Law, Morality, and Machine Learning: Judges’ Perspective on the Essence of Justice and the Prospects of Its Robotization

Abstract

The article deals with manifestations of moral and legal norms in the practice of justice, as well as the prospects of robotization of the judicial system through the lens of the relationship between the two types of normative systems. To clarify these issues, the authors address the perspective of professional judges, whose views on these phenomena have not received much attention in the literature so far. First, we analyze the key definitions of law and morality and provide a brief overview of theoretical views on the nature of their relationships, mainly in the tradition of the philosophy of law. Further, based on the latest interdisciplinary research, we discuss the prospects of robotization of making moral and legal evaluations and analyze some of the key problems in this sphere. In the second part of the article, we present and discuss the results of our study conducted using semi-structured interviews. We analyze professional judges’ perceptions of the relationships between law and morality, as well as the prospects for the robotization of justice. Our results contribute to theoretical discussions about the nature of morality and law, as well as the potential practical application of formalized algorithms for making court decisions.

Acknowledgements: The study was supported by HSE University, the project “Ethics and Law: correlation and mechanisms of mutual influence”.