Taking the wheel: user-side responsibility and the ethics of SAE level 2 driving automation

Scholarship on responsibility and autonomous technology has extensively examined responsibility gaps, distributed agency, and the obligations of developers, manufacturers, regulators, and human operators. Yet the prospective normative position of users across repeated engagement with partially automated systems, and its relationship to responsibility after harm, remains comparatively underdeveloped. This paper argues that users of SAE Level 2 partial driving automation systems occupy a normatively distinctive position that generates two forms of obligation which have not been adequately theorized. Drawing on Conradie and Nagel’s [1] framework of taking versus holding responsibility and the concept of extended responsibility developed by Mason [2], this paper makes two-part argument. First, users of SAE Level 2 systems bear prospective responsibilities arising from their continuing supervisory role, including sustained supervisory engagement, reasonable trust calibration, appropriate knowledge-seeking about system limitations, and readiness for control intervention. Second, where harm occurs and the user’s involvement is morally significant but the conditions for ordinary blameworthiness remain uncertain, users may nevertheless be positioned to take extended retrospective responsibility. Extended responsibility therefore supplements rather than replaces ordinary responsibility.