Responsibility Without Informed Agency: Kant do That

This started as a final paper for a course on technology and ethics. I've adapted it lightly for the blog. When an AI system denies someone a loan or generates medical advice that influences a doctor's decision, someone bears responsibility for that output. Responsibility in this context is the obligation to answer for and justify the consequences of using a system. Laws like the EU AI Act and company terms of service usually assign this responsibility to human actors, correctly, but responsibility means little without informed agency, the capacity to make decisions grounded in real knowledge of how a system functions and operates. Those who control the conditions of that agency have a duty to sustain it. Through the lens of Kantian ethics, utilitarian reasoning, and care ethics, the industry's pattern of opacity reveals a structural failure to honor that obligation. By hiding training data and system behavior while masking environmental costs, developers steadily undermine informed…