Moral Agency By: Oscar Rangel

What is Moral Agency? Moral agency is an individual’s ability to make moral judgements based on some notion of right or wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is “a being who is capable of acting with reference to right or wrong.

What is the Concept of Moral Agency? It’s a normative notion that picks out the class of being whose behavior is subject to moral requirements. The idea is that the behavior of a moral agent is governed by moral standards , while the behavior of something that is not a moral agent is not governed by moral standards.

What is the Concept of an Agency? (cont’d) Himma says agency is something that tends to be restricted to human individuals and animals-entities that can have intentions to act and that can perform an action. Everything else, like plants, rocks, and other inanimate objects, would be located outside the realm of agency.

John Searle Computer and related systems are typically understood to be and conceptualized as a “tool”.

What is the Moral Value of Mechanical Objects? David F. Channell explains” the moral value of purely mechanical objects is determined by factors that are external to them-in effect, by the usefulness to human beings.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwBmPiOmEGQ

Who’s to Blame or Praise? Normally since machines are defined as just another technological artifact or tool, then it is always someone else, perhaps a human designer, the operator of the mechanism, or event the corporation that manufactured the equipment that would typically be identified as the responsible party.

Who's to Blame or Praise (Cont’d) In the case of a catastrophic incident, the “accident "would be explained as an unfortunate consequence of a defect in the mechanism’s design, manufacture, or use. In the case of machine decision making or operations, the exhibited behavior would be explained and attributed to clever programming and design. If however, it is or becomes possible to assign some aspect of liability to the machine as such, he some aspect of moral responsibility would shift to the mechanism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouht1xip9NQ

Who’s to blame or praise? (Cont’d) Andreas Matthias says that it appears to be on the verge of a crucial responsibility gap, Autonomous, learning machines, based on neural networks genetic algorithms and agent architectures, create new situations, where the manufacture/operator of the machine is in principle not capable of predicting the future machine behavior anymore, and thus cannot be held morally responsible or liable for it.

Joanna Bryson In her essay “Robots should be slaves” a robots actions should be no different than they are for any other AI system and these are the same as for any other tool, ordinarily damage caused by a tool is the fault of the operator. Robots and AI systems are no different from any other technical artifact. They are tools of human manufacture, employed by human users for particular purposes, and as such merely “an extension of the user.

Automaton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7oSFNKIlaM

So What Makes Humans and Machines Different? The automaton, although capable of having the external shape and appearance of a man is absolutely unable to produce different arrangement of words. It may be able to react, but it can’t respond. It is not capable of stimulating the faculty of reason. Brooks mentions that computers, given the right set of software and the right problem domain, can reason about facts, can make decisions, and have goals.

Work cited Gunkel, David J. The Machine Question, Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics. N.p.: n.p., 2012. Print