Agent-centered morality has been a serious challenge to ethical theories based on agent-neutral morality in defining what is the moral point of view. In this paper, my concern is to examine whether arguments for agent-centered morality, in particular, arguments for agent-centered option, can be justified. -/- After critically examining three main arguments for agent-centered morality, I will contend that although there is a ring of truth in the (...) demands of agent-centered morality, agent-centered morality is more problematic than agent-neutral morality. Nevertheless, we need to take seriously the challenges to agent-neutral morality by finding a way to reflect the insight of agent-centered morality within the framework of agent-neutral morality without collapsing it into agent-centered morality. As a way of doing so, I suggest that we need to integrate the situated, rather than transcendental, nonideal, rather than idealized, and dialogical, rather than monological, perspectives developed in feminist ethics, into agent-neutral morality. (shrink)

There is, on a given moral view, an agent-centered restriction against performing acts of a certain type if that view prohibits agents from performing an instance of that act-type even to prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. The fact that commonsense morality includes many such agent-centered restrictions has been seen by several philosophers as a decisive objection against consequentialism. Despite this, I argue that agent-centered (...) restrictions are more plausibly accommodated within a consequentialist framework than within the more standard side-constraint framework. For I argue that when we combine agent-relative consequentialism with a Kantian theory of value, we arrive at a version of consequentialism, which I call 'Kantsequentialism', that has several advantages over the standard side-constraint approach to accommodating constraints. What’s more, I argue that Kantsequentialism doesn’t have any of the disadvantages that critics of consequentializing have presumed that such a theory must have. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist (...) framework. According to my proposal, a free agent is _a causally powerful substance that emerges in an anomic way from her constitutive mental events_, downwardly constraining, selecting and, in this way, having control on them. As we shall see, this particular concept of agent causation not only makes sense of the deep insight behind agent libertarianism, but it also provides us with the resources to solve some of the main objections that have been raised against it. It is true that here I cannot develop a complete defense of the evidential credentials of emergentism. Still, even if the considerations that follow do not serve to convince detractors of agent causal libertarian accounts of free will, they do suggest that libertarian agent causation is more promising than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

According to the moral standards most of us accept and live by, morality generally permits us to refrain from promoting the good of others and instead engage in non-harmful projects of our own choice. This aspect of so-called ‘ordinary morality’ has turned out to be very difficult to justify. Recently, though, various authors, including Bernard Williams and Samuel Scheffler, have proposed “Integrity Theories” that would vindicate this aspect of ordinary morality, at least in part. They are generated (...) by treating as a default some moral theory, like consequentialism, that demands that we do a great deal of good. The theory is then modified so as to make room for individuals to pursue the projects they value most deeply, and perhaps their trivial interests as well—i.e., so as to respect individual integrity. This paper presupposes that Integrity Theories are correct and that, for the reasons given by others, they can explain why morality should grant us agent-centered prerogatives to pursue our own projects and interests. The goal is to extend this work in two respects. First, it will be shown that previous authors have not paid sufficient attention to ordinary morality’s conflicting pronouncements about agent-centered prerogatives. Second, it is argued that Integrity Theories can vindicate those conflicting intuitions by positing a special kind of obligations, relievable obligations. (shrink)

A traditional idea is that moral judgment involves more than calculating the consequences of actions; it also requires an assessment of the agent's intentions, the act's nature, and whether the agent uses another person as a means to her ends. I survey experimental developments suggesting that ordinary people often tacitly reason in terms of such deontological rules. It's now unclear whether we should posit a traditional form of the doctrine of double effect. However, further research suggests that a (...) range of non-consequentialist factors influence moral judgment, including intentions, commissions, personal harm, and agent-centered commitments. Many, if not all, such factors appear to affect how involved the agent is in bringing about an outcome. (shrink)

I propose and defend a novel view called “de se consequentialism,” which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates—contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others—that agent-neutral consequentialism is consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, it clarifies the nature of agent-centered constraints, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated nonconsequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, de se (...) consequentialism enacts constraints through the very same feature that nonconsequentialist theories do. (shrink)

This article discusses the vice of self-centeredness, argues that it inhibits our ability to treat humanity as an end in itself, and that Kantian moral theory cannot account for this fact. After in this way arguing that Kantian theory fails to provide a fully adequate account of agents who live up to the formula of humanity, I discuss Buddhist resources for developing a better account.

Agent-centered constraints on harming hold that some harmful upshots of our conduct cannot be justified by its generating equal or somewhat greater benefits. In this paper I argue that all plausible theories of agent-centered constraints on harming are undermined by the likelihood that our actions will have butterfly effects, or cause cascades of changes that make the world dramatically different than it would have been. Theories that impose constraints against only intended harming or proximally caused harm (...) have unacceptable implications for choices between more and less harmful ways of securing greater goods. This leaves as plausible only theories that impose constraints against causing some unintended distal harms. But, I argue, given the distal harms our actions are likely to cause through their butterfly effects, these theories entail that any way of sustaining our lives is overwhelmingly likely to involve unjustified killing, and that we are therefore morally required either to allow ourselves to waste away or kill ourselves. (shrink)

It is a plausible and compelling theoretical assumption that epistemic rationality is just a matter of having doxastic attitudes that are the correct responses to one’s epistemic reasons, or that all requirements of epistemic rationality reduce to requirements on doxastic attitudes. According to this idea, all instances of epistemic rationality are instances of rational belief. Call this assumption, and any theory working under it, _belief-centered_. In what follows, I argue that we should not accept belief-centered theories of epistemic rationality. (...) This is an argument in three acts. In the first, I present counterexamples that problematize the belief-centered assumption: cases whose protagonists (i) fail to meet any plausible requirements on belief but (ii) nevertheless appear epistemically rational. In the second act, I consider alternative explanations of the counterexamples, friendly to the belief-centered theorist, and find them wanting. In the third and final act, I show that there are significant theoretical benefits to acknowledging a distinct agent-centered dimension of epistemic rationality and sketch a candidate agent-centered approach: a view that grounds an agent’s epistemic rationality in the possession of _good epistemic policies_. In the end, we see that a complete theory of epistemic rationality is as much of a theory of rational _agents_ as it is of rational _belief_. (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

How should we make sense of praise and blame and other such reactions towards collective agents like governments, universities, or corporations? Collective agents can be appropriate targets for our moral feelings and judgements because they can maintain and express moral positions of their own. Moral agency requires being capable of recognising moral considerations and reasons. It also necessitates the ability to react reflexively to moral matters, i.e. to take into account new moral concerns when they arise. While members of a (...) collective agent are capable of this, the collective frames the thinking of the individual moral agents within it and affects their options in myriad ways. The moral positions thus formed and expressed belong to the collective. Crucially, unlike marginal moral agents, collective agents as moral actors can be held fully responsible for their acts and omissions. (shrink)

Empirical research has distinguished moral judgments that focus on an act and the actor’s intention or mental states, and those that focus on results of an action and then seek a causal actor. Studies indicate these two types of judgments may result from a “dual-process system” of moral judgment (Cushman 2008, Kneer and Machery 2019). Results-oriented judgements may be subject to the problem of resultant moral luck because different results can arise from the same action and intention. While some argue (...) luck should not bear on persons’ culpability, Victor Kumar has argued that the tendency to hold unlucky agents responsible for harm is justified by consequentialist aims of punishment (Kumar 2019). In contrast, judgments that focus on acts and intentions may be primarily retributive. Kumar claims that judgments focused on results track external, public harm because this increases the reliability of punishment and better achieves instrumental aims, including deterrent effect. In this chapter I examine rape cases using Kumar’s theory of punishment. Rape involves outcomes that are not publicly available. If judgments of punishment depend on outcomes, then we would expect such judgments to be less stable for those instances of wrongdoing that lack public outcomes such as rape, because such judgments would rely instead on often biased and unreliable inferential processes to establish the presence of mental states, which are essentially private. In this way Kumar’s theory actually predicts the way in which we see criminal justice institutions fail with regard to arrest, prosecution, and punishment related to rape; and we might expect similar failures for other crimes that lack publicly available results. In sum, a fundamental problem with institutionalized punishment centered upon results may be that some crimes sit within a moral blindspot. (shrink)

