Artificial Moral Agency in Technoethics

Abstract

This chapter will argue that artificial agents created or synthesized by technologies such as artificial life (ALife), artificial intelligence (AI), and in robotics present unique challenges to the traditional notion of moral agency and that any successful technoethics must seriously consider that these artificial agents may indeed be artificial moral agents (AMA), worthy of moral concern. This purpose will be realized by briefly describing a taxonomy of the artificial agents that these technologies are capable of producing. I will then describe how these artificial entities conflict with our standard notions of moral agency. I argue that traditional notions of moral agency are too strict even in the case of recognizably human agents and then expand the notion of moral agency such that it can sensibly include artificial agents.