Abstract
We are living through an era of increased robotisation. Some authors have already begun to explore the impact of this robotisation on legal rules and practice. In doing so, many highlight potential liability gaps that might arise through robot misbehaviour. Although these gaps are interesting and socially significant, they do not exhaust the possible gaps that might be created by increased robotisation. In this article, I make the case for one of those alternative gaps: the retribution gap. This gap arises from a mismatch between the human desire for retribution and the absence of appropriate subjects of retributive blame. I argue for the potential existence of this gap in an era of increased robotisation; suggest that it is much harder to plug this gap than it is to plug those thus far explored in the literature; and then highlight three important social implications of this gap.
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Notes
Vincent (2011) argues that there are at least six: virtue-responsibility; role-responsibility; outcome-responsibility; causal-responsibility; capacity-responsibility; and liability-responsibility.
The concepts of legal and moral responsibility can be distinguished and sometimes pull apart. However that possibility can be ignored here.
Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562—Is a foundational decision in English tort law holding that you owe a duty of care to your ‘neighbour’, where neighbour is defined relatively broadly. In that particular case, it included the consumer of a product who was not its actual purchaser.
There are also liability standards associated with control and care for animals that might be adopted by analogy.
There are many criminal theorists who support this basic position: Moore (1993, 1997), Alexander and Ferzan (2009) and Duff (2007). These theorists support the view on moral/philosophical grounds and could be classified as pure retributivists; others support it in part because it is the dominant social/psychological attitude, e.g. Robinson and Kurzban (2007).
Though note the potential impact of the so-called ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect—if the robots are too humanoid they may be too creepy for the human users. The uncanny valley was first hypothesised by Masahiro Moti in the 1970s and has recently been confirmed in some experimental tests, but how deep and wide the valley actually is remains contentious (see: MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006; MacDorman 2006; MacDorman et al. 2009).
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Danaher, J. Robots, law and the retribution gap. Ethics Inf Technol 18, 299–309 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-016-9403-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-016-9403-3