The risk of moral outsourcing: why artificial intelligence cannot and should not make our ethical decisions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56294/ai2025428Keywords:
AI Ethics, Moral Outsourcing, Computational Ethics, Decision-Making, AccountabilityAbstract
Introduction: The delegation of ethical decision-making to artificial intelligence (AI), a practice termed 'moral outsourcing,' was examined.
Objective: This paper critically analyzes the philosophical and social implications of moral outsourcing to AI.
Method: A philosophical and theoretical analysis was conducted, synthesizing arguments from ontology, ethics, and social theory.
Results: The analysis revealed three core arguments against this practice. First, an ontological gap was identified; AI systems lacked the consciousness and subjective experience necessary for genuine moral agency. Second, the study found that the rich, contextual nature of human ethics could not be successfully reduced to formal logic without mechanizing historical biases and losing essential meaning. Third, it was argued that moral outsourcing would lead to an atrophy of human moral reasoning skills and an erosion of accountability.
Conclusions: It was concluded that AI should be developed as a tool to augment, not replace, human judgment, and that the final authority for ethical choice must remain a fundamentally human responsibility.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Mohammed Zeinu Hassen (Author)
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The article is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Unless otherwise stated, associated published material is distributed under the same licence.
