Abstract
We are living through an era of increased robotisation. Some authors have already begun to explore the impact of this robotisation on legal rules and practice. In doing so, many highlight potential liability gaps that might arise through robot misbehaviour. Although these gaps are interesting and socially significant, they do not exhaust the possible gaps that might be created by increased robotisation. In this article, I make the case for one of those alternative gaps: the retribution gap. This gap arises from a mismatch between the human desire for retribution and the absence of appropriate subjects of retributive blame. I argue for the potential existence of this gap in an era of increased robotisation; suggest that it is much harder to plug this gap than it is to plug those thus far explored in the literature; and then highlight three important social implications of this gap.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Vincent (2011) argues that there are at least six: virtue-responsibility; role-responsibility; outcome-responsibility; causal-responsibility; capacity-responsibility; and liability-responsibility.
The concepts of legal and moral responsibility can be distinguished and sometimes pull apart. However that possibility can be ignored here.
Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562—Is a foundational decision in English tort law holding that you owe a duty of care to your ‘neighbour’, where neighbour is defined relatively broadly. In that particular case, it included the consumer of a product who was not its actual purchaser.
There are also liability standards associated with control and care for animals that might be adopted by analogy.
There are many criminal theorists who support this basic position: Moore (1993, 1997), Alexander and Ferzan (2009) and Duff (2007). These theorists support the view on moral/philosophical grounds and could be classified as pure retributivists; others support it in part because it is the dominant social/psychological attitude, e.g. Robinson and Kurzban (2007).
Though note the potential impact of the so-called ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect—if the robots are too humanoid they may be too creepy for the human users. The uncanny valley was first hypothesised by Masahiro Moti in the 1970s and has recently been confirmed in some experimental tests, but how deep and wide the valley actually is remains contentious (see: MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006; MacDorman 2006; MacDorman et al. 2009).
References
Alexander, L., & Ferzan, K. (2009). Crime and culpability: A theory of criminal law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Asaro, P. (2011). A body to kick and still no soul to damn: Legal perspectives on robotics. In P. Lin, K. Abney, & G. A. Bekey (Eds.), Robot ethics: The ethical and social implications of robotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford: OUP.
Barrett, J. (2004). Why would anyone believe in God?. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Boonin, D. (2008). The problem of punishment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bostrom, N. (2012). The superintelligent will: Motivation and instrumental rationality in artificial agents. Minds and Machines, 22(2), 71–85.
Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, strategies and dangers. Oxford: OUP.
Boyer, P. (2002). Religion explained. London: Vintage.
Brahman, D., Kahan, D. M., & Hoffman, D. A. (2010). Some realism about punishment naturalism. University of Chicago Law Review, 77, 1531.
Brown, D. O. (1991). Human universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bryant, C. (2015). Worker killed in Volkswagen robot accident. Financial Times July 1, 2015.
Calo, R. (2015). Robotics and the lessons of cyberlaw. California Law Review, 103(3), 513–563.
Calo, R., Kerr, I., & Froomkin, M. (Eds.). (2016). Robot law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Carlsmith, K. M., & Darley, J. M. (2008). Psychological aspects of retributive justice. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology. San Diego, CA: Elsevier.
Chisan Hew, P. (2014). Artificial moral agents are infeasible with existing technologies. Ethics and Information Technology, 16, 197–206.
Duff, R. A. (2007). Answering for crime: Responsibility and liability in criminal law. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
Ford, M. (2015). The rise of the robots. London: Oneworld Publications.
Gintis, H. (2011). The bounds of reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gunkel, D. (2012). The machine question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hart, H. L. A. (1968). Punishment and responsibility. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hellstrom, T. (2013). On the moral responsibility of military drones. Ethics and Information Technology, 15, 99–107.
Hinds, P., Roberts, T., & Jones, H. (2004). Whose job is it anyway? A study of human-robot interaction in a collaborative task. Human–Computer Interaction, 19, 151–181.
Jensen, K. (2010). Punishment and spite: The dark side of cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365, 2635–2650.
