The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make high-stakes decisions is sometimes thought to create a troubling responsibility gap – that is, a situation where nobody can be held morally responsible for the outcomes that are brought about. However, philosophers and practitioners have recently claimed that, even though no individual can be held morally responsible, groups of individuals might be. Consequently, they think, we have less to fear from the use of AI than might appear to be the case. This (...) paper assesses this claim. Drawing on existing philosophical models of collective responsibility, I consider whether changing focus from the individual to the collective level can help us identify a locus of responsibility in a greater range of cases of AI deployment. I find that appeal to collective responsibility will be of limited use in filling the responsibility gap: the models considered either do not apply to the case at hand or else the relevant sort of collective responsibility, even if present, will not be sufficient to remove the costs that are often associated with an absence of responsibility. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and robots approach autonomous decision-making, debates about how to assign moral responsibility have gained importance, urgency, and sophistication. Answering Stenseke’s (2022a) call for scaffolds that can help us classify views and commitments, we think the current debate space can be represented hierarchically, as answers to key questions. We use the resulting taxonomy of five stances to differentiate—and defend—what is known as the “blank check” proposal. According to this proposal, a person activating a robot could (...) willingly make themselves answerable for whatever events ensue, even if those events stem from the robot’s autonomous decision(s). This blank check solution was originally proposed in the context of automated warfare (Champagne & Tonkens, 2015), but we extend it to cover all robots. We argue that, because moral answerability in the blank check is accepted voluntarily and before bad outcomes are known, it proves superior to alternative ways of assigning blame. We end by highlighting how, in addition to being just, this self-initiated and prospective moral answerability for robot harm provides deterrence that the four other stances cannot match. (shrink)

Responsibility gaps occur when autonomous machines cause harms for which nobody can be justifiably held morally responsible. The debate around responsibility gaps has focused primarily on the question of responsibility, but other approaches focus on the victims of the associated harms. In this paper I consider how the victims of ‘AI-harm’—by which I mean harms implicated in responsibility gap cases and caused by AI-agents—can make sense of what has happened to them. The reactive attitudes have an important role here. I (...) argue that regulating our reactive attitudes—withdrawing or sustaining them as our understanding of the actions, motives, status, and character of others develops—is an important part of the way in which we make sense of the harms we suffer. But, I argue, AI-agents can disrupt standard practices of regulating the reactive attitudes. This can lead victims of AI-harm to suffer a secondary hermeneutic harm (in addition to the primary AI-harm). This harm, which the responsibility gap and AI ethics literatures have neglected, can occur whether responsibility gaps are real or not. (shrink)

Danaher (2016) has argued that increasing robotization can lead to retribution gaps: Situations in which the normative fact that nobody can be justly held responsible for a harmful outcome stands in conflict with our retributivist moral dispositions. In this paper, we report a cross-cultural empirical study based on Sparrow’s (2007) famous example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime, which was conducted with participants from the US, Japan and Germany. We find that (1) people manifest a considerable willingness (...) to hold autonomous systems morally responsible, (2) partially exculpate human agents when interacting with such systems, and that more generally (3) the possibility of normative responsibility gaps is indeed at odds with people’s pronounced retributivist inclinations. We discuss what these results mean for potential implications of the retribution gap and other positions in the responsibility gap literature. (shrink)

Conceptual Engineering (CE) is thought to be generally aimed at ameliorating deficient concepts. In this paper, we challenge this assumption: we argue that CE is frequently undertaken with the orthogonal aim of _conceptual adaptation_. We develop this thesis with reference to the interplay between technology and concepts. Emerging technologies can exert significant pressure on conceptual systems and spark ‘conceptual disruption’. For example, advances in Artificial Intelligence raise the question of whether AIs are agents or mere objects, which can be construed (...) as a CE question regarding the concepts AGENT and OBJECT. We distinguish between three types of conceptual disruption (conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments) and argue that when CE occurs to address these disruptions, its primary aim is not to improve concepts, but to retain their functional quality, or to prevent them from degrading. This is the characteristic aim of CE when undertaken in philosophy of technology: to _preserve_ the functional role of a concept or conceptual scheme, rather than _improving_ how a concept fulfills its respective function. (shrink)

Due to advances in military technology, there has been an outpouring of research on what are known as autonomous weapon systems (AWS). However, it is common in this literature for arguments to be made without first making clear exactly what definitions one is employing, with the detrimental effect that authors may speak past one another or even miss the targets of their arguments. In this article I examine the U.S. Department of Defense and International Committee of the Red Cross definitions (...) of AWS, showing that these definitions are far broader than some recognize, and that they therefore classify a much larger set of weapons as AWS. I then show that these broader views of AWS have implications for what moral and legal rules we might argue should be applied to such systems. I conclude by arguing there is a greater need for precision and clarity within AWS debates, in order to ensure that researchers are discussing the same weapon systems (autonomous or otherwise) when they argue for or against particular points. The purpose of this article is not to defend any specific view of AWS, nor to further any general endorsement or objection to such systems, but rather to show the importance of argumentative clarity in this debate. (shrink)

Odgovornost pripisujemo sa namerom da postignemo neki cilj. Jedno od opših mesta u filozofskoj literaturi je da osobi možemo pripisati moralnu odgovornost ako su zadovoljena bar dva uslova: da subjekt delanja ima kontrolu nad svojim postupcima i da je u stanju da navede razloge u prilog svog postupka. Međutim, četvrtu industrijsku revoluciju karakterišu sociotehnološke pojave koje nas potencijalno suočavaju sa tzv. problemom jaza u odgovornosti. Rasprave o odgovornosti u kontekstu veštačke inteligencije karakteriše nejasna i neodređena upotreba ovog pojma. Da bismo (...) razumeli problem jaza u odgovornosti, njegove domete, kao i eventualna rešenja, u radu razmatramo različite vrste pojma odgovornosti. Identifikujući uslove primene ovih pojmova uviđamo da problem jaza u moralnoj odgovornosti dobija na značaju utoliko što nije očigledno na koji način bi mogao biti premošćen. (shrink)