Research: Moral agency and Artificial Intelligence
The research aims to reflect on the relationship between artificial intelligence technologies and the capacity to act morally. The first step will be to subject the concept of moral agency to a conceptual analysis aimed at criticizing some overly idealized conceptions based on assumptions inherited from a rationalist and essentialist tradition. The heart of the research will then describe moral agency as structured from the bottom up, from the complex fabric of social practices that gradually sediment and are tested from within, by the expressive capacities, by the needs and interests of individuals in relation to the forms of life of which they are participants. It will explore to what extent artificial intelligence technologies introduce decisive novelties into this theoretical framework compared to the past. Among the intertwined threads that make up the fabric of moral agency, reference will be made to the ways in which moral reasoning develops, the importance of the forms of life in which we are embedded for the personal development and elaboration of a sensitivity to life that is characteristic of the human agency being placed at the center. In this ethnographic framework, some specific cases from the field of technologies will be examined, particularly focusing on the revolutions that artificial intelligence is bringing to our everyday life experience. This will include changes related to the introduction of synthetic media among our cultural products, up to concerns regarding living with artificial agents.
Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence, Conceptual Engineering, Ethics, Forms of life, Moral Agency.