-/- Artificial intelligence powers Google’s search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues. Written by a philosopher of technology, AI Ethics goes beyond the (...) usual hype and nightmare scenarios to address concrete questions. -/- Mark Coeckelbergh describes influential AI narratives, ranging from Frankenstein’s monster to transhumanism and the technological singularity. He surveys relevant philosophical discussions: questions about the fundamental differences between humans and machines and debates over the moral status of AI. He explains the technology of AI, describing different approaches and focusing on machine learning and data science. He offers an overview of important ethical issues, including privacy concerns, responsibility and the delegation of decision making, transparency, and bias as it arises at all stages of data science processes. He also considers the future of work in an AI economy. Finally, he analyzes a range of policy proposals and discusses challenges for policymakers. He argues for ethical practices that embed values in design, translate democratic values into practices and include a vision of the good life and the good society . (shrink)

Bernard Williams claims that we should feel “agent-regret” for bad events we cause but for which we are not blameworthy. Such agent-regret involves no presupposition of fault, yet it also involves a need to personally make amends. This combination suggests that agent-regret, even if virtuous, is inherently irrational. In this paper, I defend agent-regret from attempts to explain it away as a confusion of other attitudes. I argue that the rationality of agent-regret is found in how it makes sense as (...) a response to conflicts that might arise between people through nothing more than bad luck. (shrink)

Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the so-called ‘abstract/concrete paradox’ also jeopardizes the consistency (...) of judicial reasoning. In a series of experiments, both lay and professional judges sometimes reached opposite conclusions when reasoning about concrete cases versus the underlying issues formulated in abstract terms. This effect emerged whether participants reasoned with broad principles, such as human dignity, or narrow rules, and was largest among individuals high in trait empathy. Finally, to understand whether people reflectively endorse the discrepancy between abstract and concrete resolutions, we examined their reactions when evaluating both, either simultaneously or sequentially. These approaches revealed no single pattern across lay and expert populations, or exploratory and confirmatory studies. Taken together, our studies suggest that empathic concern plays a greater role in guiding the judicial resolution of concrete cases than in illuminating judges' professed standards—which may result in concrete decisions in violation of their own abstract principles. (shrink)

How should automated vehicles react in emergency circumstances? Most research projects and scientific literature deal with this question from a moral perspective. In particular, it is customary to treat emergencies involving AVs as instances of moral dilemmas and to use the trolley problem as a framework to address such alleged dilemmas. Some critics have pointed out some shortcomings of this strategy and have urged to focus on mundane traffic situations instead of trolley cases involving AVs. Besides, these authors rightly point (...) out the political nature of the most interesting debates involving AVs. However, in our view, they do not offer an adequate account of the distinction between ethics and politics and still see their proposals as contributions to the ethics of AVs. We argue that many of the interesting questions about how AVs should behave, both in emergency and other situations, are of political, and not moral, nature. This view is based on a conception of politics and political normativity that we have developed elsewhere and that we call “political minimalism.” Additionally, we show that this proposed perspective has significant consequences for the design, management, and regulation of transport systems. (shrink)

Self-driving cars hold out the promise of being safer than manually driven cars. Yet they cannot be a 100 % safe. Collisions are sometimes unavoidable. So self-driving cars need to be programmed for how they should respond to scenarios where collisions are highly likely or unavoidable. The accident-scenarios self-driving cars might face have recently been likened to the key examples and dilemmas associated with the trolley problem. In this article, we critically examine this tempting analogy. We identify three important ways (...) in which the ethics of accident-algorithms for self-driving cars and the philosophy of the trolley problem differ from each other. These concern: the basic decision-making situation faced by those who decide how self-driving cars should be programmed to deal with accidents; moral and legal responsibility; and decision-making in the face of risks and uncertainty. In discussing these three areas of disanalogy, we isolate and identify a number of basic issues and complexities that arise within the ethics of the programming of self-driving cars. (shrink)

