IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 86
commentary
commentary
Michael Arnold
The Story So Far...
n Part One of the
series it was sugges-
ted that technolo-
gies are not innocent,
and should be held
to moral account. In most inter-
pretations of Western moral phi-
losophy, moral judgement does
not extend to non-humans, and
for non-humans to be included, a
number of objections need to be
overcome. The objections include:
the arguments that morality is
the exclusivity domain of humans
(considered in Part Two), the argu-
ment that non-humans don't really
act (considered in Part Three), the
argument that technologies are
just dumb instruments (considered
in Part Four), the free will argument
(to be taken up here in Part Five),
and the dilution of responsibility
argument (forthcoming in Part Six).
I
The Free Will Argument
The fifth objection to the inclusion
of technologies in the domain of
moral or ethical assessment is that
unlike humans, technologies have
no will, and are not free to determine their actions. Closely tied
to the free will requirement is the
objection that technologies have no
capacity to foresee the outcomes
of their actions, and without this
knowledge cannot be held responsible for these outcomes. To be
morally accountable, an actor must
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2632979
Date of publication: 12 December 2016
86
Christopher Pearce
Are Technologies
Innocent?
Part Five:
The "Free Will" Argument
choose to act in circumstances in
which they might have chosen otherwise, and they have chosen to act
in this way in knowledge of the likely
consequences, or where it might be
reasonably expected that the actor
might anticipate these consequences. It can be seen that this requirement for free will and foreknowledge
of outcomes is an extension of the
"dumb instrument" argument dealt
with in the previous edition, and is a
particular expression of the broader
requirement for rationality and selfconsciousness.
Now it may be argued that some
applications of artificial intelligence
have demonstrated goal-setting and
semi-autonomous learning capacities that might be regarded as akin
to the possession of free will and
knowledge of consequences. For
example, a self-driving car will confront the well-known "Trolley Problem," requiring it to determine a
particular course of action where
other actions are open to it, and to
take that action in the knowledge of
the consequences. For example, the
car's decision-making system may
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
be faced with a situation where a collision is unavoidable: it can decide
to do nothing and run into the back
of the truck, almost certainly killing
its passenger and owner, or swerve
to the left, saving its owner but
almost certainly killing pedestrians.
In this circumstance the car's autonomous, interactive, adaptive decision-making system would no doubt
held to moral account for its actions,
but what of technologies that do not
have these exotic decision-making
capacities?
The requirement that moral
actors exercise free will, and the
requirement that free will be exercised in knowledge of the likely
consequences, has been long been
regarded as a prerequisite for moral
accountability. Consider the difference between say, a cracked skull
resulting from one person choosing
to hit another over the head with a
stone axe, and say, a cracked skull
resulting from a falling coconut. It is
argued that the human with the axe
had the choice of action, and might
have acted differently. The coconut
palm did not exercise a will to release
∕
DECEmber 2016
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