This paper takes up a neglected problem for metaethical noncognitivism: the characterization of the acceptance states for agent-centered normative theories like Rational Egoism. If Egoism is a coherent view, the non-cognitivist needs a coherent acceptance state for it. This can be provided, as Dreier and Gibbard have shown. But those accounts fail when generalized, assigning the same acceptance state to normative theories that are clearly distinct, or assigning no acceptance state to theories that look to be intelligible. The (...) paper makes the case for this and then asks: What should we conclude if the problem cannot be solved? We might conclude that since Egoism is clearly a coherent view, the argument amounts to a refutation of noncognitivism. But we suggest another possibility. There is, on reflection, something incoherent, or at least odd, in standard formulations of Egoism; noncognitivism predicts this and so provides an intriguing explanation for this fact. (shrink)

The article presents an analysis centered on the emotional lapses of artificial intelligence (AI) and the influence of these lapses on two critical aspects. Firstly, the article explores the ontological impact of emotional lapses, elucidating how they hinder AI’s capacity to develop a moral sense. The absence of a moral emotion, such as sympathy, creates a barrier for machines to grasp and ethically respond to specific situations. This raises fundamental questions about machines’ ability to act as moral agents in (...) the same manner as human beings. Additionally, the article sheds light on the practical implications within human-machine relations and their effect on human friendships. The lack of friendliness or its equivalent in interactions with machines directly impacts the quality and depth of human relations. This concerningly suggests the potential replacement or compromise of genuine interpersonal connections due to limitations in human-machine interactions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: David Braybrooke argues that the core of the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas survived in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Much to my surprise, Braybrooke argues as well that David Copp’s society-centered moral theory is a secular version of this same natural law theory. Braybrooke makes a good case that there is an important idea about morality that is shared by the great philosophers in his group and that this idea is also found (...) in Copp’s work. The idea is captured by the Functionalist Thesis, the thesis that moral propositions are made true by facts about what, given the nature of human beings and their circumstances, enables people to live together in thriving communities. I argue that Copp can accept Braybrooke’s suggestion and use it to improve his formulation of the basic idea of the society-centered theory. RÉSUMÉ : David Braybrooke soutient que l’idée centrale de la théorie du droit naturel de Thomas d’Aquin a survécu dans les œuvres de Hobbes, Locke, Hume et Rousseau. À mon grand étonnement, Braybrooke soutient aussi que la théorie morale société-centrique de David Copp est une version séculaire de cette même théorie du droit naturel. Braybrooke argumente de façon convaincante que les œuvres de ces grands philosophes partagent une idée centrale relative à la moralité et que cette idée se retrouve aussi chez Copp. Cette idée est la Thèse Fonctionnaliste, c’est-à-dire la thèse selon laquelle les faits moraux sont des faits concernant ce qui rend les membres de la société capables de vivre ensemble dans des communautés florissantes, étant donné la nature des êtres humains et les circonstances de leurs vies. Je soutiens que Copp peut reprendre à son compte les arguments de Braybrooke, et ainsi améliorer la formulation de l’idée centrale de sa théorie société-centrique. (shrink)

I argue that you can be permitted to discount the interests of your adversaries even though doing so would be impartially suboptimal. This means that, in addition to the kinds of moral options that the literature traditionally recognises, there exist what I call other-sacrificing options. I explore the idea that you cannot discount the interests of your adversaries as much as you can favour the interests of your intimates; if this is correct, then there is an asymmetry between negative partiality (...) toward your adversaries and positive partiality toward your intimates. (shrink)

Associative duties are agent-centered duties to give defeasible moral priority to our special ties. Our strongest associative duties are to close friends and family. According to reductionists, our associative duties are just special duties—i.e., duties arising from what I have done to others, or what others have done to me. These include duties to abide by promises and contracts, compensate our benefactors in ways expressing gratitude, and aid those whom we have made especially vulnerable to our conduct. I (...) argue, though, that reductionism faces a problem: special duties are not strong enough to account for the strength of our associative duties. At the bar of associative duties, we are required to do what no special duty can warrant. I then present an alternative reductionist analysis of associative duties—the ‘Identity-Enactment Account’—which not only accounts for the peculiar strength of our associative duties, but also characterizes them in an intuitively compelling way. On this account, our strongest associative duties are special duties to protect or promote the welfare of the duty’s beneficiary by adopting and enacting a practical identity in which the duty’s beneficiary features prominently. There are persons who can legitimately demand a prominent place in our mental lives, for the protection and intimacy it affords. They can, in effect, legitimately demand to be among our nearest and dearest. The correlative of such a demand is, on our part, an associative duty we have toward them. (shrink)

