Abstract
Is possible to understand robots as agents with moral responsibility? It will first discuss the importance and practical relevance of this question which is due to the growing autonomous agency of robots. I will then use Daniel Dennett’s theory of personhood to argue that at the moment we have no reason to see robots as responsible agents. However it might still be possible to develop downgraded versions of moral agency that fit robots better than the traditional concept of moral responsibility. Such accounts are developed by Colin Allen and Wendel Wallach, James Moor as well as Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders. I will argue that those attempts fail, at least if applied to the current development of robotics, because they underestimate the practical character of morality and the problem of reasonable moral disagreement. In the end I will point out that it still is possible to integrate robots into responsible groups without conceptualizing them as moral agents themselves.
Adama: “She was a Cylon, a machine. Is that what Boomer was, a machine? A thing?”
Tyrol: “That’s what she turned out to be.”
Adama: “She was more than that to us. She was more than that to me. She was a vital, living person aboard my ship for almost two years. She couldn’t have been just a machine. Could you love a machine?”
(Battlestar Galactica, ‘The Farm’, Season 2, Episode 5, 2005)
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Catrin Misselhorn (2013) disagrees. She thinks that for moral agency it is enough to be able to act for moral reasons. Small children or animals acting out of sympathy would be moral agents in this sense and robots could be too. The problem with such a downgraded concept of moral agency is that it neglects reasonable disagreement regarding moral reasons, as I will argue later on. Moral agents need to be able to deal with this reasonable disagreement by deliberating about the moral value of her reasons. Otherwise they do not act for moral reasons, but only for reasons that happen to be in line with morality.
- 3.
However, it is quite debatable whether animals can be said to have a form of dignity (certainly not human dignity), but perhaps an animal dignity or one shared with humans, such as the dignity of the creature, as it is stated in the constitution of Switzerland.
- 4.
Floridi and Sanders (2004, 350) argue that there must be some connection between being a moral agent and being a moral patient. Contrary to this I believe that it is possible that being a moral agent and being a moral patient is connected to totally different properties, rationality and sentience for instance. Then there is no difficulty in assuming that there might be entities that are moral agents, but no moral patients and vice versa.
- 5.
This is often called the merit-based concept of responsibility, because the person or persons responsible deserves a punishment or reward. See: John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 207 ff.
- 6.
In the Nicomachean Ethics (1110a–1111b4), Aristotle already pointed to the control condition and the epistemic condition regarding information.
- 7.
It is not enough to say that language has a propositional content, which in a sense also applies to the signals emitted by animals. It is more about the intentional content of language compared to its extensional content (Frege 1962). Lewis Carroll, the famous author of Alice in Wonderland, and the famous logician Charles L. Dodgson are the same person. The two names have therefore the same extension, but do not have the same intension, because a speaker can refer to both names without knowing that the two names refer to the same person.
- 8.
This is being controversially discussed with the ‘cleverbot’ programme. This programme is free to use online. If you know that it is a machine, it is not very difficult to see that it is not human. Most recently the programme name Eugene Goostman is said to have passed the test.
- 9.
Of course, this is rather an empirical assertion, which goes back to something like a discursive impression.
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Neuhäuser, C. (2015). Some Sceptical Remarks Regarding Robot Responsibility and a Way Forward. In: Misselhorn, C. (eds) Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15515-9_7
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