Artefactual Agency and Artefactual Moral Agency

This chapter takes as its starting place that artefacts, in combination with humans, constitute human action and social practices, including moral actions and practices. Our concern is with what is regarded as a moral agent in these actions and practices. Ideas about artefactual ontology, artefactual agency, and artefactual moral agency are intertwined. Discourse on artefactual agency and artefactual moral agency seems to draw on three different conceptions of agency. The first has to do with the causal efficacy of artefacts in the production of events and states of affairs. The second can be thought of as acting for or on behalf of another entity; agents are those who perform tasks for others and/or represent others. The third conception of agency has to do with autonomy and is often used to ground discourse on morality and what it means to be human. The casual efficacy and acting for conceptions of agency are used to ground intelligible accounts of artefactual moral agency. Accounts of artefactual moral agency that draw on the autonomy conception of agency, however, are problematic when they use an analogy between human moral autonomy and some aspect of artefacts as the basis for attributing to artefacts the status associated with moral autonomy.