Clarify responsibility for distributed moral action within sociotechnical systems

Ascertain who within sociotechnical systems is responsible for distributed moral action arising from the design, deployment, and operation of automated decision-making systems (ADMS).

Background

Moral responsibility can be diffuse in sociotechnical systems involving multiple human and institutional actors. The authors highlight the unresolved question of how to allocate responsibility for outcomes influenced by ADMS, which is central to accountability and remediation frameworks in EBA.

References

To mention a few: was the right ADMS built, and was it build right? (Dobbe et al., 2019); what are the appropriate ethical assessment criteria for ADMS? (D'Agostino & Durante, 2018); what should be included when documenting the origin of a dataset or the design of an ADMS? (Raji et al., 2020); how to account for the power asymmetries between system owners, regulating bodies and decision-subjects when designing EBA procedures? (Crawford et al., 2019); and, who within STS is responsible for distributed moral action? (Floridi, 2016b). These questions are left for future research.

— Ethics-Based Auditing of Automated Decision-Making Systems: Intervention Points and Policy Implications  (2111.04380 - Mokander et al., 2021) in Section 5 (Discussion: limitations and risks associated with EBA), paragraph beginning “It should also be noted that when analysing STS...”

Responsibility across family and professional boundaries remains unresolved. Community-connected systems brought clinical and educational knowledge into family activity through pediatric communication and therapeutic interpretation. Analysis of child-welfare case records raised related questions about practitioner judgment and institutional accountability, but did not establish how families used the outputs. Across these settings, professional review and family contextualization must be examined as distinct tasks.

— Characterizing LLM-Based Family Education through the Lens of Activity Theory: A Scoping Review of the HCI Literature  (2609.28886 - Luo et al., 24 Sep 2026) in Paragraph “Research gaps for RQ3.1,” subsection “LLM Roles and Human Responsibilities (RQ3.1)”

As automation begins to remove the human mediator, as in autonomous ride-hailing or delivery robots, these interactional consequences do not disappear, raising the question of who, or what, will absorb them.

— Frontstage Mediation Work: Invisible Work Bridging Gaps Between AI Decisions and User Expectations  (2610.08067 - Sohn et al., 6 Oct 2026) in Section DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK

Building even one of these supports would then raise the harder question our participants kept returning to, which is not whether a system can surface workplace information but who is permitted to act on what it surfaces.

— Workplace Ambiguity and Technology Support for Autistic and IDD Workers  (2610.21236 - Curry et al., 15 Oct 2026) in Section 7, Limitations and Future Work