Kaplan, J. (2015). Humans need not apply. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kiesler, S., & Goetz, J. (2002). Mental models of robotic assistants. In Conference proceedings of CHI 2002, extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, pp. 576–77.
Kim, T., & Hinds, P. J. (2006). Who should i blame? Effects of autonomy and transparency on attributions in human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of RO-MAN’06. http://web.stanford.edu/~phinds/PDFs/Kim-Hinds-ROMAN.pdf. Accessed 11 Nov, 15.
Kitchin, R. (2016). Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. Information, Communication and Science,. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154087.
Kramer, M. (2011). The ethics of capital punishment. Oxford: OUP.
Levy, N. (2014). Consciousness and moral responsibility. Oxford: OUP.
List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, status and design of corporate agents. Oxford: OUP.
MacDorman, K. F. (2006). Subjective ratings of robot video clips for human likeness, familiarity, and eeriness: An exploration of the uncanny valley. In Proceedings of the ICCS/CogSci-2006: Toward social mechanisms of android science.
MacDorman, K. F., Green, R. D., Ho, C.-C., & Koch, C. T. (2009). Too real for comfort? Uncanny responses to computer generated faces. Computers in Human Behavior, 25(3), 695–710.
MacDorman, K. F., & Ishiguro, H. (2006). The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive and social science research. Interaction Studies, 7(3), 297–337.
Marin, A. L., Jo, D., & Lee, S. (2013). Designing robotic avatars. Are user’s impressions affected by avatar’s age? In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, HRI, March 3–6, 2013.
Matthias, A. (2004). The responsibility gap: Ascribing responsibility for the actions of learning automata. Ethics and Information Technology, 6(3), 175–183.
Matthias, A. (2011). Algorithmic moral control of war robots: Philosophical questions. Law, Innovation and Technology, 3(2), 279–301.
Moore, M. (1993). Justifying retributivism. Israel Law Review, 27, 15.
Moore, M. (1997). Placing blame: A general theory of criminal law. Oxford: OUP.
Muehlhauser, L., & Helm, L. (2013). The singularity and machine ethics. In A. Eden, J. Moor, J. Soraker, & E. Steinhart (Eds.), Singularity hypotheses: A scientific and philosophical assessment. Dordrecht: Springer.
Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature. London: Penguin.
Prevost, A. M. (1992). Race and war crimes: The 1945 war-crimes trial of general Tomoyuki Yamashita. Human Rights Quarterly, 14, 303.
Purves, D., Jenkins, R., & Strawser, B. (2015). Autonomous machines, moral judgment, and acting for the right reasons. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18, 851–872.
Robinson, P. H. (2013). Intuitions of justice and the utility of desert. Oxford: OUP.
Robinson, P. H., & Kurzban, R. (2007). Concordance and conflict in intuitions of justice. Minnesota Law Review, 91, 1829–1892.
Robinson, P. H., Kurzban, R., & Jones, O. D. (2007). The origins of shared intuitions of justice. Vanderbilt Law Review, 60, 1633.
Sainato, M. (2015). Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates Warn about artificial intelligence. The Observer Aug 19, 2015.
Scherer, M. (2016). Regulating artificial intelligence systems: Risks, challenges, competencies and strategies. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 29(2). doi:10.2139/ssrn.2609777.
Simpson, T., & Muller, V. (2016). Just wars and robots’ killings. The Philosophical Quarterly,. doi:10.1093/pq/pqv075.
Sparrow, R. (2007). Killer robots. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 24(1), 62.
Vincent, N. (2011). A structured taxonomy of responsibility concepts. In N. Vincent, I. van de Poel, & J. van den Hoven (Eds.), Moral responsibility: Beyond free will and determinism. Dordrecht: Springer.
Walker, A. (2016). Why self driving cars should never have steering wheels. Gizmodo Feb 24, 2016. http://gizmodo.com/why-self-driving-cars-really-shouldnt-ever-have-steerin-1758292942.
Yamashita, In re. (1946). 321 US 1.
Zimmerman, M. (2011). The immorality of punishment. Peterborough: Broadview Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Danaher, J. Robots, law and the retribution gap. Ethics Inf Technol 18, 299–309 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-016-9403-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-016-9403-3