  The exponential development and application of artificial intelligence
triggered an unprecedented global concern for potential social and ethical
issues. Stakeholders from different industries, international foundations,
governmental organisations and standards institutions quickly improvised and
created various codes of ethics attempting to regulate AI. A major concern is
the large homogeneity and presumed consensualism around these principles. While
it is true that some ethical doctrines, such as the famous Kantian deontology,
aspire to universalism, they are however not universal in practice. In fact,
ethical pluralism is more about differences in which relevant questions to ask
rather than different answers to a common question. When people abide by
different moral doctrines, they tend to disagree on the very approach to an
issue. Even when people from different cultures happen to agree on a set of
common principles, it does not necessarily mean that they share the same
understanding of these concepts and what they entail. In order to better
understand the philosophical roots and cultural context underlying ethical
principles in AI, we propose to analyse and compare the ethical principles
endorsed by the Chinese National New Generation Artificial Intelligence
Governance Professional Committee (CNNGAIGPC) and those elaborated by the
European High-level Expert Group on AI (HLEGAI). China and the EU have very
different political systems and diverge in their cultural heritages. In our
analysis, we wish to highlight that principles that seem similar a priori may
actually have different meanings, derived from different approaches and reflect
distinct goals.
