Responsibility Gaps and Retributive Dispositions: Evidence from the US, Japan and Germany

Abstract

Danaher (2016) has argued that increasing robotization can lead to retribution gaps: Situations in which the normative fact that nobody can be justly held responsible for a harmful outcome stands in conflict with our retributivist moral dispositions. In this paper, we report a cross-cultural empirical study based on Sparrow’s (2007) famous example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime, which was conducted with participants from the US, Japan and Germany. We find that (1) people manifest a considerable willingness to hold autonomous systems morally responsible, (2) partially exculpate human agents when interacting with such systems, and that more generally (3) the possibility of normative responsibility gaps is indeed at odds with people’s pronounced retributivist inclinations. We discuss what these results mean for potential implications of the retribution gap and other positions in the responsibility gap literature.