Bounded Morality Framework Defines AI Ethical Computation Limits.

Traditional views of moral cognition often frame it as adherence to fixed ethical theories like deontology or consequentialism. However, new research proposes "Bounded Morality," a formal framework that extends Herbert Simon's concept of bounded rationality to the realm of moral problems, particularly for agents with finite computational resources, such as AI. The framework characterizes moral situations along two dimensions: "moral breadth," which is the scope of entities considered morally relevant, and "moral depth," which refers to the inferential complexity needed to evaluate their interactions. It argues that limited resources necessitate a trade-off between these dimensions, defining a feasible space for moral computation. Within this space, established ethical theories are seen as locally efficient strategies adapted to different computational demands, rather than competing truths. This perspective implies that aligning AI morally depends on how its moral reasoning capacity is scaled and allocated, rather than simply imitating human judgments.