Proefschrift

49 2 EXTENSIVE LITERATURE REVIEW criminal and tort liability. And by encouraging accountability, it is probably possible to make persons more able and willing to discharge their (forward-looking) moral and social obligations (Pesch, 2015). However, these forms of responsibility are also distinct and require different conditions to apply. For instance, Van de Poel (2011) states that an agent can have backward-looking responsibility (i.e. being accountable or blameworthy) without being forward-looking responsible for preventing that state-of-affairs. Also, blameworthiness requires that an agent has unjustifiably and inexcusably committed a wrong action. Whereas accountability simply requires the agent to explain her behaviour, possibly but not necessarily with the goal of showing that it was not wrong, or that thought wrong, given the circumstances, justifiable or excusable (Gardner, 2007). Also, Pesch (2015) discussed the concept of “active responsibility” of engineers. Active responsibility could be viewed as forward-looking responsibility as it proactively requires engineers to take societal values of technology into account during the development of technology. It is also paired with ‘passive’ responsibility, also referred to as accountability. The pairing of active responsibility and passive responsibility creates a proactive feedback loop of responsibility that is neither strictly forward-looking nor backward-looking responsibility and by this, it takes an intermediate position between these two types of responsibility. This proactive feedback loop enables actors to learn and reflect on their actions. Yet another notion is that of command responsibility which originates in the military legal domain and is a concept used in relation to violations of the laws of war and International Human Rights Law (IHRL) (see Table 6 in appendix C for an overview). Command responsibility means that a superior can be held accountable for the crimes committed by his or her subordinates. It originates from the failure of military or civilian superiors preventing their subordinates committing crimes that violate the laws of war or IHRL or not meeting the obligation to punish the violators after committing the crime. Three conditions need to be met for command responsibility to be pertinent: 1) ‘The existence of a superior–subordinate relationship was demonstrated by the commander’s ‘effective control’ over the persons who commit the crime, 2) the superior knew or had reason to know that the criminal act was about to be or had been committed, and 3) the superior failed to take the necessary and reasonable measures to prevent the criminal act or punish the perpetrator thereof.’ (Saxon, 2016, p. 24). Command responsibility can be viewed as a combination of virtue-based responsibility and accountability. It is meant as an instrument to hold commanders accountable, but it is also linked to moral identity as the commander has the moral obligation to prevent crimes and violations that are about to be committed. All forms of responsibility are arguably to be encouraged and promoted in order for Autonomous Weapon Systems to be designed, introduced, regulated and used in a morally acceptable way, and many different forms of responsibility gaps have to be

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