scholarly journals Moral zombies: why algorithms are not moral agents

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carissa Véliz
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Experiential Knowledge ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Physical Components

AbstractIn philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons.

scholarly journals Relationships, Authority, and Reasons: A Second-Personal Account of Corporate Moral Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Alan D. Morrison ◽  
Rita Mota ◽  
William J. Wilhelm
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Corporate Communications ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Corporate Moral Agency ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Corporate Punishment

We present a second-personal account of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to the first-personal approach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation’s ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the relevance of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment.

Moral agents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinit Haksar
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Strong Version ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Concern For Others

Moral agents are those agents expected to meet the demands of morality. Not all agents are moral agents. Young children and animals, being capable of performing actions, may be agents in the way that stones, plants and cars are not. But though they are agents they are not automatically considered moral agents. For a moral agent must also be capable of conforming to at least some of the demands of morality. This requirement can be interpreted in different ways. On the weakest interpretation it will suffice if the agent has the capacity to conform to some of the external requirements of morality. So if certain agents can obey moral laws such as ‘Murder is wrong’ or ‘Stealing is wrong’, then they are moral agents, even if they respond only to prudential reasons such as fear of punishment and even if they are incapable of acting for the sake of moral considerations. According to the strong version, the Kantian version, it is also essential that the agents should have the capacity to rise above their feelings and passions and act for the sake of the moral law. There is also a position in between which claims that it will suffice if the agent can perform the relevant act out of altruistic impulses. Other suggested conditions of moral agency are that agents should have: an enduring self with free will and an inner life; understanding of the relevant facts as well as moral understanding; and moral sentiments, such as capacity for remorse and concern for others. Philosophers often disagree about which of these and other conditions are vital; the term moral agency is used with different degrees of stringency depending upon what one regards as its qualifying conditions. The Kantian sense is the most stringent. Since there are different senses of moral agency, answers to questions like ‘Are collectives moral agents?’ depend upon which sense is being used. From the Kantian standpoint, agents such as psychopaths, rational egoists, collectives and robots are at best only quasi-moral, for they do not fulfil some of the essential conditions of moral agency.

The Uses and Abuses of Narrative for Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Meretoja
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Narrative Ethics ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Blind Side ◽  
Ethical Evaluation ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Narrative Imagination ◽  
Culture Of Silence ◽  
The Continuum

Chapter 4 tests hermeneutic narrative ethics as a lens for analyzing the (ab)uses of narrative for life in Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007, The Blind Side of the Heart), exploring how narrative practices expand and diminish the space of possibilities in which moral agents act and suffer. It demonstrates how narrative “in-betweens” bind people together, through dialogic narrative imagination, and can promote exclusion that amounts to annihilation. It addresses the necessity of storytelling for survival, and a transgenerational culture of silence that leads to the repetition of harmful emotional-behavioral patterns. It explores the continuum from being able to tell one’s own stories to violently imposed narrative identities and suggests that moral agency requires a minimum narrative sense of oneself as a being worthy and capable of goodness. The chapter argues that the ethical evaluation of narrative practices must be contextual—sensitive to how they function in particular sociohistorical worlds.

scholarly journals Corporate Moral Agency and the Responsibility to Respect Human Rights in the UN Guiding Principles: Do Corporations Have Moral Rights?

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia H WERHANE
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Business And Human Rights ◽  
Human Agent ◽  
Guiding Principles ◽  
The United Nations

AbstractIn 2011 the United Nations (UN) published the ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework’ (Guiding Principles). The Guiding Principles specify that for-profit corporations have responsibilities to respect human rights. Do these responsibilities entail that corporations, too, have basic rights? The contention that corporations are moral persons is problematic because it confers moral status to an organization similar to that conferred to a human agent. I shall argue that corporations are not moral persons. But as collective bodies created, operated, and perpetuated by individual human moral agents, one can ascribe to corporations secondary moral agency as organizations. This ascription, I conclude, makes sense of the normative business responsibilities outlined in the Guiding Principles without committing one to the view that corporations are full moral persons.

Bauman on Moral Blindness

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-94
Author(s):  
Anthony Chuwkuebuka Ohaekwusi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Individual Choice ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Liquid Modernity ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Blindness ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Universe

This article analyzes Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of moral blindness against the backdrop of his designation of modern culture as a dynamic process of liquefaction constantly dissolving every paradigm and subject to the flexible and indeterminate power of individual choice. Bauman argued that the social conditions of this radically individualistic liquid modernity result in a kind of moral insensitivity that he calls adiaphorization. Adiaphorization for him places certain human acts outside the “universe of moral obligations.” It defies the entire orthodox theory of the social origins of morality as it reveals that some dehumanizing monstrous atrocities like the holocaust and genocides are not exclusively reserved for monsters, but can be attributable to “frighteningly normal” moral agents. The present text therefore attempts to discuss the various moral implications of Bauman’s analysis of moral blindness, with a view to highlighting its weaknesses. It moves on to explore Bauman’s recourse to Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the “face of the Other” as a viable ethical remedy that trumps the uncanny effects of this whole adiaphorization effect. Finally, the paper further advances his call for a rediscovery of the sense of belonging, by appealing to some major insights originating from African traditions of ethical communalism in order to propose a possible route towards the avoidance and amelioration of this moral challenge.