Where artificial agents are not liable to be ascribed true moral agency and responsibility in their own right, we can understand them as acting as proxies for human agents, as making decisions on their behalf. What I call the ‘Moral Proxy Problem’ arises because it is often not clear for whom a specific artificial agent is acting as a moral proxy. In particular, we need to decide whether artificial agents should be acting as proxies for low-level agents — e.g. (...) individual users of the artificial agents — or whether they should be moral proxies for high-level agents — e.g. designers, distributors or regulators, that is, those who can potentially control the choice behaviour of many artificial agents at once. Who we think an artificial agent is a moral proxy for determines from which agential perspective the choice problems artificial agents will be faced with should be framed: should we frame them like the individual choice scenarios previously faced by individual human agents? Or should we, rather, consider the expected aggregate effects of the many choices made by all the artificial agents of a particular type all at once? This paper looks at how artificial agents should be designed to make risky choices, and argues that the question of risky choice by artificial agents shows the moral proxy problem to be both practically relevant and difficult. (shrink)

Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will (...) develop and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

Theories of individual well‐being fall into three main categories: hedonism, the desire‐fulfilment theory, and the list theory (which maintains that there are some things that can benefit a person without increasing the person's pleasure or desire‐fulfilment). The paper briefly explains the answers that hedonism and the desire‐fulfilment theory give to the question of whether being virtuous constitutes a benefit to the agent. Most of the paper is about the list theory's answer.

The paper focuses on the conditions under which an agent can be justifiably held responsible or liable for the harmful consequences of his or her actions. Kant has famously argued that as long as the agent fulfills his or her moral duty, he or she cannot be blamed for any potential harm that might result from his or her action, no matter how foreseeable these may (have) be(en). I call this the Duty-Absolves-Thesis or DA. I begin by stating (...) the thesis in a more precise form and then go on to assess, one by one, several possible justifications for it: that (i) it wasn’t the view Kant himself actually held or was committed to; (ii) there is nothing strange about the DA, either theoretically or intuitively; (iii) the DA is more plausible as an account of legal (either criminal or tort) liability; (iv) the DA becomes perfectly plausible when conceived as a thesis about what insulates the agent from either remedial moral responsibility or the demands of compensatory justice; (v) the rationale for the DA is to protect our moral assessment of agents and their actions from the threat of moral luck. I show, with the help of the infamous Inquiring Murderer example, all these (and some other) justificatory attempts unsuccessful. I conclude that besides being counter-intuitive, the DA-thesis also lacks firm theoretical grounding and should therefore be rejected as (part of) an account of outcome moral responsibility. (shrink)

Symposium contribution on Mark Schroeder's Slaves of the Passions. Argues that Schroeder's account of agent-neutral reasons cannot be made to work, that the limited scope of his distinctive proposal in the epistemology of reasons undermines its plausibility, and that Schroeder faces an uncomfortable tension between the initial motivation for his view and the details of the view he develops.

Agent-regret seems to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. If we grant that we are not morally responsible for consequences outside our control (the ‘Standard View’), then agent-regret—which involves self-reproach and a desire to make amends for consequences outside one’s control—appears rationally indefensible. But despite its apparent indefensibility, agent-regret still seems like a reasonable response to bad moral luck. I argue here that the puzzle can be resolved if we appreciate the role that agent-regret plays in (...) a larger social practice that helps us deal with bad moral luck. That agent-regret is a component in a social practice limits the questions that we can reasonably ask about it. While we can ask whether an experience of agent-regret is rational given the norms of this practice, we cannot ask the question that motivates the puzzle of agent-regret, viz. whether agent-regret is rationally defensible according to the Standard View. (shrink)

