In the ongoing debate on safe IA, it is a relevant open question of whether rule-based MT is more ethical than statistical MT. Here are some arguments in favor of rule-based MT in this context (without blaming statistical MT which has its own strengths):

• it emulates human reasoning: it translates a text just as a human would do
• there is much control on rule-based MT since the resulting translated text can be traced back: a detailed step-by-step translation process can be provided if required
• rule-based MT can be consistently part of and integrate itself into a whole project of brain emulation, which emulates general human reasoning