When models are used to guide decisions that can affect people’s lives, those involved in modelling have a duty of care towards those who are likely to be affected by those decisions. Drawing on Cartwright et al.’s 2022 account of objectivity, we argue that this duty of care should be understood as involving a duty to model objectively. We illustrate with two tragic cases for which there was a conspicuous failure to model objectively. As these cases bring out, however, objective modelling does n…
Read moreWhen models are used to guide decisions that can affect people’s lives, those involved in modelling have a duty of care towards those who are likely to be affected by those decisions. Drawing on Cartwright et al.’s 2022 account of objectivity, we argue that this duty of care should be understood as involving a duty to model objectively. We illustrate with two tragic cases for which there was a conspicuous failure to model objectively. As these cases bring out, however, objective modelling does not occur in a vacuum. Modelling takes place embedded within a tangle of institutional norms, expectations, habits, patterns and practices, and modelling objectively will often be a systems-level problem in need of systems-level solutions. We end by diagnosing one such potential systems-level problem—a failure of intellectual humility in the institutions in which modelling takes place.
