Responsibility

Responsibility is the relation between an agent and an outcome in virtue of which the agent can rightly be praised, blamed, or asked to answer for it. Strawson located it in the reactive attitudes, such as resentment and gratitude, that we take towards one another; Fischer and Ravizza in the agent’s control over what she does; Shoemaker distinguished attributability, answerability and accountability as different relations the one word covers.

Artificial systems strain the concept because they spread causal contribution across designers, deployers, users and the systems themselves. Nissenbaum identified “many hands” as one of the barriers to accountability in a computerised society, and the worry that learning systems leave outcomes for which no one is fittingly responsible is the responsibility gap. The gap can be read as a hole into which accountability disappears. It can also be read as a map of how contribution, knowledge and control are distributed.

Two points from my own work. In the epistemology of AI it is tempting to think that because deployers answer for a system, they stand behind its outputs as a speaker stands behind her assertions. They do not. A deployer has not seen the output, does not believe it, and disclaims it in the terms of service. Responsibility for putting a system into the world is not authorship of its sentences. Derivative and distributed responsibility are real, but they are how we already treat certified instruments, whose makers we blame and whose deployment we regulate, and so they do not turn a system into a testifier.

In the ethics of algorithmic welfare, responsibility takes a sharper, institutional form. Where an institution produces the standing of the people its systems govern, the Constitutive Obligation Principle assigns it obligations of legibility, non-abandonment and remediation. They are borne by the institution, not the individual, and persist whatever any individual has or has not authorised. A fingerprint that fails to read is then not a glitch for which no one answers. It is an obligation the institution failed to discharge.