The Ethics of Moral Responsibility: Philosophical Landmarks for the Autonomous World

Abstract

Moral responsibility remains one of the central concepts of ethics, yet its traditional configuration becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in a world where actions and their consequences no longer belong exclusively to a single agent. This article revisits the theoretical foundations of moral responsibility by asking whether the classical notion of accountability can still operate within a context in which different forms of autonomy-human, collective, or technological-intersect and overlap. The discussion draws on several major philosophical reference points, from Kantian moral autonomy to modern interpretations of action and imputability developed by Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans Jonas. This framework helps clarify the extent to which moral responsibility presupposes a specific type of agency, intentionality, and self-assumption. At the same time, the article explores how the contemporary world-marked by distributed decisions, autonomous systems, and complex interdependencies-challenges the classical conditions under which responsibility has been understood. Instead of concluding that the concept should be abandoned, the argument put forward is that responsibility needs to be re-anchored and re-articulated: a more reflexive form of responsibility, attentive to long-term consequences and sensitive to the complexity of current contexts. The article concludes by outlining several philosophical guidelines for reconfiguring moral responsibility in a world that, although increasingly autonomous, still depends on subjects capable of answering for their actions.