Abstract

The advent of intelligent artificial systems has sparked a dispute about the question of who is responsible when such a system causes a harmful outcome. This paper champions the idea that this dispute should be approached as a conceptual engineering problem. Towards this claim, the paper first argues that the dispute about the responsibility gap problem is in part a conceptual dispute about the content of responsibility and related concepts. The paper then argues that the way forward is to evaluate the conceptual choices we have, in the light of a systematic understanding of why the concept is important in the first place—in short, the way forward is to engage in conceptual engineering. The paper then illustrates what approaching the responsibility gap problem as a conceptual engineering problem looks like. It outlines argumentative pathways out of the responsibility gap problem and relates these to existing contributions to the dispute.