Artificial Moral Responsibility: How We Can and Cannot Hold Machines Responsible

Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a widening respo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics
Main Author: Tigard, Daniel W. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 2021
In: Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics
Further subjects:B human-robot interaction
B AI ethics
B Artificial Intelligence
B Moral Responsibility
B machine ethics
B Blame
B Moral Agency
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Summary:Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a widening responsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial moral agents’ (AMAs) is inevitable. Still, this notion may seem to push back the problem, leaving those who have an interest in developing autonomous technology with a dilemma. We may need to scale-back our efforts at deploying AMAs (or at least maintain human oversight); otherwise, we must rapidly and drastically update our moral and legal norms in a way that ensures responsibility for potentially avoidable harms. This paper invokes contemporary accounts of responsibility in order to show how artificially intelligent systems might be held responsible. Although many theorists are concerned enough to develop artificial conceptions of agency or to exploit our present inability to regulate valuable innovations, the proposal here highlights the importance of—and outlines a plausible foundation for—a workable notion of artificial moral responsibility.
ISSN:1469-2147
Contains:Enthalten in: Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0963180120000985