A Capability Approach to AI Ethics
This work addresses ethical challenges in AI for practitioners and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies an existing philosophical framework to AI.
The paper tackles the problem of conceptualizing and implementing AI ethics by proposing the capability approach, which clarifies ethical dimensions and guides ethical design in AI tools, specifically demonstrating benefits for ethics-based auditing in medical AI.
We propose a conceptualization and implementation of AI ethics via the capability approach. We aim to show that conceptualizing AI ethics through the capability approach has two main advantages for AI ethics as a discipline. First, it helps clarify the ethical dimension of AI tools. Second, it provides guidance to implementing ethical considerations within the design of AI tools. We illustrate these advantages in the context of AI tools in medicine, by showing how ethics-based auditing of AI tools in medicine can greatly benefit from our capability-based approach.