Excuses, excuses: moral agency and the professional identity of AI developers

Abstract Artificial intelligence developers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists occupy a contradictory role in the modern marketplace. While they are central to the business and science of AI, they are marginalized as moral agents. Consequently, the marketplace has cultivated environments in which developers can be unthinking in their own roles and responsibilities, while at the same time tasking them with creating “thinking machines.” The central aim of this article is to show that this state of affairs is morally unjustifiable. To accomplish this, we draw from Arthur Isak Applbaum’s work on adversary roles and Alasdair MacIntyre’s framework for professional moral agency to establish the context dependencies for a “good” AI developer. We then draw from available studies that have engaged developers in questions about their moral agency and place them in conversation with Dennis Thompson and Helen Nissenbaum about the excuses associated with “the problem of many hands,” a concept that has beguiled accountability in the AI community for decades. We then return to MacIntyre’s framework to provide evidence from the same set of studies that AI developers do understand themselves as being responsible for more than just the role, yet they lack a robust community to whom they can submit their choices for ethical scrutiny and work environments that are often non-conducive to their moral actualization. We conclude with specific recommendations for bringing developers’ moral agency more fully into the discourse about AI ethics.