On the Morality of Artificial Agents

Erratum to: Book Symposium on Peter Paul Verbeek’s Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011

“…Hardly anybody who studies the moral significance of things would claim that things in themselves have moral agency. And if this claim is made at all, it is done at a level of abstraction that makes it much less absurd, like Floridi and Sanders did in their inspiring article 'On the morality of artificial agents' (Floridi and Sanders 2004). Moralizing Technology, in any case, does not intend to defend this idea at all.…”

Beyond the skin bag: on the moral responsibility of extended agencies

“…Dennet (1997) and those cognitive scientists represented in Dietrich (1994) are more willing than most to credit automated agents with mental qualities such as these, and are thus more open to the notion that they are, or eventually will be, morally responsible. But most thinkers are unwilling to go this far, and they resort to locutions about technological objects being quasi-responsible, conducive to moral behavior, implicated in it, and the like (Johnson and Powers 2005, Johnson 2006, Floridi and Sanders 2004, Stahl 2006, Verbeek 2006.…”

Technological Delegation: Responsibility for the Unintended

“…Based on these kinds of observations, many philosophers of technology [3,4,[16][17][18] conclude that artifacts are mediating our behavior. Technological artifacts are not just passive tools: they affect our actions and intentions.…”

“…Often, more than one human and one artifact are involved, as mediation by composition makes clear. When discussing artificial intelligence, Floridi and Sanders have addressed this point extensively, arguing for assigning moral responsibility to artifacts [16]. But also artifacts without intelligence can be understood as co-shapers of action, though of course they can never be held morally responsible in any sense.…”