scholarly journals The Theft: An Analysis of Moral Agency

Conatus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Gerard Elfstrom
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Decisions

Adam and Eve’s theft marks the beginning of the human career as moral agents.   This article will examine the assumptions underlying the notion of moral agency from the perspective of three unremarkable human beings who found themselves in situations of moral difficulty.  The article will conclude that these three people could not have acted differently than they did.  It will conclude that it is unreasonable to assume that ordinary human beings will inevitably possess the resources to address difficult moral decisions.

Artificial Moral Agency in Technoethics

2009 ◽  
pp. 205-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Sullins
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Artificial Moral Agents ◽  
Traditional Notion

This chapter will argue that artificial agents created or synthesized by technologies such as artificial life (ALife), artificial intelligence (AI), and in robotics present unique challenges to the traditional notion of moral agency and that any successful technoethics must seriously consider that these artificial agents may indeed be artificial moral agents (AMA), worthy of moral concern. This purpose will be realized by briefly describing a taxonomy of the artificial agents that these technologies are capable of producing. I will then describe how these artificial entities conflict with our standard notions of moral agency. I argue that traditional notions of moral agency are too strict even in the case of recognizably human agents and then expand the notion of moral agency such that it can sensibly include artificial agents.

Jewish philosophy in the early 19th century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Seeskin
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Issues

Although Jewish philosophy flourished in the Middle Ages, it underwent a serious decline in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. The period following Kant and Mendelssohn witnessed an attempt to reintegrate Jewish philosophy into the mainstream of Western culture. The strategy of reintegration consisted of two elements: (1) showing that there is more to Judaism than the study of Scripture and (2) arguing that some of the ideas that won favour in the Enlightenment were anticipated by Jews centuries earlier. The most central idea that Jewish thinkers claimed as their own is a shift in focus from theoretical issues to practical ones. As important features of the medieval worldview fell into disrepute, many philosophers began to ask whether there are limits to what human reason can know. Can it really prove that God exists or that the soul is immortal? One response was to argue that even if no proof can be found, there are still grounds for believing, particularly if our understanding of ourselves as moral agents makes no sense without them. But it did not take long for people to argue that moral agency requires not just a God but a free and transcendent God capable of issuing commands to free agents created in the divine image. Here too, Jewish thinkers claimed that the idea of a God who is not limited by nature and insists on mercy and justice for all people was an integral part of monotheism as understood by the Hebrew prophets.

Margaret Cavendish

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cunning
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
First Century ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Universe

Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, poet, playwright, and novelist, went to battle with the great thinkers of her time, and in many cases arguably got the better of them, but she did not have the platform that she would have had in the twenty-first century. She took a creative and systematic stand on the major questions of philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. She defends a number of theses across her corpus: for example, that human beings and all other members of the created universe are wholly material; that matter is eternal; that the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies; that matter is generally speaking knowledgeable and perceptive and that non-human creatures like spiders, plants, and cells exhibit wisdom and skill; that motion is never transferred from one body to another, but bodies always move by motions that are internal to them; that sensory perception is not via impressions or stamping; that we can have no ideas of immaterials; and that creatures depend for their properties and features on the behavior of the beings that surround them. Cavendish uses her fictional work to further illustrate these views, and in particular to illustrate the view that creatures depend on their surroundings for their social and political properties. For example, she crafts alternative worlds in which women are not seen as unfit for roles such as philosopher, scientist, and military general, and in which they flourish. This volume of Cavendish’s writings provides a cross-section of her interconnected writings, views, and arguments.

What should relational egalitarians believe?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1470594X2110526
Author(s):  
Anne-Sofie Greisen Hojlund
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Central Elements

Many find that the objectionable nature of paternalism has something to do with belief. However, since it is commonly held that beliefs are directly governed by epistemic as opposed to moral norms, how could it be objectionable to hold paternalistic beliefs about others if they are supported by the evidence? Drawing on central elements of relational egalitarianism, this paper attempts to bridge this gap. In a first step, it argues that holding paternalistic beliefs about others implies a failure to regard them as equals in terms of their moral agency. In a second step, it shows that the fact that we should regard others as equals in this sense raises the threshold for sufficiency of evidence for paternalistic beliefs to be epistemically justified. That is, moral reasons of relational equality encroach on the epistemic. However, these reasons are not decisive. In cases where others are about to jeopardize critical goods such as their lives, mobility or future autonomy, relational equality sometimes calls for paternalistic action and, by extension, the formation of beliefs that render such action rational. The upshot is that in order to meet demands of relational equality we have a pro tanto reason to not hold paternalistic beliefs about others.

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