  Just like animals, Floridi and Sanders argue, artificial agents can be seen as sources of moral actions and thus can be held morally accountable when they can be conceived of as behaving like a moral agent from an appropriate level of abstraction. The notion of levels of abstraction refers to the stance one adopts towards and entity to predict and explain its behavior. At a low level of abstraction we would explain the behavior of a system in terms of its mechanical or biological processes. At a higher level of abstraction it can help to describe the behavior of a system in terms of beliefs, desires and thoughts. If at a high enough level a computational system can effectively be described as being interactive, autonomous and adaptive, then it can be held accountable according to Floridi and Sanders (p. 352). It, thus, does not require personhood or free will for an agent to be morally accountable; rather the agent has to act as if it had intentions and was able to make choices.