The issue of a responsible agent in technological civilization

Tomsk State University of Architecture and Building, Solyanaya sq., 2, 634003 Tomsk, Russia

^a Corresponding author: nplatonova79@inbox.ru

Abstract

In our days, responsibility has become the most problematic aspect of almost all human actions, including influencing nature, scientific prognostication, and simulation of the future. The problem of responsibility is a sign of the crisis which we experience now, resulting from the gap between activities and knowledge about their consequences. Human activity has a mediated and collective nature, which makes it difficult to name the subject of responsibility. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the subjective aspect of responsibility related to the technological activity and conditions in which such liability may be plausibly attributed to any subject. Scientific and technological rationality is not a sufficient approach to face new problems ahead of us. Technological progress and moral crisis make us realize that we need a new moral system. Particularly, the idea of moral responsibility can be represented as a filter for technological innovations. However, the notion of moral responsibility has some restrictions when we attempt to apply it for technological activities. Analyzing the functions of multiform subjects of responsibility is a prerequisite to our understanding of the way in which scientific and technological progress shapes the contemporary society. We are trying to focus on the complicated notion of Collective Responsibility, which is, on the one hand, needs some philosophical implications due to appearance of new social changes and, on the other hand, analyzes the idea which allows reconstructing the whole discussion context. First of all, the authors attempt to show the main issues, which appear when researchers use this idea in their investigations. Simultaneously, the article describes the state of moral responsibility in Philosophy on the whole, where the authors define the Individual notion of responsibility, which is deeply rooted in the Western philosophical way of thinking.