Assignment 1: Critical argument essay
Determining the acceptability of an abuse detecting system comprised of cameras and a machine learning model in a high-care residence (‘Meadowlands’) is an ethical problem. Moreover, recent reports of abusive behaviours in the organisation have made the situation more complicated. Despite utilitarianism arguing for the installation of this system, I support the suspension of the system from the care ethics perspective. In the first half of this essay, I will present the view of utilitarianism, which advocates the deployment of the system. Then in the second half, I will elaborate on why we should suspend this system’s installation using care ethics.
Before applying its methodology to analyse this problem, I will describe utilitarianism first. Utilitarianism evaluates actions based on their consequences, and actions are acceptable if they maximise the overall well-being of stakeholders. In this case, the most relevant stakeholders are the residents, the staff, the residents’ families, the Meadowlands’ management, and the community. Although some staff and residents are unhappy with privacy concerns, installing the system will relieve the families, satisfy the community, and please the management. In addition, the system can reduce abusive behaviours, and all the above benefits outweigh the minor privacy concerns, guaranteeing an increase in net well-being. Thus, installing the system is acceptable from a utilitarianism perspective. In the following four paragraphs, I will elaborate on the system’s acceptability in personal, organisational, and social aspects.
In this paragraph, I will argue that the system’s installation will maintain individual well-being in response to disagreements on sacrificing individual happiness for the overall net well-being. Even though the staff and the residents may be vulnerable to the system’s data safety issues, its deployment may protect these two stakeholders differently. First, the system can reduce abusive behaviours as the mere presence of cameras warns the abusive staff. Additionally, the auto-detection system can ward residents against abuse by calling for responsive mitigating measures when
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detecting any abuse. Second, the video footage can protect the innocent staff from abuse allegations. Without such evidence, the allegations can hurt their reputation, impact their career, and even lead to lawsuits. Thus, despite the vulnerability in privacy, the gain in the protective power increases the net well-being of individual staff and residents.
We can find more support from different utilitarianism positions upon exploring the trade-offs between individual well-being. The first position is the “negative” utilitarianism, which prioritises preventing or eliminating suffering. According to this utilitarianism position, the system is acceptable because it can ease the residents suffering from existing abuse in Meadowlands. At the same time, other potential harm results from the system’s deployment, such as privacy and data safety vulnerabilities, should yield to the ease of suffering due to lower priorities. Another position called “ideal” utilitarianism values some consciousness over other happiness. According to this utilitarianism position, the residents’ dignity is one of the more valuable consciousness. Thus, sufferings from privacy and data safety vulnerabilities should not reduce the system’s acceptability because the overall happiness increases due to the contribution of the more valuable consciousness.
This paragraph illustrates that utilitarianism promotes net well-being within the organisation by acting as a good tool for determining the acceptance of a controversial system. Though opposers may deem the system unacceptable because the decision-making process is flawed, lacking the participation of the staff and the residents. I argue that utilitarianism can resolve different opinions and facilitate a fair and efficient decision-making process. Firstly, different opinions often derive from conflicting interests. For instance, an election is a democratic process to council the conflict and produce a government to represent the interest of the majority. During such a dilemma with conflicting interests from different stakeholders, utilitarianism provides a practical and acceptable metric for resolving the conflict, which is the increase in net well-being. The implied message is that if the net well- being increases, then the actions and the procedures are legitimate. In this case, despite the privacy concerns from some staff and residents, the families and the community call for stringent oversight, and the management is keen to mitigate the
impact of the abuse scandals and regain its reputation. Thus, as analysed above, net well-being increases within Meadowlands support the system’s deployment.
In this paragraph, I will argue that society will benefit from the system’s deployment because of increased overall trust between stakeholders. First, deploying an abuse detecting system can increase the reputation and trustworthiness of Meadowlands. With increasing trust from the residents and their families, prejudice and misunderstanding will disappear, facilitating a more harmonious working environment for the staff and providing a better living experience for the residents. Moreover, the trustworthiness increase will win the community support, further building up Meadowlands’ reputation and trustworthiness. Thus, the above loop of positive feedback will increase overall well-being among the society, and Meadowlands will eventually attract enough staff to resolve the abuse issue, which confirms the system’s acceptability.
I will refute the above argument using care ethics in the remaining part of this essay. This paragraph will briefly describe care ethics before identifying critical relationships in the case study. Firstly, care ethics discovers and values the moral significance within relationships and dependencies in human life. In practice, care ethics seeks to maintain relationships between caregivers and care-receivers to increase overall well-being. In this case, care ethics identifies the following pairs as relevant relationship groups: resident-staff, staff-management, and residence-community. In the following four paragraphs, I will first apply the methodology to show why this system should be suspended generally. Then, I will illustrate that the system’s deployment will harm all the above relationships, which corresponds to the consequences at the personal, organisational, and social levels. Lastly, I will conclude that installing the system is unacceptable from the care ethics perspective.
In this paragraph, I will use different positions of care ethics to analyse the problem in general and explain why this system’s installation should be rejected. First, a broader concept of care ethics defines four vital elements in a maintainable relationship: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. However, deploying the system will not contribute to any of them. On the contrary, it may compromise attentiveness and responsibility, and the following paragraph
explains why. Second, a narrower definition of care ethics focusing on personal interaction and dependency still cannot see any relationship benefiting from the system’s installation. The above deficiency is because introducing the system can only negatively affect the emotional state of the caregivers, causing a potential impact on the relationship. Thus, the system is generally unacceptable from a care ethics view. The following paragraph will detail the emotional change under the system’s installation.
From a personal perspective, I argue that the resident-staff relationship will suffer from the system due to losing emotions during the caring process. As caregivers, the staff must show the right emotions to detect residents’ needs and care well for them. However, the system may be unreliable and cause false-positive cases due to the overseas training data. These false-positive cases can consequently hurt staff’s reputation, impact their career, and even lead to lawsuits, harming the staff’s attentiveness and willingness to give care. Worse still, the staff will become emotionless and do their jobs mechanically, as they have to work under surveillance in the exposure to cyberbullying risks. Thus, the loss of emotions further hurts the already fragile relationship between the residents and the staff.
From an organisational perspective, the staff-management relationship suffers from the power imbalance within the organisation. The management has power over the staff, has little vulnerability in the system’s deployment, and excludes the staff from the decision-making process, resulting in the power imbalance within the organisation. Consequently, the power imbalance hurts the staff-management relationship in the following aspects. Firstly, as the weaker subjects in this relationship, staff are susceptible to further compromising their rights. In addition, excluding people with the best knowledge of the abuse, in this case, the staff, will lead to poor decision making, leaving the staff vulnerable to the harm caused by the system’s deployment. Moreover, it reduces staff’s commitment and willingness to invest in the relationship, forcing staff to leave and, as a result, making recruiting good staff harder. To conclude, the above loop of negative feedback will eventually break the staff-management relationship, causing a plunge in the well-being of this relationship pair.
Finally, from the social perspective, the residence-community relationship will suffer from the trust crisis caused by the system’s installation. Firstly, the abuse detecting system may not add trustworthiness to Meadowlands because its performance can be biased due to the foreign training data. Secondly, the system has no transparency and explainability. The algorithm remains opaque, and the process is hardly interpretable for non-experts, which can hardly convince the community of its reliability in detecting abuse. Thirdly, the system lacks accountability in false-positive cases because no one will be responsible for the incidents, and only the system is to be blamed. Thus, installing the system will hurt the trustworthiness of Meadowlands. Without a high level of mutual trust, the residence-community relationship will suffer, decreasing the community’s overall well-being.
To summarise, although utilitarianism advocates the installation of the abuse detecting system based on the net well-being increase from individual, organisational and social perspectives, I agree with the arguments from the care ethics opposing the system’s deployment. Acknowledging that care ethics is not a panacea for all ethical concerns regarding artificial intelligence, analysing this problem using care ethics has revealed potential harms at individual, organisational and social levels, which are invisible from the utilitarianism view. Thus, the envisaged impairment of resident-staff, staff-management, and residence-community relationships denies the system’s acceptability.
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