The ABC of Responsible AI
Written by Maximilian Kiener
Amazon’s Alexa recently told a ten-year-old girl to touch a live plug with a penny, encouraging the girl to do what could potentially lead to severe burns or even the loss of an entire limb.[1] Fortunately, the girl’s mother heard Alexa’s suggestion, intervened, and made sure her daughter stayed safe.
But what if the girl had been hurt? Who would have been responsible: Amazon for creating Alexa, the parents for not watching their daughter, or the licensing authorities for allowing Alexa to enter the market?
Pandemic Ethics: Key Workers Have a Stronger Claim to Compensation and Hazard Pay for Working During The COVID-19 Pandemic Than The Armed Forces Do When on Deployment
By Doug McConnell and Dominic Wilkinson
Post originally appeared on the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog
While the general public enjoy the relative safety of social distancing, key workers are at a higher risk of both contracting COVID-19 and transmitting it to their families. This is especially the case for ‘frontline’ workers who are frequently exposed to the virus and may not have access to adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). Tragically, many key workers have died of COVID-19 around the world already, including over 100 in the UK.
Although it is relatively rare for key workers to die from COVID-19, the risk of death is obviously much greater than one would usually expect in these roles and key workers clearly have good reason to be anxious. For ‘frontline’ workers, the distress is compounded by working in harrowing conditions where so many are dying alone. Furthermore, frontline workers have to take on the burdens of ensuring they do not transmit infections to their families, by moving in with patients, living in hotels, or maintaining rigorous social distancing in their own homes.
These atypical costs, risks, and burdens suggest that key workers are owed compensation in addition to their usual pay and a few instances of nationally coordinated applause. Continue reading
Video Series: Francesca Minerva on Discrimination Against Unattractive People
Is discrimination against unattractive people (lookism) a serious problem? What are the costs of lookism ? What should we do about lookism? In this interview with Katrien Devolder, Dr Francesca Minerva (Philosopher, Ghent University) addresses these thorny questions.
Some thoughts on reparations
Consider the following case. Imagine you inherit a fortune from your parents. With that money, you buy a luxurious house and you pay to get a good education, which later allows you to find a job where you earn a decent salary. Many years later, you find out that your parents made their fortune through a very bad act—say, defrauding someone. You also find out that the scammed person and his family lived an underprivileged life from that moment on.
What do you think you would need to do to fulfill your moral obligations?
If you’re female, your face is worth 48-67% more than mine
If you’re a young woman, your face is worth between 48-67% more than that of a young man.
That’s the gist of the Judicial College’s Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages in Personal Injury Cases, 12th Edition (2013) – one of the canonical texts used by lawyers.
For ‘Very Severe Scarring’ ‘in relatively young women (typically teens to early 30s), where the cosmetic effect is very disfiguring and the psychological reaction severe’, the suggested range of damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity (what lawyers call ‘general damages’) is £39,160 – £78,650. The corresponding figures for males (‘especially in males under 30’) are £24,090 – £53,075.
The editors of the Guidelines are embarrassed by the discrepancy. They point out that it arises from ‘cases that stretch back into the mists of time’, but that it is ‘nonetheless open to serious doubt that gender itself can be a proper or indeed lawful factor in determining the level of general damages.’ The embarrassment is appropriate. Gender in itself should not be relevant. The Guidelines list the relevant factors: they include ‘the subjective impact of the disfigurement upon the claimant and the extent to which it adversely affects the claimant’s social, domestic and work lives’.
Should the Guidelines declare that, as a matter of policy, the law should refuse to distinguish between facial scarring in males and in females? That, one might think, is an appropriate way for the law to declare its gender-blindness: it might help to nudge society (which the law leads, as well as reflects) in the right direction. But that would be wrong: the fact is that, whether we like it or not, facial scarring matters more to women. We should do our best to change the attitudes that make this the case, but it is the case, and in compensating claimants, judges should not pretend that we live in a liberal utopia in which people are not judged (by themselves and others) on the basis of the shape or colour of their face. Similarly, when assessing damages for loss of earnings, the law should not pretend that the legislation which prohibits discrimination on grounds of disability actually works.
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