Floridi Luciano
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2016 Dec 28;374(2083). doi: 10.1098/rsta.2016.0112.
The concept of distributed moral responsibility (DMR) has a long history. When it is understood as being entirely reducible to the sum of (some) human, individual and already morally loaded actions, then the allocation of DMR, and hence of praise and reward or blame and punishment, may be pragmatically difficult, but not conceptually problematic. However, in distributed environments, it is increasingly possible that a network of agents, some human, some artificial (e.g. a program) and some hybrid (e.g. a group of people working as a team thanks to a software platform), may cause distributed actions (DMAs). These are morally good or evil (i.e. morally loaded) actions caused by local interactions that are in themselves neither good nor evil (morally neutral). In this article, I analyse DMRs that are due to DMAs, and argue in favour of the allocation, by default and overridably, of full moral responsibility (faultless responsibility) to all the nodes/agents in the network causally relevant for bringing about the DMA in question, independently of intentionality. The mechanism proposed is inspired by, and adapts, three concepts: back propagation from network theory, strict liability from jurisprudence and common knowledge from epistemic logic.This article is part of the themed issue 'The ethical impact of data science'.
分布式道德责任（DMR）的概念由来已久。当它被理解为完全可归结为（某些）人类的、个体的且已具有道德内涵的行为总和时，那么DMR的分配，以及随之而来的赞扬与奖励或责备与惩罚的分配，在实践中可能会很困难，但在概念上并无问题。然而，在分布式环境中，越来越有可能出现这样的情况：一个由智能体组成的网络，其中一些是人类，一些是人工的（例如程序），还有一些是混合的（例如借助软件平台作为团队工作的一群人），可能会引发分布式行为（DMA）。这些行为是由本身既非善亦非恶（道德中立）的局部交互所导致的道德上的善或恶（即具有道德内涵）的行为。在本文中，我分析了由DMA导致的DMR，并主张默认且可推翻地将完全道德责任（无过错责任）分配给网络中与引发相关DMA有因果关系的所有节点/智能体，而不考虑其意图。所提出的机制受到网络理论中的反向传播、法理学中的严格责任以及认知逻辑中的共同知识这三个概念的启发并加以改编。本文是主题为“数据科学的伦理影响”的特刊的一部分。
