New article on the possibility of machines as moral agents online

One of the real perks of supervising PhD students is that they tend to force you outside your established academic comfort zone, and explore new territories of philosophical inquiry. This is what has happened when I have followed the footsteps and eventually joined the work of Dorna Behdadi, who is pursuing a PhD project in our practical philosophy group on the theme of Moral Agency in Animals and Machines. She has led the work on a new paper, where I am co-authour, that is now available online as a so-called preprint, while it is being considered for publication by a scientific journal. The title of the paper is "Artificial Moral Agency: Reviewing Philosophical Assumptions and Methodological Challenges", and deals with the notion of machines or any artificial entity (possibly a very advanced not yet existing one) could ever be ascribed agency of a moral sort, that might imply moral wrongdoing, responsibility for such wrongdoing (by the machine), or similar things.

Tts abstract runs thus:

The emerging field of "machine ethics" has raised the issue of the moral agency and responsibility of artificial entities, like computers and robots, under the heading of "artificial moral agents" (AMA). We analyze the philosophical assumptions at play in this debate and conclude that it is characterized by a rather pronounced conceptual and/or terminological confusion. Mostly, this confusion regards how central concepts and expressions (like agency, autonomy, responsibility, free will, rationality, consciousness) are (assumed to be) related to each other. This, in turn, creates a lack of basis for assessing either to what extent proposed positions and arguments are compatible or not, or whether or not they at all address the same issue. Furthermore, we argue that the AMA debate would benefit from assessing some underlying methodological issues, for instance, regarding the relationship between conceptual, epistemic, pragmatic and ethical reasons and positions. Lastly, because this debate has some family resemblance to debates on the moral status of various kinds of beings, the AMA discussion needs to acknowledge that there exists a challenge of demarcation regarding what kind of entities that can and should be ascribed moral agency.

 The paper can be viewed and downloaded for free here and here.

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Follow our live-streamed symposium: Reconsidering Humanity: Big Data, the Scientific Method, and the Images of Humans

One of the things I do since a number of years is to partake in the multi-disciplinary and cross-sectorial Technology, Institutions and Change working group of the major independent Swedish humanities and social science research funder Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, RJ. This groups is involved in a number of initiatives, among these book projects, research network funding, support of research education and conference-organisation. Within this context, members expose one another to aspects of the group theme, and initiate educational forays by site-visits to relevant research environments. A number of these inspired political scientist Urban Strandberg and me to start pondering some of the more visionary sides of a wave of so-called Big Data approaches which have been flooding both the sciences and the humanities in recent years. In particular, we centred on the most ambitious research visions with regard to areas of scientific and humanities inquiry into the basic aspects of humanity, society and their respective natures, where cross-disciplinary big data approaches have been held out promises of groundbreaking advances on basic challenges, such as bridging the gaps between the subjective and the objective perspectives on human experience, the individual/singular and collective/general aspects of society, and the materialistic and abstract stances of perceiving the essence of human and social nature. To address these visions and perceptions and – let's admit it – hopes and fears, with a simultaneously critical and constructive eye, we ventured to assemble, with the kind support of RJ, a selected multi-disciplinary and qualified assembly of researchers – and to some extent artists – all working in fields related to the grand Big Data visions, with philosophy, computer science, robotics, anthropology and neuroscience as some of the base disciplines.

The result is the symposium:

To make things manageable, we had to make the event invite only, but starting 9:30 CET the entire event will be streamed live on the web, here. More information, the program, abstracts, speaker presentations and more can be accessed here. Later, edited versions of the presentations will be made available as online videos. Please, spread the word! And if you're interested in the subject, don't hesitate to drop in virtually and become part of the flood of big data making up the core of the symposium's subject matter!