RESEARCH ARTICLE Autonomous Driving and Perverse Incentives Wulf Loh 1 & Catrin Misselhorn 1 Received: 26 February 2018 /Accepted: 8 July 2018 # Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract This paper discusses the ethical implications of perverse incentives with regard to autonomous driving. We define perverse incentives as a feature of an action, technology, or social policy that invites behavior which negates the primary goal of the actors initiating the action, introducing a certain technology, or implementing a social policy. As a special form of means-end-irrationality, perverse incentives are to be avoided from a prudential standpoint, as they prove to be directly self-defeating: They are not just a form of unintended side effect that must be balanced against the main goal or value to be realized by an action, technology, or policy. Instead, they directly cause the primary goals of the actors—i.e., the goals that they ultimately pursue with the action, technology, or policy—to be Bworse achieved^ (Parfit). In this paper, we elaborate on this definition and distinguish three ideal-typical phases of adverse incentives, where only in the last one the threshold for a perverse incentive is crossed. In addition, we discuss different possible relevant actors and their goals in implementing autonomous vehicles. We conclude that even if some actors do not pursue traffic safety as their primary goal, as part of a responsibility network they incur the responsibility to act on the common primary goal of the network, which we argue to be traffic safety. Keywords Autonomous driving . Perverse incentives . Robot ethics . Responsibility networks 1 Introduction When Joshua Brown was killed in his Tesla Model S last year while the car was in Autopilot mode, this incident stirred a discussion about the viability and responsibility of autonomous vehicles (AVs) (Lin 2016). Allegedly, Brown was watching a movie https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0322-6 * Wulf Loh wulf.loh@philo.uni-stuttgart.de 1 University of Stuttgart, Department of Philosophy, Seidenstr. 36, 70174 Stuttgart, Germany Philos. Technol. (2019) 32:575–590 /Published online: 16 July 2018