Reactive Attitudes and AI-Agents – Making Sense of Responsibility and Control Gaps
Open accessAbstract
Responsibility gaps occur when autonomous machines cause harms for which nobody can be justifiably held morally responsible. The debate around responsibility gaps has focused primarily on the question of responsibility, but other approaches focus on the victims of the associated harms. In this paper I consider how the victims of ‘AI-harm’—by which I mean harms implicated in responsibility gap cases and caused by AI-agents—can make sense of what has happened to them. The reactive attitudes have an important role here. I argue that regulating our reactive attitudes—withdrawing or sustaining them as our understanding of the actions, motives, status, and character of others develops—is an important part of the way in which we make sense of the harms we suffer. But, I argue, AI-agents can disrupt standard practices of regulating the reactive attitudes. This can lead victims of AI-harm to suffer a secondary hermeneutic harm (in addition to the primary AI-harm). This harm, which the responsibility gap and AI ethics literatures have neglected, can occur whether responsibility gaps are real or not.
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Hermeneutic harm is modeled as secondary harm, i.e., harm arising from the attempt to deal with a prior (primary) harm.
“Following Rebera (2024), we model hermeneutic harm as secondary harm, i.e. as harm arising from the attempt to deal with a prior (primary) harm.”
From Hidden Risks: Artificial Intelligence and Hermeneutic Harm (2025) · cites this paper as Rebera (2024)
Hermeneutic harm can arise quite independently of whether responsibility gaps are real or not.
“But as Rebera (2024) argues, hermeneutic harm can arise quite independently of whether responsibility gaps are real or not.”
From Hidden Risks: Artificial Intelligence and Hermeneutic Harm (2025) · cites this paper as Rebera (2024)
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“Philosophers such as Matthias ( 2004 ) and Sparrow ( 2007 ) argue that if designers, deployers, or users of AI-agents (following Hindriks and Veluwenkamp ( 2023 ) I will refer to these as ‘enablers’ of AI-agents) lack sufficient control over AI-agents’ actions, it would be unfair to hold them…”
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ADABARA, I., Olaniyi Sadiq, B., Nuhu Shuaibu, A., Ibrahim Danjuma, Y., & Maninti, V. (2025) · F1000Research · doi:10.12688/f1000research.169927.1 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
Hidden Risks: Artificial Intelligence and Hermeneutic Harm
Rebera, A. P., Lauwaert, L., & Oimann, A.-K. (2025) · Minds and Machines · doi:10.1007/s11023-025-09733-0 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
“Following Rebera ( 2024 ), we model hermeneutic harm as secondary harm, i.e. as harm arising from the attempt to deal with a prior (primary) harm.”
InfluentialSelf-citation
- Authors
- Rebera, A. P.
- Affiliations
- Royal Military Academy (BE)
- Corresponding author
- Rebera, Andrew P.
- ORCID
- Rebera, Andrew P.
- Venue
- Philosophy & Technology
- Published
- 2024-11-04
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 4
- ISSN
- 2210-5433 (ISSN-L)
- 2210-5441
- OpenAlex
- W4404044331
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 4
- FWCI
- 4.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Philosophy & Technology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Philosophical Ethics and Theory
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Literary and Philosophical Studies
- Keywords
- reactive attitudes, responsibility gap, AI agents, AI harms, moral responsibility, moral agency, AI ethics
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