Filling the Responsibility Gap: Agency and Responsibility in the Technological Age

The rise of automation, such as artificial intelligence, has significantly reduced human agency in artifact-involving actions, thereby giving rise to a moral dilemma known as the responsibility gap. In this dilemma, moral undesirable consequences arise from technology, yet no one is held accountable because individuals lack control over their actions and their outcomes, as well as the ability to predict these outcomes, rendering them morally blameless. This paper proposes a framework based on externalist agency and distributed responsibility, aiming to address this problem by assigning accountability to artifacts. Externalist agency holds that agency is a gradient concept rather than an all-or-nothing one. Between fully autonomous agency and non-agency, there are three intermediate gradients: distributed agency, constrained agency, and derivative agency. Distributed responsibility holds that responsibility should be allocated according to these gradients of agency. For both humans and artifacts: if an agent possesses derivative agency, forgiveness is warranted; if it possesses distributed agency, punishment is justifiable. This paper further suggests that punishment for artifacts can take the form of punishment for technological lineage—that is, modifying the design of technologies to guide their evolution toward safer and more ethical directions.