Influence of Normative Theories of Ethics on the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act: A Transformer-Based Analysis Using Semantic Textual Similarity

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13372v2
• Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:14:18 GMT
• Title: Influence of Normative Theories of Ethics on the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act: A Transformer-Based Analysis Using Semantic Textual Similarity
• Authors: Mehmet Murat Albayrakoglu, Mehmet Nafiz Aydin,
• Abstract summary: This research aims to investigate the impact of three major normative theories of ethics on the EU AI Act.<n>We introduce the concept of influence, confirmed by philosophical and chronological analysis, to examine the relationship between the theories and the Act.<n>To capture intentional and operational ethical consistency, the Act was divided into two parts: the preamble and the statutory provisions.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Despite being regarded as a significant step toward regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and its emphasis on fundamental rights, the European Union Artificial Intelligence (EU AI) Act is not immune to moral criticism. This research aims to investigate the impact of three major normative theories of ethics (virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequentialism) on the EU AI Act. We introduce the concept of influence, confirmed by philosophical and chronological analysis, to examine the underlying relationship between the theories and the Act. As a proxy measure of this influence, we propose using Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) to quantify the degree of alignment between the theories (influencers) and the Act (influencee). To capture intentional and operational ethical consistency, the Act was divided into two parts: the preamble and the statutory provisions. The textual descriptions of the theories were manually preprocessed to reduce semantic overlap and ensure a distinct representation of each theory. A heterogeneous embedding-level ensemble approach was employed, utilizing five modified Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models, built on the Transformer architecture, to compute STS scores. These scores represent the semantic alignment between various theories of ethics and each of the two components of the EU AI Act. The theories were evaluated by using voting and averaging, with findings indicating that deontological ethics has the most significant overall influence.

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