2023/08/01 by Alex John London, Hoda Heidari, London, Alex John +2 · 1 voice · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #cs.AI #cs.CY
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2308.00868
openalex publication_date 2023/08/01 · openalex created_date 2023/08/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The prevailing discourse around AI ethics lacks the language and formalism necessary to capture the diverse ethical concerns that emerge when AI systems interact with individuals. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum's capability approach, we present a framework formalizing a network of ethical concepts and entitlements necessary for AI systems to confer meaningful benefit or assistance to stakeholders. Such systems enhance stakeholders' ability to advance their life plans and well-being while upholding their fundamental rights. We characterize two necessary conditions for morally permissible interactions between AI systems and those impacted by their functioning, and two sufficient conditions for realizing the ideal of meaningful benefit. We then contrast this ideal with several salient failure modes, namely, forms of social interactions that constitute unjustified paternalism, coercion, deception, exploitation and domination. The proliferation of incidents involving AI in high-stakes domains underscores the gravity of these issues and the imperative to take an ethics-led approach to AI systems from their inception.