Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Giulio Fornaroli, ‘On corrective and distributive requirements: The case of the beneficiary pays principle’
ABSTRACT According to the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), following an injustice that has produced damages, agents that have received benefits from it may incur a duty to redress the victim even if they are not at fault for it. In this paper, I do not offer either a full-blown defense or a refutation of the […]
Linda Eggert, ‘Autonomised harming’
ABSTRACT This paper sketches elements of a theory of the ethics of autonomised harming: the phenomenon of delegating decisions about whether and whom to harm to artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems. First, the paper elucidates the challenge of integrating non-human, artificial agents, which lack rights and duties, into our moral […]
Grant, Behrends and Basl, ‘What we owe to decision-subjects: beyond transparency and explanation in automated decision-making’
ABSTRACT The ongoing explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is fueled in part by recently developed techniques in machine learning. Those techniques allow automated systems to process huge amounts of data, utilizing mathematical methods that depart from traditional statistical approaches, and resulting in impressive advancements in our ability to make predictions and uncover correlations across […]
Francis and Karhu, ‘Getting machines to do your dirty work’
ABSTRACT Autonomous systems are machines that can alter their behavior without direct human oversight or control. How ought we to program them to behave? A plausible starting point is given by the Reduction to Acts Thesis, according to which we ought to program autonomous systems to do whatever a human agent ought to do in […]
Craig Purshouse, ‘A utilitarian theory of private law’
ABSTRACT Private law covers a range of areas such as torts, contract law and property and its focus is on the rights we have against one another. It is often contrasted with public law, which is concerned with our rights against the state. Attempts to theorize private law have elicited widespread criticism for failing to […]
Ethan Leib, ‘Contract as Vow or Oath’
ABSTRACT Many scholars and judges attempt to harmonize legal practices of contracting with the social practice of promising in ordinary life. This article explores an alternative genealogy of contract in traditional social practices that track many of contract’s core norms: taking vows and oaths. Without denying that promissory morality infiltrates modern contract, contract-as-vow-or-oath can expose […]
Adam Slavny, ‘Varieties of Consequentialism and Deontology in Theories of Tort Law’
ABSTRACT An important contribution of Gregory Keating’s Reasonableness and Risk is to mount objections to law and economics whilst articulating an alternative deontological vision of tort law to that offered by corrective justice theorists. In this paper I offer two reservations about Keating’s account. One is that some forms of consequentialism can accommodate at least […]
Mark Gergen, ‘Contract Law’s Morality and Punitive Debt Enforcement’
ABSTRACT This article uses punitive enforcement of personal debt to critically examine contemporary moral theories of contract. Charles Fried and Peter Benson take the position contract law appropriately embodies the morality of commercial exchange. This has unacceptable implications for enforcement of personal debt because it licenses creditors to demand and enforce as harsh terms as […]
Kenneth Simons, ‘Exploring Nonconsequentialist Accounts of Negligence and Risky Tradeoffs’
ABSTRACT Negligence doctrine dominates tort law, yet its scope and underlying justification remain contested. One of the most controversial questions is the propriety of employing the Learned Hand test as a criterion of reasonable care or ordinary prudence. Is it helpful, or even essential, to evaluate whether the actor’s burden of taking a precaution (B) […]
‘Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility’
A self-driving taxi has no passengers, so it parks itself in a lot to reduce congestion and air pollution. After being hailed, the taxi heads out to pick up its passenger – and tragically strikes a pedestrian in a crosswalk on its way. Who or what deserves praise for the car’s actions to reduce congestion […]