Normative vs. Descriptive / Ethical Frameworks
General / High-Level Overviews
- (hare_language_1952?), The Language of Morals [PDF]
- This is the canonical book that explains, in excruciating but necessary detail, the linguistic “core” of the descriptive-versus-normative distinction. It’s overkill to read from cover-to-cover if you just want the gist of the concepts, but if you’re curious about how we can develop a “logic” of normative statements like we have for descriptive statements, this is the key text imo!
- (korsgaard_sources_1996?), The Sources of Normativity [PDF]
- This is… definitely up there among my favorite books of all time on this topic (after wading through many of them during the PhD exam gauntlet I mentioned in Week 1): it does what I wish every ethical-philosophy book did, which is, continuing to ask but why?!? to every theory of ethical justification, until it reaches a perspective which (not coincidentally) is quite close to the perspective we adopt early on in this course!
- (roemer_theories_1996?), Theories of Distributive Justice [PDF]
- I won’t lie to you, this book is pretty brutal in terms of being a mathematical “deep dive” into how the ethical frameworks we discuss in this class can be built up from a set of axioms. So, I don’t recommend the whole thing (that’s why there are two more Roemer books in this section, which are more applied looks at particular ethical frameworks!)
- The two parts we will draw on, which I do therefore recommend, are the explanations of utility functions in Chapter 1 and of Social Welfare Functionals in Chapter 4
Particular Examples / Frameworks
Fairness in AI / Context-Sensitive Fairness
- (barocas_fairness_2023?), Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities [PDF]
- This will be our main reference during this portion of the course, and is available for free (legally!) online!
- (kasy_fairness_2021?), “Fairness, Equality, and Power in Algorithmic Decision-Making”, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency [PDF]
Econometric Policy Evaluation
- (bjorkegren_machine_2022?), “(Machine) Learning what Policymakers Value”, EAAMO (Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization) [PDF]