Ethical Architectures, Risk Governance, and Moral Responsibility in Sustainable Autonomous Transportation Systems

Abstract

Abstract The rapid advancement of autonomous vehicle technologies has transformed transportation systems into complex socio-technical assemblages where ethical decision-making is no longer solely a human prerogative but increasingly embedded within algorithmic architectures. This transformation raises profound ethical, legal, and political questions concerning how autonomous systems should evaluate risk, distribute harm, assign responsibility, and promote sustainability within heterogeneous traffic environments. This research article develops a comprehensive ethical analysis of sustainable autonomous transportation by integrating philosophical ethics, risk theory, public health analogies, and human–machine interaction scholarship. Drawing strictly and exclusively on the provided body of references, the article critically examines rule-based and learning-based ethical systems, focusing on how these architectures operationalize moral reasoning under uncertainty and constraint. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between harm minimization and normative legitimacy, the limits of trolley-problem framing, and the implications of embedding ethical preferences into automated systems that interact with human drivers, pedestrians, and institutional regulators. The analysis foregrounds the role of comparative ethical design, arguing that sustainability in autonomous transportation cannot be reduced to environmental efficiency or crash reduction metrics alone but must also encompass moral accountability, social trust, and democratic legitimacy. Through an extensive theoretical elaboration and interpretive synthesis of the literature, the study identifies persistent gaps in current ethical frameworks, including insufficient attention to risk acceptance thresholds, responsibility attribution, and the governance of adaptive machine learning systems. The article concludes by proposing a risk-oriented ethical paradigm that moves beyond episodic dilemma resolution toward continuous moral governance, aligning autonomous vehicle behavior with broader societal commitments to safety, justice, and sustainability. This work contributes a publication-ready, original scholarly intervention into debates on machine ethics and sustainable mobility, offering a foundation for future normative, empirical, and regulatory research.