Artificial Intelligence and Moral Responsibility: A Philosophical Problem
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Abstract
The progress of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised debates on moral responsibility. Humans tend to delegate tasks and practices to AI. Whereas AI can learn and make decision by itself, it cannot be morally responsible and independent from the human being. The crucial question is how can we understand and articulate the moral responsibility of AI if the practices of AI have unintended consequences or are morally wrong? According to a documentary research method, this article aims to study and analyze the problem of AI and moral responsibility. It then discusses and proposes arguments attempting to tackle the problem of the responsibility gap. As a result, it offers two thesis statements: (1) it advocates that moral responsibility demands moral agency in a non-traditional approach, i.e., it does not locate responsibility in the individual and its human-like attribution. Furthermore, (2) it argues, following the previous statement, that the concept of moral agency as a mutual interaction between humans and AI is necessary for moral responsibility. Although the argument tends to deal with agency and causality—which is consistent with a backward-looking approach, we should also adjust it to consider moral responsibility in terms of a forward-looking approach.
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