Case uitwerking
Business Ethics Final Exam
- Instelling
- Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
Business Ethics Final Exam Grade 8
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Final Exam Business EthicsGrade: 8
Question 1: Governments considering the use of algorithms.
Ethics is playing a huge role nowadays in all parts of the society, like governments,
organizations and health care. And therefore the perceived fairness of decision-making
procedures is a key concern (Newman et al., 2020). Newman (2020) states that “algorithms
have created opportunities for increasing fairness by overcoming biases commonly displayed
by human decision makers”. People perceive decision-making procedures as fairer when they
are consistent, based on accurate information and free of influence from the personal biases of
decision makers (Brockner, 2006). This type of decision-making can be obtained with
algorithms.
Yet people have their doubts when decision-making amounts to algorithms. Newman
et al., (2020) states that “people who are affected by decisions made by algorithms will
perceive those decisions as less fair than decisions made by humans, because they will
perceive the algorithmic decision-making process as fundamentally reductionistic and leading
them to think that certain qualitative information or contextualization is not being taken into
account”. People affected by algorithmic decisions will perceive the decision-making process
as a replacement of the qualitative aspects of their performance to quantifiable metrics
(Newman et el., 2020).
This was also the case for the British students, where their grades were a calculation of
the school’s past performance on the tests and a student’s earlier results on mock exams,
which result in a more quantifiable metric than qualitative. Therefore, people will argue that
this can undermine their beliefs about the procedural fairness of using algorithms, because the
assumption is that decisions made by algorithms are based on less accurate information than
identical decisions made by humans (Newman et al., 2020).
Utilitarianism
A phrase that is associated with utilitarianism is: ‘‘All is well that ends well”, also
means morality is only concerned with bringing about the best consequences (Gibson, 2007).
The best consequences can be seen as the greatest happiness that will be perceived. As Gibson
(2007) states: “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as
they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”. If we want to determine whether using
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, algorithms in the public sector is the right thing to do from an utilitarian perspective, it is
important to look at the consequences that are a result of the use of the algorithms.
Since utilitarianism only looks at the consequences, the means, in this case algorithms,
cannot be judged if it is morally or not. But rather, the consequences that are derived with the
algorithms can be morally judged. For instance, if the results of using the algorithms lead to a
positive result in which the majority of people have a positive advantage, then from a
utilitarian perspective we can indicate that the use of algorithms is a good thing to do, since
the greatest happiness will be perceived. But will the results of using the algorithms
disadvantage the majority, then the use of algorithms is not the best thing to do.
So from a utilitarianism point of view the means (the algorithms) should not be
weighed but the outcome thereof. In the case of the British students, 40% of the students are
disadvantaged because of the use of the algorithms. Since this is the minority, it can be said
that the majority has acquired a positive interest in it. And from a utilitarian perspective, it can
be said that using algorithms in the case of the British students was the right thing to do.
Kant’s ethics
Unlike utilitarianism, Kant ethics doesn't just look at the consequences. Kant believed
that ethics is based on reasons and freedom, where people have the mental capacity to make
moral decisions (Gibson, 2007). The motive is all that matters and asserts that the motive
itself has to be of the right type that seeks goodness for goodness’s sake and not to its success
in realizing some desired end or purpose (Gibson, 2007). Reynolds & Bowie (2004) also state
that if one wants to bring in consequences, one must recognize that in a world where people
reason about the moral life as Kantians, an ethics program that is adopted simply to support
the bottom line will not have the best consequences. And therefore only a program that is
adopted with a good motive, can do that.
If we look at the British students’ case, it is mentioned that the government officials
said that the model was meant to make the system more fair and balance out potentially
inflated scores given by some teachers. From Kant’s perspective it can be concluded that the
aim for the implementation of the algorithms was with a good motive and therefore the
decision that is made for the use of algorithms was the right thing to do.
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