Moral responsibility

I mean, we see this, for example, in the debate over fully autonomous lethal weapons.

Where does the moral responsibility lie if the decision making is outsourced to this artificial intelligence? In my question that I had presented to you guys, I said, is this a way of morality laundering? I think in the legal world, this presents big problems, like who is actually liable for causing the harm if there's no mental state that you're gonna point to to any one person.

But I'm wondering how you think about this as the locus of moral responsibility when it comes to AI models and the decisions that they make that are then acted upon.

So I think that, sort of the key term to sit in there is diffusion, right? So what AI and particularly what the sort of widespread application of LLMs in particular excels at more than anything is just speed and scale.

Just speed and scale.

And so Al-Jubayr, he replies, he says, Allah would say to him, I knew that if you lived to adulthood, you would sin and be punished.

So I acted in your best interest and caused you to die before reaching the age of moral responsibility.

So here his argument is, al-Jubayr's argument is, see in this case, the child is complaining that if he had a longer life, he could have lived and he could have been elevated in degree and rank because of his righteousness.

And so Allah, the child doesn't know though, Allah knows what was best for him and he caused him to die because he knew that child would end up being a sinner or a disbeliever or something of that nature.

My academic specialty is medieval literature and culture, but I'm also a novelist.

And the reason I'm here is that my most recent novel is called Culpability, and it's a contemporary suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of A.I.

And I'm David Danks.

I'm currently jointly appointed between philosophy and the School of Data Science.

You're a scholar.

How do you approach, how do you advocate for those kinds of moral questions? And what are the difficulties you face?

Well, one of the big difficulties is exactly the one that you're already pointing to and that you tackle in the book, which is the complexity of moral responsibility.

And then, as you said, layering on top of that the fact that AI, at least in its current incarnation, doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that we can hold responsible.

Moral and mental laziness have emerged from the course of inaction towards these problems in our communities and even in our immediate families.

This ineptness has seriously affected the personal moral responsibility of the individual.

These conditions were apparent to the late brother Peter Marshall, Old Monkland St. James Lodge No. 177 in South Carolina, when he made the significant statement, Let us stand for something, lest we fall for anything.

We need directive purpose in our striving and endeavors for successful living.

With this, Hannah Arendt pinpoints a central idea of Kantian moral philosophy.

No human can relinquish their moral responsibility by invoking the command of another.

Anyone who takes the philosophy of Kant seriously must examine their own actions and may not hide behind blind obedience.

Arendt's statement is therefore not a blanket call to disregard every rule and every instruction.

It's crazy.

And, and, and the, the use of AI is an interesting aspect of it because it's, it's another way to kind of not be able to be morally responsible for these types of acts, right? It's a way to say, "Oh, it was the..." I, I actually wr- recently wr- written something about AI and how I think that it can be eventually used as, um, a way to just basically wash their hands of moral responsibility, point at it, say, "It did that.

We don't know how it did it." You know, the- these agents got out, they started this cyber pandemic, and it causes a cascade of events that eventually, as always happens, is it reduces our rights as citizens because they have to protect us for our security, of course.

Um, so you know, as you said, on a battlefield, how do you define a battlefield? You know what I mean? It, you know, you have battlefields in Ukraine, battlefields in, in Gaza, um, but there's also urban environments, like you said, or they target you, say, "Well, you're acting much like a, a domestic terrorist," you know? Or look at, uh, J6.

have to be.

And that notion of moral culpability is paramount in Christian ethics, because moral responsibility means that, like, as a part of bearing God's image, it means you actually have moral capacities to know right from wrong, which is crucial for our humanity in order to be understanding ourselves as having violated God's moral law.

And so this push towards therapeutism, I think, actually serves to undermine the dignity of those who have done wrong because you actually—a part of punishment— is in hopes that the person recognizes that they come to grips with the nature of what they did actually being wrong.

And you're