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Blame It on the AI? On the Moral Responsibility of Artificial Moral Advisors

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Abstract

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors (AMAs) and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility.

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Data Availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Code Availability

The code included in the article is based on the code2flow syntax available here: https://code2flow.com/.

Notes

  1. Throughout the article, we follow Giubilini and Savulescu (2018) in using the acronym AMAs to refer to Artificial Moral Advisors. We use AAMAs as an acronym to refer to the broader class of Autonomous Artificial Moral Agents. Note, however, that the research literature also uses AMAs as an acronym to refer to Artificial Moral Agents, which is roughly the equivalent to our use of AAMAs.

  2. Other scholars (Broadie, 1991) endorse a view where only the voluntariness requirement is necessary for moral responsibility. However, voluntariness is taken to include deliberation (Bostock, 2000). A possible explanation for differences in interpretation is that Aristotle speaks extensively about the pair voluntary-involuntary, while introducing deliberate decision later in the NE (Glover, 1970).

  3. Actions performed “because of ignorance” may be either done “in ignorance” or “by ignorance.” The former is culpable ignorance (1110b, 25), e.g., when agents act while being drunk, which is the result of their own negligence (vice) and the latter excusable ignorance (1111a, 20), e.g., when agents cannot reasonably foresee the consequences of their actions, because they lack contextual knowledge.

  4. Such actions are considered “mixed actions” by Aristotle: in a sense, voluntary, because the agent performs the action themselves, the principle of action is in the agent; in another sense, involuntary, because the agent acts while coerced in a context that they cannot control — the purpose of the action is externally determined (Constantinescu, 2013; Mureșan, 2007). Such mixed actions are, in general, voluntary, but, in particular, not voluntary (1110a, 15). There is a mixed will of the agent (Bostock, 2000), in that they both want to perform the action (as the best alternative in the given circumstances) and do not want to perform it (as this is not their choice, had they been able to make an option in normal circumstances).

  5. See Constantinescu (2013) for an initial restatement of the four conditions.

  6. Note, however, that condition (1) imposes some more general requirements that are context-independent — the entity is able to initiate a causal action, while condition (2) requires some more relative, context-dependent demands — the entity is not coerced in the specific context of action.

  7. The app can be accessed here: https://code2flow.com/.

  8. We thank one anonymous reviewer for suggesting this question.

  9. We thank one anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

  10. We thank one anonymous reviewer for highlighting these questions.

  11. However, this goes against the position defended by List (2021), who argues that the AI systems that require little to no input from us while in use should be considered “new loci of agency,” as they would exhibit a high degree of autonomy. Evolutionary computing, he adds, could even get humans out of the picture of AI moral responsibility completely. Our discussion of the four conditions of the Moral Responsibility Test gives us strong reasons to remain sceptical of List’s position and to argue that even such potential Autonomous Artificial Moral Agents would fail it.

  12. See, for instance, the way apps dedicated to co-parenting (e.g., OurFamilyWizard, coParenter, TalkingParents) currently work (Coldwell, 2021): by using sentiment analysis, the apps flag what is detected as “emotionally charged” phrases in written conversations between separated parents, offering the person who writes the extra-time for reflecting whether they still want to send the message, acknowledging the risk that the second parent might interpret the phrase as aggressive or humiliating, for instance. Such co-parenting apps are already recommended by lawyers in the USA as standard practice for separated parents, because of the “chilling effect” on the communication between them. AMAs could also prove to be especially useful as part of the ethical infrastructures of companies in order to enable managers better address a wide variety of moral dilemmas in the workplace (Uszkai et al., 2021).

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Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-1765, within PNCDI III, awarded for the research project Collective moral responsibility: from organizations to artificial systems. Re-assessing the Aristotelian framework, implemented within CCEA and ICUB, University of Bucharest (2021–2022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, 204 Splaiul Independentei St., RO-060024, Bucharest, Romania

    Mihaela Constantinescu & Constantin Vică

  2. Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

    Radu Uszkai & Cristina Voinea

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  1. Mihaela Constantinescu
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  2. Constantin Vică
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  3. Radu Uszkai
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  4. Cristina Voinea
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mihaela Constantinescu.

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Constantinescu, M., Vică, C., Uszkai, R. et al. Blame It on the AI? On the Moral Responsibility of Artificial Moral Advisors. Philos. Technol. 35, 35 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00529-z

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