This paper is a critical investigation about the historical origins of two contemporary approaches in ethics: moral particularism and moral generalism. Moral particularism states that there are no defensible moral principles and that moral thought doesn’t consist in the application of moral principles to cases, but in understanding the morally relevant features of an action, which vary from case to case. In opposition, moral generalism is the traditional claim that moral decisions are made by applying general rules to particular actions. (...) Plato is often seen as a moral generalist for his appeal to Forms which are universal standards, while Aristotle is regarded as a precursor of moral particularism for stressing the importance of the “the prudence”, which is the intellectual capacity to perceive the irreducible specificity of a context, and the importance of “the means” which differs from person to person. First I will take Plato into discussion, and I will briefly reconstruct his theoretical account on Justice and virtue in order to establish his “generalist” orientation. Then I will analyze Aristotle’s alleged particularism by appealing to his texts and assessing some considerations of a few contemporary authors. At the end of the paper, I will question both particularism and generalism for the appropriation of the two ancient philosophers, on the ground that modern moral philosophy which is an action centered ethics is hard to reconcile with ancient moral thought which was an agent centered one. (shrink)

As robots and Artificial Intelligences become more enmeshed in rich social contexts, it seems inevitable that we will have to make them into moral machines equipped with moral skills. Apart from the technical difficulties of how we could achieve this goal, we can also ask the ethical question of whether we should seek to create such Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs). Recently, several papers have argued that we have strong reasons not to develop AMAs. In response, we develop a comprehensive analysis (...) of the relevant arguments for and against creating AMAs, and we argue that all things considered we have strong reasons to continue to responsibly develop AMAs. The key contributions of this paper are threefold. First, to provide the first comprehensive response to the important arguments made against AMAs by Wynsberghe and Robbins (in “Critiquing the Reasons for Making Artificial Moral Agents”, Science and Engineering Ethics 25, 2019) and to introduce several novel lines of argument in the process. Second, to collate and thematise for the first time the key arguments for and against AMAs in a single paper. Third, to recast the debate away from blanket arguments for or against AMAs in general, to a more nuanced discussion about the use of what sort of AMAs, in what sort of contexts, and for what sort of purposes is morally appropriate. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has been dogged by the objection that it lacks the ability to provide adequate action-guidance, that it is agent-centered rather act-centered. Virtue ethics has also been faulted for devolving into moral cultural relativism. Rosalind Hursthouse has presented an action-based, naturalistic theory of virtue ethics intended to defuse these charges. Despite its merits, I argue that Hurthouse’s theory fails to successfully solve the problems associated with action guidance and relativism precisely because her attempt to provide a (...) non-cultural basis for virtue ethics undermines the possibility of using virtue ethics to derive useful action-guidance. The action-guiding power of virtue is derived from culture; seeking to avoid the cultural grounding of virtue merely brings one back to the problem of how virtue ethics can provide action-guidance. (shrink)

For an artificial agent to be morally praiseworthy, its rules for behaviour and the mechanisms for supplying those rules must not be supplied entirely by external humans. Such systems are a substantial departure from current technologies and theory, and are a low prospect. With foreseeable technologies, an artificial agent will carry zero responsibility for its behavior and humans will retain full responsibility.

In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects but for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that (...) thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the (...) discussion about moral expertise. (shrink)

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of (...) the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

