Introduction: When Systems “Decide” on Their Own
Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly capable of making complex decisions without real-time human control. Self-driving cars navigate traffic, medical algorithms recommend treatments, trading systems move billions in financial markets, and autonomous drones adjust their flight paths midair.
As AI autonomy expands, a fundamental philosophical and legal question arises: can truly autonomous AI systems be considered moral agents, and if not, what does their autonomy mean for responsibility in criminal law?
The term autonomy suggests self-rule or self-governance — traits historically associated with persons. Yet AI systems are also designed artifacts, created, trained, and deployed by human beings. This article examines the tension between AI autonomy and moral agency, and its implications for attributing criminal responsibility when autonomous systems cause harm.
1. What Do We Mean by “Autonomy” in AI?
In technical discourse, AI autonomy usually refers to a system’s ability to:
- Operate without continuous human oversight,
- Perceive its environment and update its internal state,
- Select and execute actions to achieve predefined goals,
- Adapt its behavior over time based on data and feedback.
This is functional autonomy: the system can perform tasks independently within a given domain. It can surprise its designers with novel solutions or unanticipated failure modes.
However, functional autonomy is not the same as moral or Kantian autonomy:
- Moral autonomy involves the capacity to understand and adopt moral norms,
- Reflect on reasons and values,
- Choose actions not merely as outputs of optimization, but as expressions of a rational will.
AI systems, even highly advanced ones, optimize objective functions; they do not formulate or endorse moral principles. This distinction lies at the heart of the problem of moral agency.
2. Moral Agency: More Than Just Complex Behavior
A moral agent is typically understood as an entity that:
- Possesses awareness of what it is doing,
- Can distinguish between right and wrong,
- Has the capacity to control its actions in light of that understanding,
- Can appropriately be held to account, praised, or blamed.
Human beings are paradigmatic moral agents. Corporations, by legal fiction, are sometimes treated as agents because they aggregate the decisions of many human actors.
AI systems, by contrast:
- Lack consciousness or subjective experience,
- Have no internal sense of “ought” or “ought not”,
- Do not experience guilt, remorse, or shame.
They are capable of complex behavior, but complexity is not enough to establish moral agency. A hurricane or a virus can behave in complex and adaptive ways, but we do not treat them as moral agents.
3. The Temptation to Treat Autonomous AI as Moral Agents
Despite these differences, there is a strong intuitive temptation to think of autonomous AI as agents:
- We speak of systems “deciding”, “choosing”, or “wanting” outcomes,
- We anthropomorphize AI through design and language,
- We see systems act unpredictably and infer a kind of hidden will.
This temptation is amplified when:
- AI behavior is opaque even to its designers (“black box” models),
- Systems engage in strategic interactions (e.g., in games or markets),
- The consequences are serious (e.g., accidents, discrimination, financial loss).
In such contexts, it can be attractive — psychologically and politically — to say “the AI did it”. But treating AI autonomy as moral agency risks misplacing responsibility.
4. The Problem of Moral Agency for Criminal Law
Criminal law relies on the concept of a responsible actor — a being who can be blamed for wrongdoing. This requires:
- Capacity: the ability to understand and respond to reasons,
- Voluntariness: control over one’s actions,
- Culpability: a defective alignment between will and norm.
Autonomous AI systems do not meet these criteria in a robust sense:
- Their “decisions” are outputs of algorithms and data, not of a will,
- Their “goals” are externally imposed optimization targets,
- Their behavior is constrained by architecture and training.
If we treat autonomous AI as moral agents, criminal liability risks becoming untethered from moral responsibility. This undermines the legitimacy of punishment and may turn criminal law into a purely technocratic risk management tool.
5. AI Autonomy as a Challenge to Human Responsibility
Even if AI is not a moral agent, its autonomy does challenge traditional ways of locating human responsibility.
In AI-driven systems:
- Human control is spatially and temporally distant from harmful outcomes,
- No single individual may understand or oversee the whole system,
- Design, deployment, and operation decisions are distributed across teams and organizations.
This can create an illusion that “no one is really responsible” when things go wrong, especially if everyone can point to the system’s autonomy:
- Developers: “We didn’t foresee this behavior.”
- Managers: “We trusted the technology.”
- Users: “The system recommended it.”
Thus, AI autonomy does not create a new moral agent; it creates new excuses for existing agents.
6. Reframing AI Autonomy: From Moral Agency to Design Choice
To avoid this responsibility vacuum, we must reconceptualize AI autonomy not as a replacement for human agency, but as a product of human design choices.
Key reframing steps:
- Autonomy is granted, not innate
- Humans decide how much discretion a system has,
- Humans define the objectives, constraints, and training regime.
- Autonomy is domain-specific and limited
- Systems are autonomous only within particular tasks and environments,
- Outside those parameters, they fail or behave unpredictably.
- Autonomy entails heightened duties
- The more autonomy a system has, the greater the duty of care for those who design, deploy, and oversee it.
In this view, AI autonomy becomes an aggravating factor for human responsibility, not a basis for recognizing AI as a new moral subject.
7. Implications for Criminal Responsibility
Once we understand AI autonomy as human-created and limited, we can revisit criminal liability with clearer focus.
7.1. Developers and Designers
Developers who:
- Build highly autonomous systems for high-risk contexts,
- Ignore foreseeable dangers arising from autonomy (e.g., unpredictable behavior, edge cases),
- Fail to implement safeguards (override mechanisms, monitoring tools),
may be criminally liable under recklessness or negligence when harm occurs.
7.2. Corporate Decision-Makers
Corporate leaders who:
- Deploy autonomous systems without adequate testing or oversight,
- Prioritize speed and profit over safety,
- Fail to heed internal or external warnings,
can be held liable individually or via corporate criminal liability. AI autonomy does not dilute their responsibility; it underscores their role in choosing automation.
7.3. Professional Users
Professionals (doctors, drivers, financial advisors, etc.) who rely on autonomous systems must:
- Understand the system’s limits and risks,
- Maintain some degree of critical oversight,
- Avoid “automation bias” — uncritical deference to AI outputs.
Failure to do so in high-risk situations may amount to criminal negligence.
8. Why AI Is Not (Yet) a Moral Agent — and Why That Matters
Could AI ever become a moral agent? Some speculate about future systems with consciousness or generalized reasoning. For now, however:
- There is no empirical basis to claim that current AI has subjective experience,
- Moral concepts like guilt, remorse, or responsibility remain meaningless to machines,
- Projecting moral agency onto AI today is speculative at best and misleading at worst.
This matters because:
- Criminal law’s legitimacy depends on linking sanctions to moral agency,
- If we “pretend” AI is a moral agent, we risk hiding human choices behind a technological façade,
- We may end up punishing the wrong entities while the real decision-makers avoid scrutiny.
9. Conclusion: Keep Autonomy, Reserve Moral Agency
AI autonomy is real in a functional sense: systems can act without ongoing human input, adapt to environments, and produce unforeseen outcomes. But functional autonomy does not equal moral agency.
For criminal law and broader questions of responsibility, the key points are:
- AI systems are tools with sophisticated autonomy, not independent moral subjects,
- Their autonomy is the result of human design and governance choices,
- The more autonomy we grant AI, the stronger and clearer our human duties of care must become.
The problem of moral agency in AI is therefore less about elevating AI to the status of a moral agent, and more about preventing humans from stepping down from their moral and legal responsibilities.
In short: AI may act on its own, but it should never answer on its own. Moral and criminal responsibility must remain anchored in human beings and human organizations — the true authors of autonomous systems.
Yanıt yok