In recent decades, participants in the debate about whether we are free and responsible agents have tended with increasing frequency to begin their papers or books by fixing the terms “free” and “responsible” in clear ways to avoid misunderstanding. This is an admirable development, and while some misunderstandings have certainly been avoided, and positions better illuminated as a result, new and interesting questions also arise. Two ways of fixing these terms and identifying the underlying concepts have emerged as especially influential, (...) one that takes the freedom required for responsibility to be understood in terms of accountability and the other in terms of desert. In this paper, I start by asking: are theorists talking about the same things, or are they really participating in two different debates? Are desert and accountability mutually entailing? I tentatively conclude that they are in fact mutually entailing. Coming to this conclusion requires making finer distinctions among various more specific and competing accounts of both accountability and desert. Ultimately, I argue, that there is good reason to accept that accountability and desert have the same satisfaction conditions. (shrink)

Death.--The absurd.--Moral luck.--Sexual perversion.--War and massacre.--Ruthlessness in public life.--The policy of preference.--Equality.--The fragmentation of value.--Ethics without biology.--Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness.--What is it like to be a bat?--Panpsychism.--Subjective and objective.

The author, an experienced psychiatrist and professor, examines the feeling of guilt in different times, places, cultures, religions, and contexts.

This is the first study of guilt from a wide variety of perspectives: psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, six major religions, four key moral philosophers, and the law. Katchadourian explores the ways in which guilt functions within individual lives and intimate relationships, looking at behaviors that typically induce guilt in both historical and modern contexts. He examines how the capacity for moral judgments develops within individuals and through evolutionary processes. He then turns to the socio-cultural aspects of guilt and (...) addresses society's attempts to come to terms with guilt as culpability through the legal process. This personal work draws from, and integrates, material from extensive primary and secondary literature. Through the extensive use of literary and personal accounts, it provides an intimate picture of what it is like to experience this universal emotion. Written in clear and engaging prose, with a touch of humor, _Guilt_ should appeal to a wide audience. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

Trolley cases are widely considered central to the ethics of autonomous vehicles. We caution against this by identifying four problems. Trolley cases, given technical limitations, rest on assumptions that are in tension with one another. Furthermore, trolley cases illuminate only a limited range of ethical issues insofar as they cohere with a certain design framework. Furthermore, trolley cases seem to demand a moral answer when a political answer is called for. Finally, trolley cases might be epistemically problematic in several ways. (...) To put forward a positive proposal, we illustrate how ethical challenges arise from mundane driving situations. We argue that mundane situations are relevant because of the specificity they require and the scale they exhibit. We then illustrate some of the ethical challenges arising from optimizing for safety, balancing safety with other values such as mobility, and adjusting to incentives of legal frameworks. (shrink)

In this paper I consider fairness of blaming a wrongdoer. In particular, I consider the claim that blaming a wrongdoer can be unfair because blame has a certain characteristic force, a force which is not fairly imposed upon the wrongdoer unless certain conditions are met--unless, e.g., the wrongdoer could have done otherwise, or unless she is someone capable of having done right, or unless she is able to control her behavior by the light of moral reasons. While agreeing that blame (...) has a characteristic force, I am skeptical of this charge of unfairness. My skepticism concerns itself less with the particular conditions of fairness proposed than with the idea that blame can be rendered unfair by its characteristic force. If to blame a person were simply to perform certain intentional actions, then, as we will see, blame could be rendered unfair by its force. But to blame a person is not just to act in certain ways. It is, at least in large part, to make certain judgments or adopt certain attitudes. However, it is unclear how these attitudes or judgments carry "force"? and also unclear whether they can be rendered unfair by their force. Examining these issues, I will suggest that much of the force of blame is found in a set of judgments--most centrally, the judgment that one person failed to show proper regard for others. But, I will argue, once it is granted that such judgments are true, their characteristic force cannot render them unfair. (shrink)

