ff4ERA: A new Fuzzy Framework for Ethical Risk Assessment in AI

The emergence of Symbiotic AI (SAI) introduces new challenges to ethical decision-making as it deepens human-AI collaboration. As symbiosis grows, AI systems pose greater ethical risks, including harm to human rights and trust. Ethical Risk Assessment (ERA) thus becomes crucial for guiding decisions that minimize such risks. However, ERA is hindered by uncertainty, vagueness, and incomplete information, and morality itself is context-dependent and imprecise. This motivates the need for a flexible, transparent, yet robust framework for ERA. Our work supports ethical decision-making by quantitatively assessing and prioritizing multiple ethical risks so that artificial agents can select actions aligned with human values and acceptable risk levels. We introduce ff4ERA, a fuzzy framework that integrates Fuzzy Logic, the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), and Certainty Factors (CF) to quantify ethical risks via an Ethical Risk Score (ERS) for each risk type. The final ERS combines the FAHP-derived weight, propagated CF, and risk level. The framework offers a robust mathematical approach for collaborative ERA modeling and systematic, step-by-step analysis. A case study confirms that ff4ERA yields context-sensitive, ethically meaningful risk scores reflecting both expert input and sensor-based evidence. Risk scores vary consistently with relevant factors while remaining robust to unrelated inputs. Local sensitivity analysis shows predictable, mostly monotonic behavior across perturbations, and global Sobol analysis highlights the dominant influence of expert-defined weights and certainty factors, validating the model design. Overall, the results demonstrate ff4ERA ability to produce interpretable, traceable, and risk-aware ethical assessments, enabling what-if analyses and guiding designers in calibrating membership functions and expert judgments for reliable ethical decision support.