Artificial agents (AAs), particularly but not only those in Cyberspace, extend the class of entities that can be involved in moral situations. For they can be conceived of as moral patients (as entities that can be acted upon for good or evil) and also as moral agents (as entities that can perform actions, again for good or evil). In this paper, we clarify the concept of agent and go on to separate the concerns of morality and responsibility of (...) agents (most interestingly for us, of AAs). We conclude that there is substantial and important scope, particularly in Computer Ethics, for the concept of moral agent not necessarily exhibiting free will, mental states or responsibility. This complements the more traditional approach, common at least since Montaigne and Descartes, which considers whether or not (artificial) agents have mental states, feelings, emotions and so on. By focussing directly on mind-less morality we are able to avoid that question and also many of the concerns of Artificial Intelligence. A vital component in our approach is the Method of Abstraction for analysing the level of abstraction (LoA) at which an agent is considered to act. The LoA is determined by the way in which one chooses to describe, analyse and discuss a system and its context. The Method of Abstraction is explained in terms of an interface or set of features or observables at a given LoA. Agenthood, and in particular moral agenthood, depends on a LoA. Our guidelines for agenthood are: interactivity (response to stimulus by change of state), autonomy (ability to change state without stimulus) and adaptability (ability to change the transition rules by which state is changed) at a given LoA. Morality may be thought of as a threshold defined on the observables in the interface determining the LoA under consideration. An agent is morally good if its actions all respect that threshold; and it is morally evil if some action violates it. That view is particularly informative when the agent constitutes a software or digital system, and the observables are numerical. Finally we review the consequences for Computer Ethics of our approach. In conclusion, this approach facilitates the discussion of the morality of agents not only in Cyberspace but also in the biosphere, where animals can be considered moral agents without their having to display free will, emotions or mental states, and in social contexts, where systems like organizations can play the role of moral agents. The primary cost of this facility is the extension of the class of agents and moral agents to embrace AAs. (shrink)

Deontic constraints prohibit an agent performing acts of a certain type even when doing so will prevent more instances of that act being performed by others. In this article I show how deontic constraints can be interpreted as either maximizing or non-maximizing rules. I then argue that they should be interpreted as maximizing rules because interpreting them as non-maximizing rules results in a problem with moral advice. Given this conclusion, a strong case can be made that consequentialism provides the (...) best account of deontic constraints. (shrink)

If we were required to sacrifice our own interests whenever doing so was best overall, or prohibited from doing so unless it was optimal, then we would be mere sites for the realisation of value. Our interests, not ourselves, would wholly determine what we ought to do. We are not mere sites for the realisation of value — instead we, ourselves, matter unconditionally. So we have options to act suboptimally. These options have limits, grounded in the very same considerations. Though (...) not merely such sites, you and I are also sites for the realisation of value, and our interests (and ourselves) must therefore sometimes determine what others ought to do, in particular requiring them to bear reasonable costs for our sake. Likewise, just as my moral status grounds a requirement that others show me appropriate respect, so must I do to myself. (shrink)

According to some collectivists, purposive groups that lack decision-making procedures such as riot mobs, friends walking together, or the pro-life lobby can be morally responsible and have moral duties. I focus on plural subject- and we-mode-collectivism. I argue that purposive groups do not qualify as duty-bearers even if they qualify as agents on either view. To qualify as a duty-bearer, an agent must be morally competent. I develop the Update Argument. An agent is morally competent only if the (...) agent has sufficient positive and negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. Positive control involves the general ability to update one’s goal-seeking states, whereas negative control involves the absence of other agents with the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with updating one’s goal-seeking states. I argue that even if purposive groups qualify as plural subjects or we-mode group agents, these groups necessarily lack negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. This creates a cut-off point for groups as duty-bearers: Organized groups may qualify as duty-bearers, whereas purposive groups cannot qualify as duty-bearers. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an exposition and critique of Johnson and Noorman’s (2014) three conceptualizations of the agential roles artificial systems can play. I argue that two of these conceptions are unproblematic: that of causally efficacious agency and “acting for” or surrogate agency. Their third conception, that of “autonomous agency,” however, is one I have reservations about. The authors point out that there are two ways in which the term “autonomy” can be used: there is, firstly, the engineering sense (...) of the term, which simply refers to the ability of some system to act independently of substantive human control. Secondly, there is the moral sense of the term, which has traditionally grounded many notions of human mor-al responsibility. I argue that the continued usage of “autonomy” in discussions of artificial agency complicates matters unnecessarily. This occurs in two ways: firstly, the condition of autonomy, even in its engineering sense, fails to accurately describe the way “autonomous” systems are developed in practice. Secondly, the continued usage of autonomy in the moral sense introduces unnecessary meta-physical baggage form the free will debate into discussions about moral agency. In order to understand the debate surrounding autonomy, we would therefore first need to settle many seemingly intractable metaphysical questions regarding the existence of free will in human beings. (shrink)

