsatz möchte eine Antwort darauf geben, wie die Wirtschaftsplaner der Staatlichen Plankommission der UdSSR (Gosplan) die sowjetischen Streitkräfte im Kriegsfall mit den vom Militär geforderten Waffen und Rüstungsgütern ausstatten wollten. Gefragt wird deshalb, welche Mengen von welchen Waffen für den Ernstfall bereitzustellen waren. Zudem wird versucht festzustellen, ob die Mobilmachungsplanungen mit der Militärstrategie der Sowjetunion in …
Leviathan for Sale
We experimentally test Hume’s hypothesis that people underappreciate the value of cooperation-enforcing institutions in impersonal interactions by relying on personal trust. Subjects played a game in groups of two or six. Each subject could defect at any time, leaving the others with zero payoff by unilaterally appropriating an amount of money that grew over a period of 5 minutes. All players received the maximum payoff only if nobody defected. B…
Automated vehicles and the morality of post-collision behavior
We address the considerations of the European Commission Expert Group on the ethics of connected and automated vehicles regarding data provision in the event of collisions. While human drivers’ appropriate post-collision behavior is clearly defined, regulations for automated driving do not provide for collision detection. We agree it is important to systematically incorporate citizens’ intuitions into the discourse on the ethics of automated vehi…
The ethics of corporate hypocrisy
In the current landscape of management and business ethics scholarship, a prominent type of dissimulation is exemplified by corporate hypocrisy. The concept of corporate hypocrisy brings traditional morality to bear on the institutions of the modern society and thereby emphasizes the contested relationship between the research programs of individual and institutional ethics. Assuming that morality in the modern society resides in institutions rat…
Business Ethics
Hiding Behind Machines
The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the imposition of harm by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest…
People Prefer Moral Discretion to Algorithms
We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained mainly by the fear of opaque decisions that are potentially biased. Using incentivized experiments, we study which role the desire for human discretion in moral decision-making plays. This seems justified in light of evidence suggesting that people might not doubt the quality of algorithmic decisions, but still reject them. In our first…
Zombies in the Loop? Humans Trust Untrustworthy AI-Advisors for Ethical Decisions
Departing from the claim that AI needs to be trustworthy, we find that ethical advice from an AI-powered algorithm is trusted even when its users know nothing about its training data and when they learn information about it that warrants distrust. We conducted online experiments where the subjects took the role of decision-makers who received advice from an algorithm on how to deal with an ethical dilemma. We manipulated the information about the…
Genetically Engineered Foods and Moral Absolutism
There is an ongoing debate about genetic engineering (GE) in food production. Supporters argue that it makes crops more resilient to stresses, such as drought or pests, and should be considered by researchers as a technology to address issues of global food security, whereas opponents put forward that GE crops serve only the economic interests of transnational agrifood-firms and have not yet delivered on their promises to address food shortage an…
Algorithms as partners in crime
The human in the loop is often advocated as a panacea against concerns about AI-powered machines, which increasingly take decisions of consequence in all realms of life. However, can we rely on humans to prevent unethical decisions by machines? We run online experiments modeling both the case where the machine serves as a corrective to the human and where the human serves as a corrective to the machine. Our results suggest that, in the former cas…
The behavioral economics of dynamically inconsistent behavior
Preferences often change—even in short time intervals—due to either the mere passage of time (present-biased preferences) or changes in visceral or environmental conditions (state-dependent preferences). On the basis of empirical findings concerning state-dependent preferences, we critically discuss the “Aristotelian” view of unitary decision makers in economics. We illustrate that the conceptualization of preferences as “present-biased” as oppos…
The Care-Dependent are Less Averse to Care Robots
A growing gap is emerging between the supply of and demand for professional caregivers, not least because of the ever-increasing average age of the world’s population. One strategy to address this growing gap in many regions is the use of care robots. Although there have been numerous ethical debates about the use of robots in nursing and elderly care, an important question remains unexamined: how do the potential recipients of such care perceive…
Contagious humans
History has shown that attitudes toward new technologies can change abruptly following disruptive events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became apparent that care robots enable increased social isolation. This feature of robotic care usually raises strong ethical concerns about potentially decreased comfort for the care-dependent. In a large-scale online study, we tested the influence of the pandemic on people's affective attitudes toward care …
An interdisciplinary perspective on AI-supported decision making in medicine
Artificial intelligence (AI)-supported medical diagnosis offers the potential to utilize the collaborative intelligence of context-sensitive humans and narrowly focused machines for patients’ benefit. The employment of machine-learning-based decision-support systems (MLDSS) in medicine, however, raises important multidisciplinary challenges that cannot be addressed in isolation. We discuss three disciplinary perspectives on the topic and their in…
Perceived responsibility in AI-supported medicine
In a representative vignette study in Germany with 1,653 respondents, we investigated laypeople’s attribution of moral responsibility in collaborative medical diagnosis. Specifically, we compare people’s judgments in a setting in which physicians are supported by an AI-based recommender system to a setting in which they are supported by a human colleague. It turns out that people tend to attribute moral responsibility to the artificial agent, alt…
The Inauthentic Online Self
People sometimes behave differently depending on whether they are interacting online (by email, social media, etc.) vs. interacting in person. Four studies test the hypothesis that when an agent’s behavior is different online vs. in person, people think that the online behavior is less reflective of who the agent truly is deep down. Study 1 found that the very same behavior is regarded as less reflective of the true self when it is performed onli…
Machine-Mediated Morality
Experimental studies on preferences towards human and robot agents in instrumental dilemmas suggest that people have higher utilitarian preferences for machines than for humans. However, these studies give participants only two options for the agent: either a utilitarian action or omission. It, thus, remains unclear whether a higher share of utilitarian preferences means that people become more utilitarian when considering robot agents or whether…
When Goliath sells to David
External shocks (e.g., due to a pandemic) may lead to price jumps in the short term. Rather than being read as a signal of increased scarcity, the resulting “price gouging” is often ascribed to sellers’ selfish exploitation of the crisis. In our experimental study, we investigate the drivers of fairness perceptions regarding voluntary transactions in situations of increased scarcity and explore how they pertain to the economic policy debate on pr…
A behavioral economics approach to programming autonomous systems in moral dilemmas
Autonomous systems (ASs) will eventually make many decisions in moral dilemmas without human oversight. How humans will respond to the presence of ASs and whether humans will accept them will crucially depend on how ASs’ decisions are programmed. For example, how moral dilemmas are approached in the programming of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is stated as an important factor by potential adopters of this technology. After all, how risks are assigned…
Amazing trace
Growing legal and societal attention to sustainability has driven the development of certification schemes that verify socially and environmentally responsible production. This study compares two such schemes: mass balancing (MB) and product segregation (PS). Both aim to achieve similar sustainability goals but differ in traceability - PS certifies individual products, while MB credits sustainable production without product-specific labeling. We …
The acceptability of AI in higher education
The ethical aspect of artificial intelligence is becoming more pressing. Besides consulting experts, various efforts have been undertaken to consult stakeholders and to understand under which terms the stakeholders consider AI-based systems acceptable. However, reasons in favor of or against AI-based systems in education do not depend solely on questions of usability or functionality, nor on the consideration of moral values. While most studies s…
Political science (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (10 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Economics (6 works)