Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017.

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We address the question of how an agent can adapt its behavior to comply with newly adopted norms. This is particularly relevant in the case of open systems where agents may enter and leave norm-governed social contexts not known at design time. This requires norms to be explicitly and separately stated and presented to an agent as rules to which it then can try to adapt its behavior.
We propose a formal semantic framework that specifies an execution mechanism for such socially adaptive agents. This framework is based on expressing norms using Linear Temporal Logic. The formality of the framework allows us to rigorously study its norm compliance properties. A weak form of norm compliance allows agents to abort execution in order to prevent norm violation. In this paper we investigate a stronger notion of norm compliance that is evaluated over infinite traces. We show that it is not possible for all agents to be strongly compliant with any arbitrary set of norms. We then investigate situations when strong norm compliance can be guaranteed.@en