Daniel Pinto

Data companies such as Facebook use machine learning algorithms to analyze users' personal data, revealing fine-grained patterns about when individuals are most vulnerable. These practices, widely described as manipulative, have generated a growing literature on how data companies wrong users through their influence. In this article, I argue that existing accounts overlook a significant wrong. I show that these data companies engaged in a distinctive form of deception at the point of data collection: users were led to believe that recommendation systems existed to personalize their experience, when in fact the primary purpose was to discover their vulnerabilities. I consider several candidate accounts of what makes this deception wrong, including appeals to inauthenticity, informed consent, deception about commercial intent, and domination, and argue that none adequately captures the core wrong. I then argue that this deception constitutes a form of treachery: a deception whose purpose is to acquire power over the victim by co-opting their agency. Drawing on cases from other contexts, I show that treachery is a pro tanto wrong that is independent of whether the acquired power is ever exercised. The concept of treachery thus identifies a prior wrong that existing accounts had not previously identified.

An influential survey by Joshua Knobe (2003) indicates that the cognitive process ascribing intentionality to an agent is mediated by the perceived moral worth of the action. To assess the external validity of the finding and to obtain more precise estimates of effect sizes, the present study replicates this canonical experiment with a large scale random sample of the German population (N = 2,295). The difference we observe between the harm and help scenarios is more pronounced than in nearly all previous studies (90.5% [88.754, 92.148] attribute intentionality in the harm scenario, 92.5% [90.947, 94.005] do not do so in the help scenario). In exploratory multivariate analyses, we also investigate whether the magnitude of the Knobe effect differs between different population groups, as characterized by a broad set of socio-demographics and personality traits as given by the Big Five. We find that the magnitude of the Knobe effect varies with gender, migration status, and being in a managerial position.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many vaccine trials which had significant purposes which participants needed to understand to validly consent. For example, participants needed to understand that the purpose of dose-escalation vaccine trials was to give incremental doses of a vaccine until participants became ill. Likewise, participants needed to understand that even if they received placebos, they could not take a genuine vaccine to preserve the integrity of the trials. Yet, these intuitive judgements about what participants need to understand to validly consent are rejected by recent accounts of consent. According to these accounts, as long as participants were given a good opportunity to learn these purposes, they do not need to actually understand them to consent. In this paper, I reject this consensus, and I argue that participants who failed to understand these aims associated with vaccine trials failed to provide legitimate consent. I defend this claim by developing and defending a new understanding condition for valid consent. According to this understanding condition, a participant must understand when a consent transaction has features which violate the norms which govern the medical practice with which they are acquainted. I argue that this condition is independently plausible and best explains why participants needed to understand these aims associated with vaccine trials to validly consent.