The ethical dilemma of whether autonomous vehicles should protect the passengers or pedestrians when harm is unavoidable has been widely researched and debated. Several behavioral scientists have sought public opinion on this issue, based on the premise that EDs are critical to resolve for AV adoption. However, many scholars and industry participants have downplayed the importance of these edge cases. Policy makers also advocate a focus on higher level ethical principles rather than on a specific solution to EDs. But conspicuously (...) absent from this debate is the view of the consumers or potential adopters, who will be instrumental to the success of AVs. The current research investigated this issue both from a theoretical standpoint and through empirical research. The literature on innovation adoption and risk perception suggests that EDs will be heavily weighted by potential adopters of AVs. Two studies conducted with a broad sample of consumers verified this assertion. The results from these studies showed that people associated EDs with the highest risk and considered EDs as the most important issue to address as compared to the other technical, legal and ethical issues facing AVs. As such, EDs need to be addressed to ensure robustness in the design of AVs and to assure consumers of the safety of this promising technology. Some preliminary evidence is provided about interventions to resolve the social dilemma in EDs and about the ethical preferences of prospective early adopters of AVs. (shrink)

How should autonomous vehicles be programmed to behave in the event of an unavoidable accident in which the only choice open is one between causing different damages or losses to different objects or persons? This paper addresses this ethical question starting from the normative principles elaborated in the law to regulate difficult choices in other emergency scenarios. In particular, the paper offers a rational reconstruction of some major principles and norms embedded in the Anglo-American jurisprudence and case law on the (...) “doctrine of necessity”; and assesses which, if any, of these principles and norms can be utilized to find reasonable guidelines for solving the ethical issue of the regulation of the programming of autonomous vehicles in emergency situations. The paper covers the following topics: the distinction between “justification” and “excuse”, the legal prohibition of intentional killing outside self-defence, the incommensurability of goods, and the legal constrains to the use of lethal force set by normative positions: obligations, responsibility, rights, and authority. For each of these principles and constrains the possible application to the programming of autonomous vehicles is discussed. Based on the analysis, some practical suggestions are offered. (shrink)

Recent evolutionary perspectives on guilt tend to focus on how guilt functions as a means for the individual to self-regulate behavior and as a mechanism for reinforcing cooperative tendencies. While these accounts highlight important dimensions of guilt and provide important insights into its evolutionary emergence, they pay scant attention to the large empirical literature on its maladaptive effects on individuals. This paper considers the nature of guilt, explores its biological function, and provides an evolutionary perspective on whether it is an (...) individual-level or group selected trait. After surveying philosophical and psychological analyses of guilt, we consider which psychological mechanisms underlie the capacity to experience and act from guilt and whether they point to an emergence of guilt in early humans or to guilt having a longer phylogenetic history. Because guilt is a characteristically social emotion, we then examine its contemporary role in social and legal contexts, which may p... (shrink)

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams describes the experience of guilt in terms of fear at the anger of an internalised other, who is a “victim or enforcer.” Williams says it is a merit of his account that it shows how our guilt turns us towards the victims of our wrongdoing. I argue that his account in fact misses the most important form of guilt's “concern with victims”– the experience of remorse. I consider, and reject, one way of trying to (...) supplement this lack in Williams's account of guilt. Finally, I sketch some features of remorse that suggest that remorse belongs to a very different moral picture from the one painted by Williams. (shrink)

It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally (...) to deserve to feel guilty. Being blamed by someone else is not necessarily harmful to the wrongdoer. The blame might not be expressed, or the wrongdoer might not care. But to blame oneself necessarily involves suffering. This conception of blameworthiness explains why the control condition should obtain: We are morally blameworthy for A only if A was under our control because to be blameworthy is to deserve to feel guilty, to feel guilty is to suffer, and one deserves to suffer for A only if A was under one’s control. (shrink)

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue (...) that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun. -/- Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The authors go on (...) to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003).

