Beyond the skin bag: on the moral responsibility of extended agencies
Ethics and Information Technology
Transparency and social responsibility issues for Wikipedia
Ethics and Information Technology
Sharing Moral Responsibility with Robots: A Pragmatic Approach
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Tenth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence: SCAI 2008
Agents of responsibility--freelance web developers in web applications development
Information Systems Frontiers
Ethics and Information Technology
Negotiating autonomy and responsibility in military robots
Ethics and Information Technology
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In this paper, we focus attention on the role of computer system complexity in ascribing responsibility. We begin by introducing the notion of technological moral action (TMA). TMA is carried out by the combination of a computer system user, a system designer (developers, programmers, and testers), and a computer system (hardware and software). We discuss three sometimes overlapping types of responsibility: causal responsibility, moral responsibility, and role responsibility. Our analysis is informed by the well-known accounts provided by Hart and Hart and Honoré. While these accounts are helpful, they have misled philosophers and others by presupposing that responsibility can be ascribed in all cases of action simply by paying attention to the free and intended actions of human beings. Such accounts neglect the part played by technology in ascriptions of responsibility in cases of moral action with technology. For both moral and role responsibility, we argue that ascriptions of both causal and role responsibility depend on seeing action as complex in the sense described by TMA. We conclude by showing how our analysis enriches moral discourse about responsibility for TMA.