Clair Baleshta

New artificial intelligence (AI) systems grounded in machine learning are being integrated into our lives at a rapid rate, but not without consequence: scholars across domains have increasingly pointed out issues related to privacy, transparency, bias, discrimination, exploitation, and exclusion associated with algorithmic systems in both public and private sector contexts. Concerns surrounding the adverse impacts of these technologies have spurred discussion on the topics of algorithmic harm. However, the overwhelming majority of articles on said harms offer no definition as to what constitutes ‘harm’ in these contexts. This paper aims to address this omission by introducing one criterion for a suitable account of algorithmic harm. More specifically, we follow Joel Feinberg in understanding harms as distinct from wrongs, where only the latter necessarily carry a normative dimension. This distinction highlights issues in the current scholarship surrounding the conflation of algorithmic harms and wrongs. In response to these issues, we put forth two requirements for upholding the harms/wrongs distinction when analyzing the increasingly far-reaching impacts of these technologies and suggest how this distinction can be useful in design, engineering, and policymaking.

Although feminist philosophers have rarely engaged critically with the concept of harm or the philosophy of harm scholarship, recent feminist depictions of harm theories as ‘highly idealized’ point to a valuable insight on harm embedded in feminist philosophy. Underlying criticisms about the harm literature’s idealized character is the idea that it often matters who the subject of harm is, making attention to social location important for assessments of harm. The assumption that social location matters when analyzing harm is something that appears throughout feminist philosophy. Yet, as such little consideration has been allotted to the concept in this literature, the idea is significantly underdeveloped. My goal is therefore to develop this insight further, providing a defence of social location’s relevance and responding to concerns from harm theorists about introducing a form of context-dependence into our assessments of harm.