Moral Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

What do we mean by moral freedom? What necessary conditions are required for it? Do the exponential advances and pervasive applications of artificial intelligence (AI) promote it, or do they undermine it? Are we dealing with a novel ethical challenge? If that is the case, how should we respond to it? These are a few of the compelling questions this book addresses. These concerns are increasingly ineluctable in our contemporary informational society, where people depend more and more on AI-based technology and are therefore inevitably exposed to their invisible, but powerful, algorithmic design. This book constitutes a foundation for the field of Ethics of AI to understand a novel challenge raised by AI and specifically machine-learning algorithms (ML) to our moral freedom and it provides conceptual and practical tools to address it, along with a moral compass to navigate our complex reality that is increasingly structured and shaped by algorithmic technology. Rooted in ethical reasoning, Tiribelli offers arguments showing how our moral freedom, that is, our capacity to become genuine moral agents and develop over time genuine moral identity, can be preempted and silently eroded by the rise of a new form of predeterminism that the author identifies as the threat of algorithmic predeterminism. Tiribelli explains how the conditions sine qua non underlying our capacity to choose and act as genuine moral agents can be deeply affected by ML algorithms when their predictive power serves third-party interests that do not consider and respect people as decisional end-setters, by exploiting instead their choice-driving elements to meet heteronomously predefined goals. Drawing insights from theories developed in Moral Philosophy, the author unpacks the algorithmic reshaping impact on our choice-context, and specifically on our availability of morally heterogeneous options and our moral autonomy, and she unveils detrimental consequences for the future of our moral freedom as a fundamental value for the flourishing of individuals and societies. Finally, building on theories of informational and intellectual privacy, Tiribelli proposes a novel lens in order to operationalize an ethical-normative value such as moral freedom. This conceptual privacy lens is defined as moral privacy, which encompasses a zone of the protection of our moral freedom and highlights what it takes in order to safeguard our capacity to become the person and the moral agent we want to be, to contribute from a moral perspective to the society we want to build, in an era that is increasingly permeated and governed by AI-based technology.