Moral zombies: why algorithms are not moral agents
Tóm tắt
In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism—the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components—is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency is something independent from sentience. Algorithms, I argue, are a kind of functional moral zombie, such that thinking about the latter can help us better understand and regulate the former. I contend that the main reason why algorithms can be neither autonomous nor accountable is that they lack sentience. Moral zombies and algorithms are incoherent as moral agents because they lack the necessary moral understanding to be morally responsible. To understand what it means to inflict pain on someone, it is necessary to have experiential knowledge of pain. At most, for an algorithm that feels nothing, ‘values’ will be items on a list, possibly prioritised in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel cannot value, and beings that do not value cannot act for moral reasons.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Birhane A, van Dijk J (2020) Robot Rights? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead. AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 207–213
Bostrom N (2012) The superintelligent will: motivation and instrumental rationality in advanced artificial agents. Mind Mach 22:71–85
Brislin SJ, Buchman-Schmitt JM, Joiner TE et al (2016) “Do unto others”? Distinct psychopathy facets predict reduced perception and tolerance of pain. Personal Disord 7(3):240–246
Bryson JJ, Diamantis ME, Grant TD (2017) Of, For, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons. Artif Intell Law 25:273–291
Cave S, Nyrup R, Vold K et al (2019) Motivations and risks of machine ethics. Proc IEEE 107(3):562–574
Christman J (2015) Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/autonomy-moral/
Coeckelbergh M (2016) Responsibility and the moral phenomenology of using self-driving cars. Appl Artif Intell 30(8):748–757
Danaher J (2020) Welcoming robots into the moral circle: a defence of ethical behaviourism. Sci Eng Ethics 26:2023–2049
Darolia R, Koedel C, Martorell P, et al. (2015) Do Employers prefer workers who attend for-profit colleges? evidence from a field experiment. J Policy Anal Manag 34(4):881–903
Frankfurt H (1999) Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge University Press
Levy N (2007) The responsibility of the psychopath revisited. Philos Psychiatry Psychol 14(2):129–138
McKenna M (2013) Reasons-responsiveness, agents, and mechanisms. In: Shoemaker D (ed) Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. Oxford University Press, p 151–183
Moor JH (2009) Four Kinds of Ethical Robots. Philos Now 72:12–14
Omohundro SM (2008) The Basic AI Drives. In: Wang P, Goertzel B, Franklin S (eds) Proceedings of the first artificial general intelligence conference. IOS Press, Amsterdam, p 483–492
O’Neil C (2016) Weapons of Math Destruction. Penguin
Schneewind J (1992) Autonomy, Obligation, and Virtue. In: Guyer P (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge University Press, p 309–341
van Wynsberghe A, Robbins S (2019) Critiquing the reasons for making artificial moral agents. Sci Eng Ethics 25:719–735
Varela FJ, Thompson E, Rosch E (1991) The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT
Véliz C (2016) The challenge of determining whether and A.I. Is Sentient. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2016/04/the-challenge-ofdetermining-whether-an-a-i-is-sentient.html. Accessed 14 April 2016
Velleman D (2002) Identification and Identity. In: Buss S, Overton L (eds) Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. MIT Press, p 91–123
Wallach W, Allen C (2009) Moral Machines. Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. Oxford University Press, New York City
Watson G (2013) Moral Agency. The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee294