Beyond Fairness: Alternative Moral Dimensions for Assessing Algorithms and Designing Systems

Abstract

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has risen as an imminent concern across scholarly communities. This concern has propagated a great interest in algorithmic fairness. Large research agendas are now devoted to increasing algorithmic fairness, assessing algorithmic fairness, and understanding human perceptions of fairness. We argue that there is an overreliance on fairness as a single dimension of morality, which comes at the expense of other important human values. Drawing from moral psychology, we present five moral dimensions that go beyond fairness, and suggest three ways these alternative dimensions may contribute to ethical AI development.

Presented at pluralism@CSCW workshop (Many Worlds of Ethics: Ethical Pluralism in CSCW) and M2@NeurIPS workshop (AI Meets Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue about Computational Ethics at NeurIPS) in 2023