Theorists attending to the epistemic condition on responsibility are divided over whether moral ignorance is ever exculpatory. While those who argue that reasonable expectation is required for blameworthiness often maintain that moral ignorance can excuse, theorists who embrace a quality of will approach to blameworthiness are not sanguine about the prospect of excuses among morally ignorant wrongdoers. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that moral ignorance always reflects insufficient care for what matters morally, and therefore that moral ignorance never excuses. Furthermore, (...) quality of will theorists treat their skepticism about excuses for the morally ignorant as a natural implication of their approach. It is therefore unsurprising that, while many have argued for the blamelessness of certain morally ignorant agents on grounds concerning reasonable expectation, the possibility that morally ignorant agents might be blameless even according to quality of will views has not been adequately addressed. I illustrate and explain how it is possible for morally ignorant agents to display sufficient care for the morally relevant features of their wrong behavior. Thus, even if quality of will views are correct, moral ignorance sometimes excuses. (shrink)

Certain consequentialists have responded to deontological worries regarding personal projects or options and agent-centered restrictions or constraints by pointing out that it is consistent with consequentialist principles that people develop within themselves, dispositions to act with such things in mind, even if doing so does not lead to the best consequences on every occasion. This paper argues that making this response requires shifting the focus of moral evaluation off of evaluation of individual actions and towards evaluation of whole (...) character traits and patterns of behavior. However, this weds consequentialism to a sort of psychological determinism, with which it is incompatible, because it makes any sort of assessment in terms of right or wrong incoherent. The paper concludes by sketching an ethical theory that abandons right and wrong as its organizing concepts, but nevertheless preserves much of the spirit of consequentialism. Relationships between whole patterns of behavior and the production of good and bad consequences can be studied and analyzed, and this information can be used to improve society and ourselves, without it being required that any individual persons acts or dispositions to behave be evaluated as right or wrong. (shrink)

Abstract: Artificial Morality is a new, emerging interdisciplinary field that centres around the idea of creating artificial moral agents, or AMAs, by implementing moral competence in artificial systems. AMAs are ought to be autonomous agents capable of socially correct judgements and ethically functional behaviour. This request for moral machines comes from the changes in everyday practice, where artificial systems are being frequently used in a variety of situations from home help and elderly care purposes to banking and court algorithms. (...) It is therefore important to create reliable and responsible machines based on the same ethical principles that society demands from people. New challenges in creating such agents appear. There are philosophical questions about a machine’s potential to be an agent, or mora l agent, in the first place. Then comes the problem of social acceptance of such machines, regardless of their theoretic agency status. As a result of efforts to resolve this problem, there are insinuations of needed additional psychological (emotional and cogn itive) competence in cold moral machines. What makes this endeavour of developing AMAs even harder is the complexity of the technical, engineering aspect of their creation. Implementation approaches such as top- down, bottom-up and hybrid approach aim to find the best way of developing fully moral agents, but they encounter their own problems throughout this effort. (shrink)

Traditional studies have shown that the moral judgments are influenced by many biasing factors, like the consequences of a behavior, certain characteristics of the agent who commits the act, or the words chosen to describe the behavior. In the present study we investigated a new factor that could bias the evaluation of morally relevant human behavior: the perceived similarity between the participants and the agent described in the moral scenario. The participants read a story about a driver who (...) illegally overtook another car and hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street. The latter was taken to the hospital with a broken leg. The driver was described either as being similar to the participant (a student, 21 years old, the same gender as th­e participant) or dissimilar (a retired person, 69 years old, different gender as the participant). The results show that the participants from the increased similarity group expressed more lenient evaluations of the immorality of the driver’s behavior compared to the participants from the decreased similarity group. The results are discussed within a framework which puts emphasis on motivational and protective reasons. (shrink)

This article focuses on a particular issue under machine ethics—that is, the nature of Artificial Moral Agents. Machine ethics is a branch of artificial intelligence that looks into the moral status of artificial agents. Artificial moral agents, on the other hand, are artificial autonomous agents that possess moral value, as well as certain rights and responsibilities. This paper demonstrates that attempts to fully develop a theory that could possibly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents may consider certain philosophical (...) ideas, like the standard characterizations of agency, rational agency, moral agency, and artificial agency. At the very least, the said philosophical concepts may be treated as signposts for further research on how to truly account for the nature of Artificial Moral Agents. (shrink)

Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. By Mele Alfred R..).

