Before I dive into a twitterless weekend, this was one thing still on my mind. I am struggling with the concept of moral agency. On the one hand it refers to us: we are moral agents. On the other hand it seems to mean simply 'anything that is a moral factor at play' /1
@Abebab
@Abebab
For designers this is relevant. The famous bridge in the US city I forget (NY?) where buses from poor neighborhoods cannot pass so these buses never reach the rich parts of town, has strong moral agency in the second sense. But to say it is 'a moral agent', means we are using /2
'agent' in a different way than if we refer to people. It is the language of an observer, a philosopher (of the analytic breed I suspect), using words to describe the 'things' they things they see and tries to group things that go together under a name. /3
"O look and here's everything that has moral consequences. Let's call these 'moral agents'. But from my phenomenological point of view it is problematic lump together human beings and artifacts as 'a set of things'. Putting names to groups of beings may have some value /4
But it only ever remains a metaphor, a tool we, observers, use to explicitly model the world.
Now all of this is not a problem, just so long as we know what we are doing when we call a bridge a moral agent and how this is not the same as you calling me a moral agent./5
Now all of this is not a problem, just so long as we know what we are doing when we call a bridge a moral agent and how this is not the same as you calling me a moral agent./5
And, just so long as AI engineers don't get involved. Because these guys (and girls) will start building what they call "intelligent bridges" and now ethics are popular since last Tuesday they've been suddenly shouting from the rooftops that what they build is moral agents, /6
..and well, so, just as we humans have rights and responsibilities, perhaps their bridges should have them too, like, it's only fair isn't it? "We're all moral agents after all". /7
The fabrications of AI engineers are, at best, simulations of human moral agency, or, mostly, they are modern, interactive instantations of 'physical agency' - in other words, artifically constructed objects, nobody home, created by humans for a functional purpose /8
..and experienced as meaningful elements in human practices (meanings which may not purposes designers intended), through the embodied interaction which can only exist as embedded within elaborated social-cultural historical human contexts of practice./9
Now let's talk about human welfare instead. /10
