Beyond Responsibility: New Gaps with AI Systems?

Workshop “Beyond Responsibility: New Gaps with AI Systems?”

Overview

Few ideas have gained as much traction in the philosophy and ethics of Artificial Intelligence as the claim that artificial systems create responsibility gaps, i.e., situations where no one can be held responsible for their morally harmful outcomes (Matthias, 2004). Following the rapid and recent advancements in AI, the debate has progressively expanded to analogous “gaps”, including retribution (Danaher, 2016), achievement (Danaher & Nyholm, 2021), meaningfulness (Rüther, 2024), authorship (Nawar, 2024), and testimony (Sparrow & Flenady, 2025). These concepts share a core insight: AI systems disrupt established social, epistemic, and moral properties and practices. But despite the widespread adoption of “gap” concepts across diverse phenomena, their precise definitions and existence remain contested (e.g., Oimann & Tollon, 2025; Veluwenkamp, 2025), and a unified framework identifying common characteristics of various gaps is missing. This represents a critical shortcoming in our understanding of these gaps, since effective mitigation or compensation strategies depend on a thorough grasp of the underlying phenomenon.

The workshop “Beyond responsibility: new gaps with AI systems?” aims to unify and systematize this growing debate, starting with but moving beyond the well-known case of responsibility gaps. This workshop features researchers with expertise in the philosophical and ethical dimensions of AI to collaboratively explore the causes and defining characteristics of, as well as potential remedies to,  gaps created by artificial systems.

Program

updates will follow soon.

Support

The event is co-sponsored by the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT).