Applied Ethics Commons^™

A Proposal For More Useful Ai Ethics: Hierarchical Principlism & The Principle Of Compassion, Adam Braus

Applied Computer Science | Faculty Scholarship

Principlism is one of the leading approaches to AI ethics. Developed originally to address bioethical issues in medicine and research, the theory requires decision-makers to consider various ethical principles to justify their actions. Despite its dominance in bioethics and growing popularity in AI ethics, principlism faces serious theoretical and practical criticisms. One serious criticism is that since ethical principles are combined ad hoc, conflicts inevitably arise between them, leading to inconsistencies. While defenders of principlism propose a process for resolving such disputes, contemporary critics argue that this process is incomplete, and at best, principlist frameworks can only help structure analysis …

Who Bears The Cost? A Module For Researching The Intersection Of Technology, The Individual, And Climate Change, Jonathan Auyer

Climate Change and the Individual, 2025-26

Who Bears the Cost? A Module for Researching the Intersection of Technology, the Individual, and Climate Change is a multi-day writing and research module designed for first-year composition courses. Using the ongoing controversy surrounding the Science, Technology & Advanced Manufacturing Park (STAMP) in Genesee County, New York as a central case study, students investigate the ethical, environmental, and social dimensions of artificial intelligence and climate change. The module guides students from initial inquiry, exploring the philosophical question of whether technology is value-neutral or value-laden, through source research, collaborative discussion, and persuasive writing. Drawing on the rhetorical framework of They Say …

Ethical Work Cultures & Ai, Andrew Brei

Presentations - 2025

With the help of moral theories, several case studies, and insights from the world of behavioral ethics, my project aims to provide engineering professionals with the means to deal properly with moral issues that commonly arise in their chosen fields.

Artificial Intelligence In Health Care: Business Opportunities And Ethical Challenges, Ankita Srivastava,, Marco Marabelli, Jeffrey Moriarty

Ethics Publication

Artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular generative AI (GAI), are making incredible progress toward automation. The pervasive and invasive nature of these technologies are affecting every industry, and health care is no exception. This paper summarizes insights derived from a panel that the Hoffman Center for Business Ethics and the Center for Health and Business at Bentley University hosted in March 2024. The panel invited three qualified health care professionals: Evan Carey, Susan Persky and John Torous. The panelists are all active in multiple aspects of AI in health care but represent a focus on the key areas of policy …

Artificial Intelligence In Health Care: Business Opportunities And Ethical Challenges, Ankita Srivastava, Marco Marabelli, Jeffrey Moriarty

Computer Information Systems Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular generative AI (GAI), are making incredible progress toward automation. The pervasive and invasive nature of these technologies are affecting every industry, and health care is no exception. This paper summarizes insights derived from a panel that the Hoffman Center for Business Ethics and the Center for Health and Business at Bentley University hosted in March 2024. The panel invited three qualified health care professionals: Evan Carey, Susan Persky and John Torous. The panelists are all active in multiple aspects of AI in health care but represent a focus on the key areas of policy …

Transparency And Authority Concerns With Using Ai To Make Ethical Recommendations In Clinical Settings, Jeffrey Byrnes, Michael Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

In response to recent proposals to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to automate ethics consultations in healthcare, we raise two main problems for the prospect of having healthcare professionals rely on AI-driven programs to provide ethical guidance in clinical matters. The first cause for concern is that, because these programs would effectively function like black boxes, this approach seems to preclude the kind of transparency that would allow clinical staff to explain and justify treatment decisions to patients, fellow caregivers, and those tasked with providing oversight. The other main problem is that the kind of authority that would need to be …

Volume 7 (2024) Artificial Intelligence And Responsibility, Arwa Alnajashi, Danielle Derise, Philip L. Frana, David Mcgraw, Amanda Sawyer, Tatjana Titareva, Raafat Zaini, Allie Zombron

International Journal on Responsibility

The seventh volume of the International Journal on Responsibility (IJR) arrives at a crucial moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence and its integration into our academic and social fabric. As we witness the rapid advancement and deployment of AI systems across various domains, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions of responsibility surrounding AI technology, with a particular focus on its role in higher education and broader societal implications.

The articles in this volume contribute to our understanding of responsibility through diverse lenses, from classroom implementation to ethical design considerations. Together, they fulfill IJR’s central mission of exploring “Who …

L’Ia, Nouvelle Forme D’Aliénation Et De Déresponsabilisation De L’Homme ?, Lina Iskandar Hawat

Horizons et Conjonctures

Artificial intelligence represents a technology capable of transforming the world and humanity. Through it, human beings confront their nature and limits and assume ethical responsibility toward this innovation that carries both opportunities and risks. Its effects can be positive or negative on the human future, and it can modify human interactions through virtual environments susceptible to becoming sources of problems and isolation. AI can surpass humans in performance and rationality while remaining unpredictable, raising questions about trust and cooperation. The central question: how can human beings preserve their place as the ultimate end and avoid alienation in technological fascination? This …

How Can Law Enforcement Use Technology To Protect Citizens Justly?, Zach Kantenwein

Emerging Writers

This paper explores the danger of emerging artificial intelligence technology perpetuating racial injustice in law enforcement and how police can ensure the protection of citizens amid this information age. We dissect a real-world case in which AI predictive policing technology resulted in alarming racial discrimination against American minority citizens. We discuss the possible explanations for this result and explore the limitations of artificial intelligence technology. Furthermore, we brainstorm methods for ensuring American citizens' just and constitutional protection as new technology is developed and tested. We propose implementing transparency laws that make the details about any policing technology and surveillance available …

The Barriers To Implementation Of Artificial Intelligence In Human Resource Management, Maddy L. Filetti

Student Publications

The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in Human Resource Management (HRM) has rapidly become a point of controversy in academic and applied settings. This review will specifically examine the most recent publications on the challenges of implementing these AI tools in the recruitment and selection functions of HR. I identify various issues brought forth by the literature related the adoption of AI-based hiring technology in organizations, including practical costs, bias, data privacy, adverse employee and manager perceptions, and validity and reliability assessment. Suggestions for addressing the concerns are also discussed – namely, the construction of inclusive algorithms, creation of …

Balanced Blended Space: Foundational Human–Ai Dialogues In A Symmetry-Based Mediation Framework, David Smith

Publications and Research

This working paper documents the early development of the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework through a series of iterative interactions between a cognitive agent (human researcher) and a computational agent (AI system) conducted in 2023. The work is motivated by the need for a universal theoretical model capable of describing the integration of physical, virtual, and conceptual spaces, particularly in response to increasing fragmentation across contemporary communication systems.

BBS is proposed as a symmetry-based mediation framework in which relationships between domains—such as physical and virtual space, cognition and computation, and multiple sensory modalities—are treated as structurally equivalent and mappable. Central …

Ai Art: Artists’ Best Friend Or Mortal Enemy?, Ethan Gabrys

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

This paper analyzes the impacts and implications of generative AI software on art and examines the ethics of using such tools. Through the argument that careless use of these tools presents a danger to the art world as they risk devaluing human expression, Gabrys states that “as what it means to be human changes with each generation, new artists express sentiment through their art. Art has the ability to tell us about the human experience.” He concludes that the use of AI tools takes the skill and sentiment of human artists out of the equation, begging the question: if the …

The Ethics Of Governance Of Data Analytics In Healthcare, Andrew Harrington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent literature and studies on data governance usually focus on data ethics and governance from a specific country or industry, which has been mostly business, without considering the larger global impact that is affected. Data is a worldwide asset; thus, its implications and considerations should be viewed as such. Hence, this dissertation attempts to incorporate this view by weaving together topics in healthcare, such as the blending of finance and delivery, data governance at the micro and macro levels, data analytics in healthcare, ethics of AI and information management, and technology’s impact on end-of-life practices. Through highlighting these areas of …

Murder On The Vr Express: Studying The Impact Of Thought Experiments At A Distance In Virtual Reality, Andrew Kissel, Krzysztof J. Rechowicz, John B. Shull

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Hypothetical thought experiments allow researchers to gain insights into widespread moral intuitions and provide opportunities for individuals to explore their moral commitments. Previous thought experiment studies in virtual reality (VR) required participants to come to an on-site laboratory, which possibly restricted the study population, introduced an observer effect, and made internal reflection on the participants’ part more difficult. These shortcomings are particularly crucial today, as results from such studies are increasingly impacting the development of artificial intelligence systems, self-driving cars, and other technologies. This paper explores the viability of deploying thought experiments in commercially available in-home VR headsets. We conducted …

Ethics And Governance Of General Models: Challenges And Countermeasures, Yan Teng, Guoyu Wang, Yingchun Wang