The doyen of living English philosophers, by these reflections, took hold of and changed the outlook of a good many other philosophers, if not quite enough. He did so, essentially, by assuming that talk of freedom and responsibility is talk not of facts or truths, in a certain sense, but of our attitudes. His more explicit concern was to look again at the question of whether determinism and freedom are consistent with one another -- by shifting attention to certain personal (...) rather than moral attitudes, first of all gratitude and resentment. In the end, he arrived at a kind of Compatibilist or, as he says, Optimist conclusion. That is no doubt a recommendation but not the largest recommendation of this splendidly rich piece of philosophy. (shrink)

In "Moral Luck" Bernard Williams famously drew on our intuitive judgments about agent-regret – mostly, on our judgment that agent-regret is often appropriate – in his argument about the role of luck in rational and moral evaluation. I think that Williams is importantly right about the appropriateness of agent-regret, but importantly wrong about the implications of this observation. In this paper, I suggest an alternative understanding of the normative judgment Williams is putting forward, the one about the appropriateness of agent-regret. (...) I distinguish between being responsible and taking responsibility. The judgment about the appropriateness of agent-regret, I argue, is better understood as a judgment about the (forward-looking) moral duty to take responsibility than about the (backward-looking) fact of being responsible. The distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility is wider in scope, though, than the discussion of agent-regret, and in this paper I go to some lengths elaborating on this distinction and its theoretical usefulness. Thus, I distinguish different senses of taking responsibility (forward- and backward-looking; just acknowledging responsibility that is already there vs. making it the case that one is responsible); I argue against initial doubts about the very coherence of this stronger understanding of taking-responsibility; and I specify the background conditions for the possibility of taking responsibility in this strong sense. The discussion of the normative background conditions necessary for the possibility of taking responsibility in the strong sense leads to a discussion of an intuitive notion of penumbral agency. Thus, I cannot take responsibility for Jefferson's owning slaves – the relevant actions and events are just too far from my agency to allow for me to take responsibility over them. Of course, I can issue statements that sound like an attempt to take responsibility. But I cannot thereby become responsible. It is just not within my power to make it the case that I am responsible for Jefferson's slave-ownership. At the other extreme, for some things I do not need to take responsibility in order to be responsible. For my actions – or perhaps intentions, or some such – I am already responsible, independently of whether I ever take (or even acknowledge) responsibility. These things are within the core of my agency, and I am responsible for them regardless of whether I take responsibility for them. But we should acknowledge the fact that there is more to this spectrum than just the extremes. Some actions and events are not within my core agency, but nor are they too far to allow me to take responsibility for them (thereby becoming responsible for them). Possible examples include the actions of my country, the actions of my rather young children, and – now getting back to Williams's discussion – the uncontrolled consequences of my actions. In these cases of penumbral agency, I argue, we are not responsible, but we can become responsible by taking responsibility. Furthermore, we may have a moral duty to take responsibility. Thus, the distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility is theoretically useful in accounting for our intuitively problematic and ambivalent responsibility-judgments. In the case of my country's actions, for instance, we want to say both that I am not responsible for them (given my very limited power to influence them); but we also want to say that there's something wrong about my refusing to accept responsibility for my country's actions, or about my just noting that I am not responsible for those actions. Utilizing the distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility, we can say that while I am not responsible for my country's actions, I am under a moral duty to take (some) responsibility for them. In the case of agent-regret and moral luck, this distinction allows us – vis-à-vis Williams – to have our cake and eat it too. True, agent-regret is often appropriate. But this shows nothing directly about responsibility. Rather, it shows something about our moral duties to take responsibility. And that these duties are sensitive to lucky circumstances is not more mysterious or paradoxical than the circumstances-sensitivity of pretty much all of our other moral duties. In other words, thus understood, the appropriateness of agent-regret is perfectly compatible with the denial of moral luck. (shrink)

This essay is primarily concerned with one type of moral luck – luck in how things turn out. Do acts that actually lead to harm deserve the same treatment as similar acts that, by chance, do not lead to harm? This paper argues that we must recognize the truth in two, opposing tendencies in such cases.