The Moral Impact of Delegating to Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: Various artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly embedded in the decision processes of firms, governments, and individuals, taking on delegated decision execution and exerting profound influence on the morality of human decisions and moral judgment. Despite the rapid growth of related empirical and theoretical research, the existing literature still lacks a systematic analysis of what makes AI agents distinctive from other types of agents, and it also lacks a unified analytical framework to systematically characterize the pathways through which AI agents influence moral decision-making. Therefore, this paper develops a “decision-maker–agent–evaluator” framework of decision-making and accountability to synthesize and reorganize the existing literature. We argue that when an agent intervenes in the decision process, it lengthens both the decision-maker’s decision chain and the evaluator’s feedback chain (where evaluators include affected parties and third-party observers). This, in turn, weakens decision-makers’ moral salience and evaluators’ attribution of responsibility, thereby facilitating unethical behavior. Moreover, distinctive features of AI agents—such as opacity (black-boxness), high compliance, scalability, and instrumentality—further intensify the execution of unethical instructions, increase decision-makers’ opportunities for deniability, and expand the scope of unethical impacts along the decision chain. At the same time, these features can increase evaluators’ moral tolerance for unethical outcomes and blur their inferences about the decision-maker’s intent and responsibility along the feedback chain, further encouraging unethical behavior. Finally, we suggest that future research should refine the relative roles of the mechanisms within this framework, examine how unethical behavior diffuses and scales up at organizational and societal levels, and explore governance tools and institutional arrangements for human–AI collaboration.