Beneficent Intelligence: A Capability Approach to Modeling Benefit, Assistance, and Associated Moral Failures through AI Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework based on the capability approach to evaluate the ethical interactions of AI systems, emphasizing benefits, rights, and moral failures in high-stakes applications.

Contribution

It develops a novel formalism for AI ethics rooted in the capability approach, defining conditions for morally permissible interactions and identifying failure modes.

Findings

Identifies necessary and sufficient conditions for beneficial AI interactions.

Defines moral failure modes such as coercion and exploitation.

Highlights the importance of ethics-led AI design in high-stakes domains.

Abstract

The prevailing discourse around AI ethics lacks the language and formalism necessary to capture the diverse ethical concerns that emerge when AI systems interact with individuals. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum's capability approach, we present a framework formalizing a network of ethical concepts and entitlements necessary for AI systems to confer meaningful benefit or assistance to stakeholders. Such systems enhance stakeholders' ability to advance their life plans and well-being while upholding their fundamental rights. We characterize two necessary conditions for morally permissible interactions between AI systems and those impacted by their functioning, and two sufficient conditions for realizing the ideal of meaningful benefit. We then contrast this ideal with several salient failure modes, namely, forms of social interactions that constitute unjustified paternalism, coercion, deception, exploitation and domination. The proliferation of incidents involving AI in high-stakes domains underscores the gravity of these issues and the imperative to take an ethics-led approach to AI systems from their inception.