Robots to Blame?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Babushkina
Keyword(s):  
Social Robots ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Reactive Attitude ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
Attitudes And Practices

My concern is the preservation of rationally justifiable moral practices, which face challenges because of the increasing integration of social robots into roles previously occupied exclusively by persons. I will focus on the attribution of responsibility and blaming as examples of such practices. I will argue that blaming robots (a) does not satisfy the rational constraints on the reactive attitude of blame and other related reactive attitudes and practices such as resentment, forgiving, and punishment, and (b) is by itself morally wrong.

Respect and the Reactive Attitudes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Reactive Attitude ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Recognition Respect

The nature of both respect and the reactive attitudes is illuminated by understanding the reactive attitudes to be a class of emotions distinguished by their forming a distinctively interpersonal pattern of rationality. In feeling a reactive attitude such as resentment, one holds the wrongdoer responsible by “calling on” him to feel guilt and on witnesses to feel disapprobation or indignation; other things being equal, one’s resentment is unwarranted if that “call” is not taken up by others. This call and its uptake are made intelligible through the community members’ joint background commitment to the value of the community and its norms, and to the dignity of its members as members—a commitment undertaken and reaffirmed in their reactive attitudes. The resulting interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes constitute their joint recognition respect for its norms and for each other as a part of their joint reverence for the community.

Fair Opportunity and Responsibility

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David O. Brink
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Situational Influences ◽  
Structural Injustice ◽  
Crimes Of Passion ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Criminal Jurisprudence

Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a response-independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. Consequently, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent’s capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities—normative competence—and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference—situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion. Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.

Personal Relationships and Blame

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Reactive Attitude ◽  
Communal Relationships

Scanlon argues that blame involves revising one’s relationship with a wrongdoer because of the significance for the blamer of that wrongdoing, and he argues that reactive attitude accounts of blame cannot accommodate how blame varies according to that relationship. This chapter argues that a reactive attitude account can nonetheless accommodate this point. To do this, one must turn to broad, interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes in terms of which we can make sense of human communities. The sort of relationship whose impairment is relevant to blame, then, is that of co-membership in such communities, and the significance of the agent's wrongdoing relevant for blame is the significance those actions and attitudes have for us in the community. Examining the connections between one’s personal commitments and one’s communal relationships reveals that revisions to one’s relationship with the wrongdoer are a consequence rather than, as Scanlon claims, a part of blame.

Trust: A Forward-Looking Reactive Attitude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Reactive Attitude ◽  
Evaluative Judgments ◽  
Forward Looking

The reactive attitudes are often thought to be “reactive” in that they are backward-looking responses to wrongdoing that has already happened. This is a mistake that obscures the rational interconnections among the reactive attitudes. Rather, we should understand trust and distrust to be forward-looking reactive attitudes, so that in feeling trust we are thereby committed to later feeling approbation or gratitude when our trust is upheld or resentment when it is betrayed. Understanding trust in this way not only clarifies the rational interconnections among reactive attitudes. It also provides a compelling account of trust itself, including: the nature of trustworthiness and the rationality of trust; distinctions among personal, self, and vicarious reactive trust; the nature of welcome and unwelcome trust; and how trust can motivate the trustee to act in accordance with that trust. The Chapter concludes by helpfully blurring the distinction between emotions and evaluative judgments.

scholarly journals Shame and the Scope of Moral Accountability

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Tinghao Wang
Keyword(s):  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Reactive Attitude ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Stephen Darwall

Abstract It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore.

Strawson’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Russell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Attitudes And Practices

In “Freedom and Resentment” P. F. Strawson interprets the “Pessimist” as one who claims that if determinism is true then the attitudes and practices associated with moral responsibility cannot be justified and must be abandoned altogether. Against the pessimist Strawson argues that no reasoning of any sort could lead us to abandon or suspend our “reactive attitudes.” He claims that responsibility is a “given” of human life and society—something which we are inescapably committed to. This chapter argues that Strawson’s reply to the pessimist is seriously flawed. In particular, he fails to distinguish two very different forms or modes of naturalism and he is constrained by the nature of his own objectives (i.e., the refutation of pessimism) to embrace the stronger and far less plausible form of naturalism.

Interactive Experience and Identification as Predictors of Attributing Responsibility in Video Games

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Nathan Walter ◽  
Yariv Tsfati
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Theoretical Expectation ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
Attributions Of Responsibility ◽  
Violent Video Game ◽  
Grand Theft Auto Iv ◽  
Interactive Experience

Abstract. This study examines the effect of interactivity on the attribution of responsibility for the character’s actions in a violent video game. Through an experiment, we tested the hypothesis that identification with the main character in Grand Theft Auto IV mediates the effect of interactivity on attributions of responsibility for the main character’s antisocial behavior. Using the framework of the fundamental attribution error, we demonstrated that those who actually played the game, as opposed to those who simply watched someone else playing it, identified with the main character. In accordance with the theoretical expectation, those who played the game and came to identify with the main character attributed the responsibility for his actions to external factors such as “living in a violent society.” By contrast, those who did not interact with the game attributed responsibility for the character’s actions to his personality traits. These findings could be viewed as contrasting with psychological research suggesting that respondents should have distanced themselves from the violent protagonist rather than identifying with him, and with Iyengar’s (1991) expectation that more personalized episodic framing would be associated with attributing responsibility to the protagonist.

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