Animal rights philosophers have traditionally accepted the claim that human beings are unique, but rejected the claim that our uniqueness justifies denying animals moral rights. Humans were thought to be unique specifically because we possess moral agency. In this commentary, I explore the claim that some nonhuman animals are also moral agents, and I take note of its counter-intuitive implications.

In this paper Sullins argues that in certain circumstances robots can be seen as real moral agents. A distinction is made between persons and moral agents such that, it is not necessary for a robot to have personhood in order to be a moral agent. I detail three requirements for a robot to be seen as a moral agent. The first is achieved when the robot is significantly autonomous from any programmers or operators of the machine. The second (...) is when one can analyze or explain the robot's behavior only by ascribing to it some predisposition or 'intention' to do good or harm. And finally, robot moral agency requires the robot to behave in a way that shows and understanding of responsibility to some other moral agent. Robots with all of these criteria will have moral rights as well as responsibilities regardless of their status as persons. (shrink)

This paper discusses a puzzling tension in attributions of moral responsibility in cases of resultant moral luck: we seem to hold agents fully morally responsible for unlucky outcomes, but less-than-fully-responsible for unlucky outcomes brought about differently than intended. This tension cannot be easily discharged or explained, but it does shed light on a famous puzzle about causation and responsibility, the Thirsty Traveler.

In their strife for designing a moral system where everyone is given equal consideration, cosmopolitan theorists have merely tolerated partiality as a necessary evil (insofar it means that we give priority to our kin opposite the distant needy). As a result, the cosmopolitan ideal has long departed from our moral psychologies and our social realities. Here I put forward partial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to save that obstacle. Instead of demanding impartial universal action, it requires from us that we are (...) equally responsive in all the relationships we stand in. That goes from the local to the cosmopolitan sphere, since I defend that we are related with strangers as co-members of the global community. Thus, partiality not only is accommodated by cosmopolitanism, but actually supports it: only by having meaningful personal relationships we become able to care for distant strangers. (shrink)

In this essay I lay out the textual materials surrounding the birth of physical anthropology as a racial science in the eighteenth century with a special focus on the development of Kant's own contributions to the new field. Kant’s contributions to natural history demonstrated his commitment to a physical, mental, and moral hierarchy among the races and I spend some time describing both the advantages he drew from this hierarchy for making sense of the social and political history of inequality (...) between peoples, and the obviously problematic relationship that such views would entail for Kant’s universalism as he began to formulate his ethical program in the 1780s. While there is continued scholarly debate regarding a purported moral “turn” made by Kant once he dropped his commitment to a racial hierarchy in the 1790s, what the narrative as a whole reveals is not only the manner by which questions of racial difference defined physical anthropology from its outset, but the easy and uncomplicated manner by which whole member groups of the population could be excluded from lofty pronouncements regarding the “rights of man”—a fact that was as true for Kant in Königsberg, as it was for Jefferson and Hamilton in Philadelphia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The distinction between what I call nonelective obligations and discretionary obligations, a distinction that focuses on one particular thread of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, helps us to identify the obligations that carry over from principals to agents. Clarity on this issue is necessary to identify the moral obligations within “shareholder primacy”, which conceives of managers as agents of shareholders. My main claim is that the principal-agent relation requires agents to fulfill nonelective obligations, but it does not (...) always require discharging discretionary obligations. I show that the requirement to fulfill nonelective obligations is more far-reaching than has been acknowledged by most defenders and critics of shareholder primacy. But I also show that managers are not bound by certain discretionary obligations like charity, showing that their moral obligations are more circumscribed than the obligations that apply to human beings in general. (shrink)

The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is one of the most important in contemporary moral theory. Yet, providing an adequate formal account of it has proven difficult. In this article I defend a new formal account of the distinction, one that avoids various problems faced by other accounts. My account is based on an influential account of the distinction developed by McNaughton and Rawling. I argue that their approach is on the right track but that it succumbs to two serious objections. (...) I then show how to formulate a new account that follows the key insights of McNaughton and Rawling’s approach yet avoids the two objections. (shrink)

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do (...) so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards. (shrink)