Tracing and the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

Timpe, Kevin

doi:10.5840/schoolman2011881/22

Cited by 22 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Fischer and Ravizza’s second condition for guidance control, the ownership condition, may be characterized in terms of a tracing condition. The idea of tracing is often used by moral responsibility theorists and according to Manuel Vargas tracing “is one of a few things to which nearly all parties in the debate about free will [and moral responsibility] appeal to with equal enthusiasm” (Vargas, 2005 quoted by Timpe, 2011 ). The concept of tracing tries to capture the basic intuition that a human agent may be responsible for an outcome even if she does not satisfy the conditions for responsibility in situ at the time of her action, provided that she was responsible at an earlier time for finding herself later in the position of not satisfying those conditions.…”

Section: Meaningful Human Control: Tracking and Tracing Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meaningful Human Control over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

2018

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Debates on lethal autonomous weapon systems have proliferated in the past 5 years. Ethical concerns have been voiced about a possible raise in the number of wrongs and crimes in military operations and about the creation of a "responsibility gap" for harms caused by these systems. To address these concerns, the principle of "meaningful human control" has been introduced in the legal-political debate; according to this principle, humans not computers and their algorithms should ultimately remain in control of, and thus morally responsible for, relevant decisions about (lethal) military operations. However, policy-makers and technical designers lack a detailed theory of what "meaningful human control" exactly means. In this paper, we lay the foundation of a philosophical account of meaningful human control, based on the concept of "guidance control" as elaborated in the philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility. Following the ideals of "Responsible Innovation" and "Value-sensitive Design," our account of meaningful human control is cast in the form of design requirements. We identify two general necessary conditions to be satisfied for an autonomous system to remain under meaningful human control: first, a "tracking" condition, according to which the system should be able to respond to both the relevant moral reasons of the humans designing and deploying the system and the relevant facts in the environment in which the system operates; second, a "tracing" condition, according to which the system should be designed in such a way as to grant the possibility to always trace back the outcome of its operations to at least one human along the chain of design and operation. As we think that meaningful human control can be one of the central notions in ethics of robotics and AI, in the last part of the paper, we start exploring the implications of our account for the design and use of non-military autonomous systems, for instance, self-driving cars. Keywords: meaningful human control, autonomous weapon systems, responsibility gap, ethics of robotics, responsible innovation in robotics, value-sensitive design in robotics, ai ethics, ethics of autonomous systems Santoni de Sio and van den Hoven Meaningful Human Control over Autonomous Systems

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Section: Meaningful Human Control: Tracking and Tracing Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meaningful Human Control over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

2018

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“…130-141) distinguishes between different versions of the tracing view. For a discussion of tracing views see: Peels (2011), H.M. Smith (2011), Timpe (2011), andVargas (2005). 13 This example is modeled after an example by Sher (2009: 24).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Blameworthiness of Forgetting

Bernecker¹

2018

New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory

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“…Lastly, I look only at retrospective moral responsibility, or responsibility for what one has done. 2 Many theorists rely implicitly or explicitly on some notion of tracing: Vargas (2013); Smith (1983); Ekstrom (2000); van Inwagen (1989); Fischer and Ravizza (1998: 50); Dennett (1984: 13); Kane (1996: 39); Ginet (2000); Fischer and Tognazzini (2009); Timpe (2011); Audi (1991). Notable exceptions to this trend include Harry Frankfurt's (1998) later work on responsibility, Mason (2015), Scanlon (1998Scanlon ( , 2008, and Angela Smith (2005Smith ( , 2008Smith ( , 2015.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Place of the Trace: Negligence and Responsibility

Murray

2019

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome's obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory of responsibility.

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Tracing and the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

Cited by 22 publications

References 11 publications

Meaningful Human Control over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

Meaningful Human Control over Autonomous Systems: A Philosophical Account

On the Blameworthiness of Forgetting

The Place of the Trace: Negligence and Responsibility

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