Moral zombies: why algorithms are not moral agents.
AI & society June 1, 2021 Carissa Véliz 176 citations
The paper argues that algorithms are a kind of functional moral zombie, lacking sentience, and therefore cannot be autonomous or accountable moral agents. Just as philosophical zombies—exact physical duplicates of conscious beings without subjective experience—are used to challenge physicalism, algorithms similarly lack the experiential knowledge needed for moral understanding. Without feeling, an algorithm cannot truly value anything or act for moral reasons; its 'values' are merely prioritized items on a list. The author contends that moral agency requires sentience, so both zombies and algorithms are incoherent as morally responsible agents.