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

In recent years, the general model is one of the most important development trends of artificial intelligence. With the rapidly increasing research and deployment of general models, the social and ethical effects of general models have received extensive attention. Grounded in the characteristics of general models, this article analyzes the potential ethical challenges of the models at three levels:algorithm, data, and computing power. The detailed challenges include uncertainty, truthfulness, reliability, bias, toxicity, fairness, privacy, and environmental issues. Also, through the lens of philosophy of technology, it elaborates the important reasons for the ethical challenges:the "mirroring" effect and transparency problem caused …

The Symptom Of Ethics: Rethinking Ethics In The Face Of The Machine, David J. Gunkel

Human-Machine Communication

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj …

Machine Ethics, Ethics For Machines: Context-Based Modeling For Machines Making Ethical Decisions, Jaysa Ramirez

Honors Program Theses

Machine ethics is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that focuses on if – and if so, how – machines can make ethical decisions autonomously. Through a close study of two positions on whether or not machines can be moral agents, this project sheds light on a clash of assumptions that is keeping the field of machine ethics in limbo. After making this clash of assumptions clear, I raise two questions which get at the scope of machine ethics itself: 1) What makes ethical decision-making different from other kinds of decision-making? 2) To what extent can machines engage with ethics and make …

Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, And Artificial Intelligence, Os Keyes

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems shift to interact with new domains and populations, so does AI ethics: a relatively nascent subdiscipline that frequently concerns itself with questions of “fairness” and “accountability.” This fairness-centred approach has been criticized for (amongst other things) lacking the ability to address discursive, rather than distributional, injustices. In this paper I simultaneously validate these concerns, and work to correct the relative silence of both conventional and critical AI ethicists around disability, by exploring the narratives deployed by AI researchers in discussing and designing systems around autism. Demonstrating that these narratives frequently perpetuate a dangerously dehumanizing model …

Implementation Considerations For Mitigating Bias In Supervised Machine Learning, Bardia Bijani Aval

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

Machine Learning (ML) is an important component of computer science and a mainstream way of making sense of large amounts of data. Although the technology is establishing new possibilities in different fields, there are also problems to consider, one of which is bias. Due to the inductive reasoning of ML algorithms in creating mathematical models, the predictions and trends found by the models will never necessarily be true – just more or less probable. Knowing this, it is unreasonable for us to expect the applied deductive reasoning of these models to ever be fully unbiased. Therefore, it is important that …

Course Syllabus (Sp19) Coli 214b--Literature & Society: "A.I. And Other Radical Humanisms In Cyberpunk And Science Fiction", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

As that which we call “technology” continues to evolve as both concept and practice, we discover ever more inventive ways to answer its call, and science fiction seems to serve as a universal standpoint from which global societies manage to confront, question, and reimagine the nature of our shared humanity as a radically technical relation. While the growing social pervasiveness of artificial intelligence and the attendant encoded transformations of “the human” appear, together, to form a relatively absolute horizon of political thinking, social agency, and aesthetic experience, it seems certain that our current crisis also offers us …

Will Artificial Intelligence Have Free-Will?, Guadalupe Rodriguez

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Will Artificial Intelligence have free will the way the Creature did?

Ethics And Bias In Machine Learning: A Technical Study Of What Makes Us “Good”, Ashley Nicole Shadowen

Student Theses

The topic of machine ethics is growing in recognition and energy, but bias in machine learning algorithms outpaces it to date. Bias is a complicated term with good and bad connotations in the field of algorithmic prediction making. Especially in circumstances with legal and ethical consequences, we must study the results of these machines to ensure fairness. This paper attempts to address ethics at the algorithmic level of autonomous machines. There is no one solution to solving machine bias, it depends on the context of the given system and the most reasonable way to avoid biased decisions while maintaining the …

Evolving Machine Morality Strategies Through Multiagent Simulations, David Burke

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

There is a general consensus among robotics researchers that the world of the future will be filled with autonomous and semi-autonomous machines. There is less of a consensus, though, on the best approach to instilling a sense of 'machine morality' in these systems so that they will be able to have effective interactions with humans in an increasingly complex world. In my talk, we take a brief look at some existing approaches to computational ethics, and then describe work we've undertaken creating multiagent simulations involving moral decision-making during strategic interactions. In these simulations, agents make choices about whether to cooperate …