Not preventing them from doing something in the future, mind you. Holding them accountable won't be a net long term improvement. Just accountability for the sake of punishment.
I'm sure there are people who believe that, but I suspect most of the reputable philosophers will agree with the utilitarians on this particular issue.
It is difficult to defend against "your stubbornness will cause mounds of corpses for no obvious gain". This is a pretty clear cut line of approach.
"Old Uncle Bob forgot his glasses again and ran over a kid" doesn't have any implication regarding my use of a car. "A self-driving Tesla was confused by work signage and ran over a kid" would destroy a lot of trust into self-driving cars.
(I'm not a philosopher so maybe somebody with an actual background can correct me if I'm wrong)
Ignoring the hyperbole in your statement, I think the traditional counterpoint to consequentialism is deontology. Meaning, the intent behind an action matters despite the consequences. So if you are willingly putting people at risk in the short-term for the "long term good", it's morally wrong. History is rife with examples of how taking an "ends justify the means" philosophy can lead to truly abhorrent policy decisions.
>but I suspect most of the reputable philosophers will agree with the utilitarians on this particular issue.
This comes across as a "no true Scotsman" defense by implying if one is not a utilitarian in this case, they must not be reputable. Kant is generally considered a "reputable" philosopher and would likely fall on the deontological side of the argument as would many others.
>This is a pretty clear cut line of approach.
Ethics is not mathematics so there is often no "clear cut" answer. If you are defining policy, absolutism in this realm is dangerous; you have to acknowledge other people's morals may differ from yours and not fall prey to the presumption that just because it makes sense to you, it must be right.
People by and large don't intend to put people at risk. The intent of someone who causes a car crash is rarely malicious.
> This comes across as a "no true Scotsman" defense...
I suspect Kant would agree with me that it would be a difficult argument to carry as a philosopher when you are arguing in favour of increasing the corpse count for no particular reason. "If a self-driving car bugs out and kills someone, who's responsible?" certainly isn't a reason to kill people. We can afford to live in ignorance if it means more people live to die in their old age.
I'm on board with the idea that maybe someone has a reason that it is a good idea to just let people kill each other by accident. But so far in this thread nobody has bought one up.
And yet it happens, which is to the point and (depending on locality) people are still held accountable. Adopting nascent technologies almost always comes with risk tradeoffs because we don't yet have a solid understanding of the latent risks. Look at aircraft statistics if you need an example. To your point, over time they will improve, but not without accepting additional risk in the near-term. The last point is false only if you believe we understand the risk profile enough to unequivocally say autonomous cars are safer in all conditions. I don't think we can claim that yet.
What you're advocating is like someone in the early 1950s being told "Just make everyone fly in a de Havilland Comet! Don't you know air travel is going to be the safest mode of travel per mile!?" While true over the long run and in the aggregate, that individual on the Comet is being told to take an outsized risk. I'm making the claim that some people (not even necessarily me) would have a moral issue with being told at the individual level they need to take a larger risk for the betterment of society in the future.
So even while in the long time horizon they may be safer, or even be safer in the aggregate now, you could be subjecting passengers to higher risks in those individual cases. I can't speak for Kant, but I think some people may think it's immoral to draconianly force them to accept that risk. Kant speaks against the hypothetical imperative which is a motivation to obtain certain ends (like forcing policy that reduces traffic deaths in the aggregate).
If you disagree, ask yourself or others a hypothetical: take whomever you love the most in this world whether it's a child, a parent, or a dog. Would you be willing to adopt a rule today that they can never step foot in an ape-driven car for the rest of their life and every instance of travel be relegated to autonomous vehicles? Even if you are okay with that risk, there are plenty of people who would balk at it.
The whole argument above is built upon the assumption that everybody agrees with a utilitarian mindset so I’m assuming the answer to the question, in part, is you should care about the philosophical underpinnings.