IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 101

account is the sense in which its action in a chain of
events is identified - for example, a dog growls at child,
unstable rocks threaten a house, car headlights fail
because of faulty magneto - and remedial action is directed at the dog, the rocks or the magneto. In some limited,
pragmatic sense then, the dog may be "held to account"
by being disciplined, the rock formation may be "blamed"
and then removed or reinforced, and the magneto identified as the "culprit" and replaced. In the same limited
sense, a Doctor, an accountant, a salesperson, will not
tolerate a computer system that crashes repeatedly, fails
to print, or loses files. The dog, the rocks, the magneto
and the computer system are held to be accountable
for their role in events, and may be the focus of immediate intervention, but despite the morally laden language
that is often used ("fault," "held to account," "blamed,"
"culprit"), the accountability of the non-human is limited.
For the moral responsibility for the actions of the dog,
rocks, magneto or computer system is not held to be
intrinsic to those non-humans, but is held to be located
in the dog's owner, the town planners that co-located
the house and the rocks, the owner of the car, or the
computer system's programmer or operator. Although the
actions of non-human technologies may be the immediate cause of great harm, it is humans further back or further forward in the chain of causality that are held to be
morally accountable for the harm.
The reasons for this have been pretty much settled
after a couple of thousand years of discussion among
metaphysicians and moral philosophers. The actions
of a non-human may be proximate in a chain of causality culminating in great harm, but a non-human is held
to be beyond the realm of moral accountability on any
one of six grounds. These grounds are not necessarily exhaustive, and it may be that other objections may
be raised, but they do represent the most significant
hurdles my argument must jump to be accepted.
1) The human exclusivity argument. The technology is
not human. A priori, only humans may be held to be
morally accountable for their actions.
2) The passive instrument argument. Technologies do
not act in the world; they are acted upon by humans.
Because they do not act, they cannot be held morally
accountable.
3) The dumb instrument argument. The technology
may be the immediate cause of harm, but the technology is created and operated by humans. The creators and operators are responsible for the action of
the technology, not the technology itself.
4) The free will argument. The technology is deterministic. That is, it has no will, and it is not free to choose
its actions. Without this freedom there can be no
moral responsibility.
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5) The right mind argument. Technologies have no
knowledge of the wider circumstances in which they
act, or of the consequences of their actions, and cannot
reasonably be expected to have an awareness of these
contexts or consequences. To be held accountable for
the consequences of an action, a technology must have
the capacity to foresee these consequences.
6) The dilution of responsibility argument. Many technologies are ill-defined systems rather than discrete
entities, they have no clear boundaries in space and
time, and their constituent elements and boundaries
are not clearly evident. Responsibility that is located
everywhere, is located nowhere.

It is not only the engineers and
technicians that should be held to
moral account for their design work
but also the technologies in and
of themselves.

In each of the next six issues of the Technology and
Society Magazine we will take these propositions one
by one. Should a single objection be sustained, the conclusion that technologies are innocent must be supported, but if none are sustained, we must conclude that
technologies can and should be held to moral account.

Next Issue ...
Are Technologies Innocent? Part Two: The human
exclusivity argument.

Author Information
Michael Arnold is with the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Christopher Pearce is with the School of Medicine,
Dentistry and Health Sciences, the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Acknowledgment
This series of short articles is a heavily revised version
of an earlier publication [1].

Reference
[1] M. Arnold and C. Pearce, "Is technology innocent? Holding technologies to moral account," IEEE Technology and Society Mag.,
vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 44-50, 2008.

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