I’ve a brand new paper popping out within the journal Philosophy and Expertise. It is about duty gaps and why, on some events, they’re good factor and we should not all the time attempt to plug them. Extra particularly, it has how one of many advantages of autonomous machines is that they permit a decreased price type of ethical delegation. Extra particulars under.
Title: Tragic Choices and the Virtue of Techno-Responsibility Gaps
Hyperlinks: Official; Philpapers; Researchgate
Summary: There’s a concern that the widespread deployment of autonomous machines will open up numerous ‘duty gaps’ all through society. Numerous articulations of such techno-responsibility gaps have been proposed through the years, together with a number of potential options. Most of those options deal with ‘plugging’ or ‘dissolving’ the gaps. This paper affords an alternate perspective. It argues that techno-responsibility gaps are, typically, to be welcomed and that one of many benefits of autonomous machines is that they permit us to embrace sure sorts of duty hole. The argument is predicated on the concept human morality is usually tragic. We often confront conditions wherein competing ethical issues pull in numerous instructions and it’s unattainable to completely stability these issues. This heightens the burden of duty related to our decisions. We deal with the tragedy of ethical alternative in numerous methods. Typically we delude ourselves into considering the alternatives we make weren’t tragic (illusionism); typically we delegate the tragic option to others (delegation); typically we make the selection ourselves and bear the psychological penalties (responsibilisation). Every of those methods has its advantages and prices. One potential benefit of autonomous machines is that they permit a decreased price type of delegation. Nevertheless, we solely acquire the benefit of this decreased price if we settle for that some techno-responsibility gaps are virtuous.
