The Architecture of Moral Responsibility: Re-Structuring Moral Blame to fill in the Responsibility gap

Abstract

The increasing integration of artificial intelligence into decision-making processes has intensified questions about how responsibility should be understood within socio-technical systems. Although debates surrounding the responsibility gap have identified important challenges for existing models of responsibility, they often leave underexamined the internal structure of responsibility itself, treating it as a one-dimensional concept despite comprising multiple analytically distinct normative relations. This paper argues that a more adequate account can be developed by drawing on Gary Watson’s distinction between attributability and accountability, together with his later elaboration of responsibility in terms of attributability, accountability, answerability, and culpability. These distinctions provide the basis for analysing responsibility as a multi-layered structure composed of distinct but related normative dimensions. This perspective makes it possible to examine responsibility under conditions of technological mediation without attributing moral agency or moral responsibility to artificial intelligence systems. Building on this framework, I develop eight sub-dimensions of blame designed to capture how responsibility relations are differentiated and reconfigured within socio-technical systems. The resulting account reconceives the responsibility gap not as a single problem, but as a set of structurally distinct layers between responsibility relations. The paper’s contribution is to provide a structured analytical framework for mapping these relations with greater precision, thereby clarifying how responsibility is organised in socio-technical environments while preserving human and institutional actors as the primary bearers of accountability and culpability.