Abstract:In this essay, I describe and explain the standard accounts of agency, natural agency, artificial agency, and moral agency, as well as articulate what are widely taken to be the criteria for moral agency, supporting the contention that this is the standard account with citations from such widely-used and respected professional resources as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I then flesh out the implications of some of these well-settled theories with respect to the prerequisites that an ICT must satisfy in order to count as a moral agent accountable for its behavior. I argue that each of the various elements of the necessary conditions for moral agency presupposes consciousness, i.e., the capacity for inner subjective experience like that of pain or, as Nagel puts it, the possession of an internal something-of-which-it isis-to-be-like. I ultimately conclude that the issue of whether artificial moral agency is possible depends on the issue of whether it is possible for ICTs to be conscious.

In this essay, I describe and explain the standard accounts of agency, natural agency, artificial agency, and moral agency, as well as articulate what are widely taken to be the criteria for moral agency, supporting the contention that this is the standard account with citations from such widely used and respected professional resources as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I then flesh out the implications of some of these well-settled theories with respect to the prerequisites that an ICT must satisfy in order to count as a moral agent accountable for its behavior. I argue that each of the various elements of the necessary conditions for moral agency presupposes consciousness, i.e., the capacity for inner subjective experience like that of pain or, as Nagel puts it, the possession of an internal something-of-which-it is-is-to-be-like. I ultimately conclude that the issue of whether artificial moral agency is possible depends on the issue of whether it is possible for ICTs to be conscious.

The amount of content, both on and offline, to which people in reasonably affluent nations have access has increased to the point that it has raised concerns that we are now suffering from a harmful condition of Ôinformation overload.Õ Although the phrase is being used more frequently, the concept is not yet well understood -beyond expressing the rather basic idea of having access to more information than is good for us. This essay attempts to provide a philosophical explication of the concept of information overload and is therefore what philosophers call Ôconceptual analysisÕ -a task that, along with normative ethical analysis, is distinctive to Anglo-American style analytic philosophy. I will begin with an analysis of the atomic concepts expressed by the terms ÔinformationÕ and ÔoverloadÕ and then attempt to give a philosophical explanation of the concept of information overload that more precisely identifies exactly what the condition amounts to.