The Experts below are selected from a list of 51381 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Vaishak Belle - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Learning tractable probabilistic models for Moral Responsibility and blame
2021Co-Authors: Lewis Hammond, Vaishak BelleAbstract:Moral Responsibility is a major concern in autonomous systems, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to kidney exchanges. Although there have been recent attempts to formalise Responsibility and blame, among similar notions, the problem of learning within these formalisms has been unaddressed. From the viewpoint of such systems, the urgent questions are: (a) How can models of Moral scenarios and blameworthiness be extracted and learnt automatically from data? (b) How can judgements be computed effectively and efficiently, given the split-second decision points faced by some systems? By building on constrained tractable probabilistic learning, we propose and implement a hybrid (between data-driven and rule-based methods) learning framework for inducing models of such scenarios automatically from data and reasoning tractably from them. We report on experiments that compare our system with human judgement in three illustrative domains: lung cancer staging, teamwork management, and trolley problems.
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deep tractable probabilistic models for Moral Responsibility
2018Co-Authors: Lewis Hammond, Vaishak BelleAbstract:Moral Responsibility is a major concern in automated decision-making, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to kidney exchanges. From the viewpoint of automated systems, the urgent questions are: (a) How can models of Moral scenarios and blameworthiness be extracted and learnt automatically from data? (b) How can judgements be computed tractably, given the split-second decision points faced by the system? By building on deep tractable probabilistic learning, we propose a learning regime for inducing models of such scenarios automatically from data and reasoning tractably from them. We report on experiments that compare our system with human judgement in three illustrative domains: lung cancer staging, teamwork management, and trolley problems.
Luciano Floridi - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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faultless Responsibility on the nature and allocation of Moral Responsibility for distributed Moral actions
2016Co-Authors: Luciano FloridiAbstract: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 Moral 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'.
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faultless Responsibility on the nature and allocation of Moral Responsibility for distributed Moral actions
2016Co-Authors: Luciano FloridiAbstract: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 Moral 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.
James Dempsey - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Moral Responsibility shared values and corporate culture
2015Co-Authors: James DempseyAbstract:Although it is unremarkable to hear a corporate culture described as ethical or unethical, it remains quite unclear what such a claim means or how it may be justified. I begin by addressing these two questions by offering an account of corporate culture as the intrinsic values that are shared by organisation members and that underpin organisational goals. I then employ this analysis to offer a new account of how Moral Responsibility is generated and distributed in business organisations. Since certain corporate values, or culture, will predictably promote wrongdoing by members, all those who participated in that culture will acquire a degree of Moral Responsibility for the wrongdoing that results. They are, we may say, complicit in the wrongdoing because they helped facilitate it. This is because, by sharing values in the way that creates corporate culture, organisation members give each other reasons for acting in line with those values
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corporations and non agential Moral Responsibility
2013Co-Authors: James DempseyAbstract:One of the core challenges presented by ascriptions of Moral Responsibility to corporations is to identify who or what is being held responsible. A significant source of controversy in attempts to answer this challenge is whether or not Responsibility can fall on a ‘corporate entity’ distinct from the individuals that make it up. In this article I argue that both sides of this debate have incorrectly assumed that the possession of Moral agency is a necessary condition for holding Moral Responsibility. I go on to argue that it is sufficient for a corporate entity to be a ‘Morally significant system’, that is a non-agential system created by Moral agents, and I develop an account of such systems. I conclude by setting out the implications of this analysis for our practices of holding corporations Morally responsible.
Roy F Baumeister - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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forget the folk Moral Responsibility preservation motives and other conditions for compatibilism
2019Co-Authors: Cory J Clark, Bo Winegard, Roy F BaumeisterAbstract:For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and Moral Responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to Moral Responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of Moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for Moral Responsibility than participants who were asked about Moral Responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments-and only when the descriptions had Moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and Moral Responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that Moral Responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold Moral Responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed.
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forget the folk Moral Responsibility preservation motives and other conditions for compatibilism
2017Co-Authors: Cory J Clark, Bo Winegard, Roy F BaumeisterAbstract:For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe. We argue that these attempts are misguided because (1) lay people do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will and (2) people are strongly motivated to preserve free will and Moral Responsibility. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that compatibilism is particularly compelling when determinism poses potential threats to Moral Responsibility. In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of Moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for Moral Responsibility than participants who were asked about Moral Responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism arguments influenced their compatibilist judgments—and only when the arguments had Moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will argument first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and Moral Responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that Moral Responsibility can be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Rather, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold Moral Responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed.
Manuel Velasquez - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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debunking corporate Moral Responsibility
2003Co-Authors: Manuel VelasquezAbstract:I address three topics. First, I argue that the issue of corporate Moral Responsibility is an important one for business ethics. Second, I examine a core argument for the claim that the corporate organization is a separate Moral agent and show it is based on an unnoticed but elementary mistake deriving from the fallacy of division. Third, I examine the assumptions collectivists make about what it means to say that organizations act and that they act intentionally and show that these assumptions are mistaken in their failure to understand the nature of intentional causality and of “as-if” intentionality. In exposing these mistakes I set out my own view in the form of two theses, the first of which states that individual members of an organization are always causally responsible for any corporate act, and the second of which states that attributions of intentions to corporations are always either descriptive or prescriptive attributions of “as if” intentionality.