Invasive neural devices offer novel prospects for motor rehabilitation on different levels of agentive behavior. From a functional perspective, they interact with, support, or enable human intentional actions in such a way that movement capabilities are regained. However, when there is a technical malfunction resulting in an unintended movement, the complexity of the relationship between the end user and the device sometimes makes it difficult to determine who is responsible for the outcome – a circumstance that has been coined as “responsibility gap” in the literature. So far, recent accounts frame this issue around the theme of control but more work is needed to explore the complicated terrain of assigning responsibility for neural device-mediated actions from this control perspective. This paper aims at contributing to this tendency by offering more fine-grained distinctions of how that control capacity is facilitated by the machine and how it can be exercised by the end user. This results in a novel framework that depicts an in-depth exploration of the control aspect of responsibility in a way that incorporates the diversity of relationships between neurotechnologies, the various conditions they treat, and the individual end user’s experience.

侵入性神经设备为不同水平代理行为的运动康复提供了新的前景。从功能的角度来看，它们以重新获得运动能力的方式与人类有意的行为相互作用、支持或使之成为可能。然而，当技术故障导致意外移动时，最终用户与设备之间关系的复杂性有时会导致难以确定谁应对结果负责——这种情况被称为“责任差距”在文献中。到目前为止，最近的报道围绕控制主题构建了这个问题，但需要做更多的工作来探索从这个控制角度为神经设备介导的行为分配责任的复杂领域。本文旨在通过对机器如何促进控制能力以及最终用户如何行使控制能力提供更细粒度的区分来促进这种趋势。这导致了一个新颖的框架，该框架描述了对责任控制方面的深入探索，其方式结合了神经技术之间关系的多样性、它们治疗的各种条件以及个体最终用户的体验。