Perica Jovchevski

This article examines the ethical and moral implications of automation bias inhigh-stakes decision-making contexts. Drawing on empirical studies, we distin-guish between weak automation bias, where users follow system’s automated cues(or its silence) without consulting readily accessible evidence that contradictsthem, and strong automation bias, where users follow such cues (or their absence)even when they are aware of such evidence. While weak automation bias, in ourview, resembles automation-based complacency and is plausibly associated withnegligence on the part of the human operator, strong automation bias reveals anexcessive and unwarranted transfer of trust from operators to automated systemswhich results in epistemic deference of the former to the prompts of the latter. Weargue that what is ethically and morally troubling about this form of deference,is that it interferes with the exercise of the operators’ autonomous agency as wellas with their duty to exercise human judgment in high-stakes decision-makingcontexts. To mitigate these effects, we discuss two design-based tools introducingepistemic friction - Reflection Machines (RMs) and defeaters - which ultimatelyaim at cultivating critical trust in the interaction between human operators anddecision-support systems.

This chapter challenges the coherence of the purely retributivist framework of justifying more lenient punishment for juvenile offenders relative to adults for identical crimes. We begin by discussing three theses which, in our opinion, distinguish retributivist from other justifications of punishment and point to an exception from two of them which retributivists commonly grant: namely, that juvenile offenders should be treated differently than adults by the criminal legal systems for the same crimes and be subject to more lenient punitive, non-punitive, or a complex of punitive and non-punitive measures. While intuitively plausible, we claim that retributivists are far from being at ease with the reasons for the exception. We consider two responses they commonly offer: the arguments from (a) moral responsibility and (b) participation in a political community, but conclude that none of them offers a plausible justification for the ascription of more lenient punishment to young offenders of criminal age. In the last section, we start from the retributivist failure to justify the differential treatment and argue that our intuition for lesser punishment of children should be justified based on forward-looking considerations, unavailable to pure retributivists, which we believe in some circumstances also grant lesser punishment to adults as well.

In this paper, we offer a defense of non-punitive measures as morally justified responses to crime within a framework of society as a fair system of cooperation among free and equal individuals. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we elaborate on the premises of our argument: we situate criminal acts within a model of society as a fair system of cooperation, identify the types of unfair disadvantages crimes bring about, and consider the social aim of the criminal justice system. Next, we reject the claim defended by fair-play retributivists that fairness considerations make punishment a necessary response to criminal acts. In the last step, we demonstrate that it is rather non-punitive responses to crime that are warranted under the principle of fairness and, as such, are morally justified. We conclude the paper by rejecting two possible objections to our defense: the “responsibility gap” and the “victims’ claim to justice” objections.