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Responsibility Gaps and Retributive Dispositions: Evidence from the US, Japan and Germany.
Markus Kneer1, Markus Christen2
1IDea_Lab, University of Graz, Graz, Austria. markus.kneer@gmail.com.
Science and Engineering Ethics
|October 17, 2024
Summary
People are willing to hold autonomous systems responsible for harm, challenging the idea of responsibility gaps. This cross-cultural study finds that retributivist moral inclinations conflict with the possibility of no one being accountable for autonomous actions.
Area of Science:
- Moral Philosophy
- Cognitive Science
- Robotics Ethics
Background:
- Increasing robotization raises concerns about accountability for harm caused by autonomous systems.
- Danaher (2016) introduced the concept of 'retribution gaps,' where no one can be justly held responsible for harmful outcomes, conflicting with retributivist moral beliefs.
- Autonomous weapon systems present a critical case study for exploring responsibility gaps in real-world scenarios.
Purpose of the Study:
- To empirically investigate cross-cultural perceptions of moral responsibility for autonomous systems.
- To examine how people assign responsibility when autonomous systems commit harmful acts, specifically war crimes.
- To assess the conflict between retributivist moral inclinations and the potential for responsibility gaps.
Main Methods:
- Cross-cultural empirical study involving participants from the United States, Japan, and Germany.
- Utilized a scenario based on Sparrow's (2007) example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime.
- Data collected on participants' willingness to assign moral responsibility and their attributions of blame to both systems and human agents.
Main Results:
- Participants showed a significant willingness to assign moral responsibility to autonomous systems.
- Human agents interacting with autonomous systems were partially exculpated.
- The findings indicate that the existence of normative responsibility gaps is incongruent with strong retributivist moral inclinations.
Conclusions:
- The study provides empirical support for the tension between retributivist morality and the emergence of responsibility gaps due to autonomous systems.
- Findings have implications for legal and ethical frameworks governing artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies.
- Further research is needed to explore the societal and ethical consequences of responsibility gaps in the context of advanced automation.
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