Högskolan i Skövde

This paper argues that, within the ethics community, the wider philosophical establishment and society in general, people have been far too quick to let themselves and, all too often, each other off the hook, at the same time as setting impossibly high standards for artefactual moral agents to meet, such that the artefactual agents should be guaranteed to make no mistakes. If artefacts are ever to be considered candidates for moral agency, then they should be held to no higher (and, at the same time, not significantly lower) a standard than what human beings can achieve. Meanwhile, the prospects of artefactual moral agency invite the opportunity for human moral agents to reconsider the standards they set for themselves and hold themselves to a higher standard.