Proefschrift

125 6 CONCLUSION The concerns described above highlight that responsibility and accountability are values often mentioned in the societal and academic debate around Autonomous Weapon Systems. Responsibility can be forward-looking to actions to come and backwardlooking to actions that have occurred. Accountability is a form of backward-looking responsibility, refers to the ability and willingness of actors to provide information and explanations about their actions and defines mechanisms for corporate and public governance to hold agents and organisations accountable in a forum. Responsibility contributes to minimizing unintended consequences by anticipating on actions and unintended consequences to come and taking measures to prevent or mitigate them. Accountability can decrease unintended consequences in providing information and explanations by actors of their previous actions in order for other actors to learn from them and prevent mistakes and unintended consequences of their own. To answer research question two: Q2 How should the values of accountability, responsibility and the concept of Human Oversight be characterized? we turned to philosophical, political science, public management, international relations, social psychology, constitutional law and business administration literature. By reviewing the literature of these fields, we found that the term accountability has two different uses. On the one hand, it is used in a broad sense to praise or criticize the performance of states, organizations, firms or officials regarding policy or decisions in relation to their ability and willingness to give information and explanations about their actions (‘accountability as a virtue’). On the other hand, in a narrow sense, accountability is also used to define the mechanisms for corporate and public governance to hold agents and organisations accountable (‘accountability as a mechanism’) (Bovens, Schillemans, & Goodin, 2014). Accountability is not only scrutiny after the event has occurred, it also has a preventive and anticipatory use for which norms are (re)produced, internalized and adjusted by means of accountability if necessary. Responsibility can be forward-looking to actions to come and backward-looking to actions that have occurred. Van de Poel (2011) focusses on moral responsibility for consequences to describe the notions of forward- and backward-looking responsibility and does not describe organizational, social and legal responsibility nor responsibility for actions. Two varieties of responsibility that are primarily forward-looking are: 1) responsibility as virtue and 2) the moral obligation that something is the case; and three varieties that are primarily backward-looking are: 3) accountability, 4) blameworthiness and 5) liability. Following this reasoning we found that accountability is backward-looking and part of the responsibility which encompasses more than accountability alone.

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