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The Spectrum of Responsibility Ascription for End Users of Neurotechnologies

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Abstract

Invasive neural devices offer novel prospects for motor rehabilitation on different levels of agentive behavior. From a functional perspective, they interact with, support, or enable human intentional actions in such a way that movement capabilities are regained. However, when there is a technical malfunction resulting in an unintended movement, the complexity of the relationship between the end user and the device sometimes makes it difficult to determine who is responsible for the outcome – a circumstance that has been coined as “responsibility gap” in the literature. So far, recent accounts frame this issue around the theme of control but more work is needed to explore the complicated terrain of assigning responsibility for neural device-mediated actions from this control perspective. This paper aims at contributing to this tendency by offering more fine-grained distinctions of how that control capacity is facilitated by the machine and how it can be exercised by the end user. This results in a novel framework that depicts an in-depth exploration of the control aspect of responsibility in a way that incorporates the diversity of relationships between neurotechnologies, the various conditions they treat, and the individual end user’s experience.

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Notes

  1. Note that there are also other aspects of responsibility that are of importance in the literature, such as the question how to assign responsibility within a research team for decisions that are made [11] and inquiries about the need for specific rules and regulations that could guide this decision making in clinical care teams [7, 12].

  2. Research in action theory is vast and, even when leaving direct and indirect predecessors aside, reaches at least 70 years into the past (e.g., [19,20,21,22,23,24,25]). It is crucial to note that elaborating upon those authors in a way that all aspects are comprehensively covered goes way beyond the scope of this paper. This is why the focus lies exclusively on contemporary action theory.

  3. Elisabeth Pacheries’ ([26]: 189) depiction of the “intentional cascade” that introduces three types of intentions (i.e., future-directed intention, present-directed intention, motor intention) is a good example of how this threefold distinction could look like.

  4. In other words, having the capacity to perform bodily movements is an “enabling condition” [34] to generate and perform intentional actions. For instance, if a person never learned to swim, this person cannot intend to swim (at most intend learning to swim or keep a desire (but not an intention!) to swim) since this person lacks the appropriate motor skills to act upon that intention. This action-theoretical view has wide ranging implications to our understanding of free will which has been thoroughly analyzed by Schönau [35].

  5. Other types of responsibility that are discussed in the literature but not relevant for this paper include, among others, moral responsibility and liability responsibility. Fischer and Ravizza [36] describe moral responsibility as holding certain beliefs or attitudes towards a person (e.g. the act of holding another person responsible for breaking an item). Hage [37] states that liability-responsibility denotes that someone stands in a certain legal relation to the events that are caused. More about legal responsibility of autonomous machines can be found in Brożek and Jakubiec [38] and more about liability for BCI systems in Bublitz et al. [39]).

  6. This being said, the epistemic condition is still a crucial and important aspect of responsibility. However, it seems to fall more into the realm of moral or legal responsibility as it identifies ways in which it is justified to blame or praise a person for (knowingly or unknowingly) causing an action. Nevertheless, building an epistemic analysis upon this control analysis is a noteworthy project, albeit clearly being subject of another paper.

  7. It is important to note that, while the framework is novel in its specific utilization of a pluralistic understanding of responsibility, the general notion of understanding responsibility under a pluralistic scope has already been brought forward by other authors such as Shoemaker [52] or Watson [53]. While a thorough integration of their work into this paper would be interesting, it would go far beyond this paper’s goal that focuses more tightly on providing a general picture of causal responsibility in neural devices under the theme of control.

  8. It should be noted that, of course, able-bodied persons might get nervous and shake, dropping a glass or a pencil as a consequence. In such cases, they lose guidance control over their movements, resulting in them being differently morally responsible for that action in comparison to performing that same movement without unintentional shaking.

  9. In the figure, the aspect of exerting no control over an action is categorized as a “happening”, indicating that there is some event the end user experiences without being an active agent. It is noteworthy that this “passive” part of agency is acknowledged and discussed in the literature under the term “patiency”, i.e. the way what it is like to be acted upon or how individuals experience the effects of self-governed actions [54]. While this concept has been successfully used for understanding autonomous systems [55] and for pointing out the contrast between agency and patiency in health-monitoring applications [56], a thorough exploration of patiency would go beyond the scope of this paper since the focus lies in identifying agentive capacities of exerting control.

  10. This should not indicate that PD patients are able to stop the shaking movement when they yield veto control but that they are able to stop the overall action. For instance, the movement of reaching out for a cup can be stopped or redirected while the tremor is most likely to continue. In this case, guidance control would be impaired while veto control, in terms of stopping the overall goal-directed action, is still exercisable.

  11. This issue was brought to me during the Workshop “The Ethics of Experimental Deep Brain Stimulation – Future Directions” in Oxford/UK, January 2020. I like to thank the colleagues and the organisers for the valuable exchange of ideas and the helpful discussions.

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Schönau, A. The Spectrum of Responsibility Ascription for End Users of Neurotechnologies. Neuroethics 14, 423–435 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-021-09460-0

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