Conceptual analysis demonstrates the necessity of driving phronesis for autonomous vehicles in mixed-traffic environments, suggesting AVs must emulate human practical wisdom to coordinate safely.
One of the main ethical reasons why autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been portrayed as the future of transportation is their potential to enhance road safety by eliminating human error. However, while AVs may mitigate known hazards, their successful deployment in the near future hinges on their performance in a mixed-traffic environment, where they must coexist and interact with human drivers. This paper adopts a broad Aristotelian virtue ethics framework to introduce the concept of driving phronesis as a normative framework for resolving nuanced, everyday coordination problems in traffic. Thus, our paper argues that a promising future for AVs is one in which they will function as digital duplicates of drivers in specific contexts, endowed with functional driving phronesis.
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GIBEA et al. (2026) studied this question.
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