Moral distance, AI, and the ethics of care

Abstract

This paper investigates how the introduction of AI to decision making increases moral distance and recommends the ethics of care to augment the ethical examination of AI decision making. With AI decision making, face-to-face interactions are minimized, and decisions are part of a more opaque process that humans do not always understand. Within decision-making research, the concept of moral distance is used to explain why individuals behave unethically towards those who are not seen. Moral distance abstracts those who are impacted by the decision and leads to less ethical decisions. The goal of this paper is to identify and analyze the moral distance created by AI through both proximity distance (in space, time, and culture) and bureaucratic distance (derived from hierarchy, complex processes, and principlism). We then propose the ethics of care as a moral framework to analyze the moral implications of AI. The ethics of care brings to the forefront circumstances and context, interdependence, and vulnerability in analyzing algorithmic decision making.