Avatar agency. Moral responsibility at the intersection of individual, collective, and artificial social entities in emergent avatar communities.

This project develops a dynamic normative framework for ascribing moral responsibility in avatar communities, addressing the impact of avatar agency on human accountability and ethical practices.

Subsidie
€ 1.494.688
2024

Projectdetails

Introduction

This project investigates how avatar agency impacts practices of ascribing moral responsibility in emergent avatar communities (Metaverse, augmented Metaverse, and Human-Cybernetic Avatar societies). These communities challenge traditional frameworks of agency and moral responsibility.

Background

The unprecedented persistent and continuous use of multiple avatars by both humans and organisations has the potential to permeate prior boundaries of the physical, the augmented, and the virtual world. We propose a dynamic normative framework of ascribing moral responsibility that is grounded in a philosophical conceptualisation of avatar agency.

Framework Overview

This framework considers the way interactions between avatars, individuals, and organisations generate intertwined and mutual ascriptions of moral responsibility, potentially enhancing or, on the contrary, diminishing human agency and responsibility in emergent avatar communities.

Objectives

We construct our approach along five main objectives:

  1. To clarify avatar agency and related responsibility pertaining to individual, organisational, and artificial members of emergent avatar communities.
  2. To delineate the way avatar agency enhances or restrains individual agency and responsibility.
  3. To correlate the way interactions between social entities in avatar communities generate mutually enhancing (or perhaps decreasing) ascriptions of moral responsibility to all participants.
  4. To evaluate the extent to which the ethical characteristics of the community environment can generate normative attributions of responsibility.
  5. To project normative evaluations of blaming and praising practices in avatar communities.

Conclusion

The successful delivery of this ethical framework is an original contribution to the problem of moral responsibility and bears direct implications for future regulation, impacting societal moral practices of accountability and blaming.

Financiële details & Tijdlijn

Financiële details

Subsidiebedrag€ 1.494.688
Totale projectbegroting€ 1.494.688

Tijdlijn

Startdatum1-1-2024
Einddatum31-12-2028
Subsidiejaar2024

Partners & Locaties

Projectpartners

  • UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCURESTIpenvoerder

Land(en)

Romania

Vergelijkbare projecten binnen European Research Council

ERC Starting...

Agency in Law

LEGACY aims to reappraise legal agency by analyzing the historical dominance of Liberal Agency and developing a comprehensive theory that addresses contemporary challenges to this concept.

€ 1.496.595
ERC Starting...

Delegating decisions: An overlooked way of pursuing immoral goals

This project aims to explore how morally motivated individuals delegate unethical decisions to avoid responsibility, using a new 3R framework to analyze its psychological and social implications.

€ 1.498.269
ERC Starting...

Human collaboration with AI agents in national health governance: organizational circumstances under which data analysts and medical experts follow or deviate from AI.

This project aims to explore the socio-cultural dynamics of AI in health governance across six countries to develop a theory on ethical AI intervention and its impact on national health policies.

€ 1.499.961
ERC Advanced...

Harmony within society

This project aims to develop a unified framework for understanding social interactions and divisive behaviors, exploring safe spaces, transparency, and coopetition to enhance societal engagement.

€ 1.597.750
ERC Starting...

Corporate Moral Progress

The project aims to explore corporate moral responsibility, identify challenges to ethical conduct, and develop methods for fostering moral progress in corporations through interdisciplinary approaches.

€ 1.371.715

Vergelijkbare projecten uit andere regelingen

EIC Pathfinder

Value-Aware Artificial Intelligence

The VALAWAI project aims to develop a toolbox for Value-Aware AI that integrates moral consciousness to enhance ethical decision-making in social media, robotics, and medical protocols.

€ 3.926.432
EIC Pathfinder

Counterfactual Assessment and Valuation for Awareness Architecture

The CAVAA project aims to develop a computational architecture for awareness in biological and technological systems, enhancing user experience through explainability and adaptability in various applications.

€ 3.132.460
EIC Pathfinder

Emergent awareness from minimal collectives

EMERGE aims to develop a framework for collaborative awareness in minimal artificial agents, enabling complex cooperative behaviors without shared language or pre-defined protocols.

€ 2.839.511
EIC Pathfinder

Improving social competences of virtual agents through artificial consciousness based on the Attention Schema Theory

ASTOUND aims to develop an AI architecture for artificial consciousness using Attention Schema Theory to enhance social interaction and natural language understanding in machines.

€ 3.330.897