Over the years, companies have adopted hiring algorithms because they promise wider job candidate pools, lower recruitment costs and less human bias. Despite these promises, they also bring perils. Using them can inflict unintentional harms on individual human rights. These include the five human rights to work, equality and nondiscrimination, privacy, free expression and free association. Despite the human rights harms of hiring algorithms, the AI ethics literature has predominantly focused on abstract ethical principles. This is problematic for two reasons. (...) First, AI principles have been criticized for being vague and not actionable. Second, the use of vague ethical principles to discuss algorithmic risks does not provide any accountability. This lack of accountability creates an algorithmic accountability gap. Closing this gap is crucial because, without accountability, the use of hiring algorithms can lead to discrimination and unequal access to employment opportunities. This paper makes two contributions to the AI ethics literature. First, it frames the ethical risks of hiring algorithms using international human rights law as a universal standard for determining algorithmic accountability. Second, it evaluates four types of algorithmic impact assessments in terms of how effectively they address the five human rights of job applicants implicated in hiring algorithms. It determines which of the assessments can help companies audit their hiring algorithms and close the algorithmic accountability gap. (shrink)

When J.R. Cash (Johnny Cash) sings that he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, audiences impressed by the singer's skillful creation and depiction of a nihilistic lyrical subject clap and cheer. When Terrell Doyley (Skengdo) and Joshua Malinga (A.M.) sang broadly similar lyrics at a concert in 2018, London's Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service took them to be describing violent acts they had participated in and violent intentions they harbored, and the lyrics were used (...) as the basis for legal proceedings against the singers that resulted in convictions. In this paper, I will argue that Doyley and Malinga's case illustrates a distinctive and important form that epistemic injustice can take. By failing to see their lyrics as speech that involves the exercise of their capacity for imagination, the police and prosecutors treat them as an impoverished sort of epistemic agent. I will call the wrong involved in cases like this one poetic injustice. (shrink)

Formułowane w ostatnim czasie przez postępowych Amerykanów zarzuty wobec cynicznej, konserwatywnej „weaponizacji” wolności słowa trafnie zwracają uwagę na tkwiący w niej aspekt hipokryzji. Przesłankę tych oskarżeń często stanowi jednak wolność słowa rozumiana „absolutystycznie” jako bezwzględne dobro. W istocie należy ją zawsze rozumieć jako coś, co prowadzi do innego celu: mającego wymiar obiektywny, subiektywny bądź intersubiektywny. Najczęstszą funkcją wolności słowa jest tworzenie warunków dla epistemologicznego poszukiwania prawdy. Zwracali na to uwagę liberałowie, tacy jak John Stuart Mill, oraz marksiści, tacy jak Herbert (...) Marcuse – twierdzący, że realizację tego celu utrudnia „represywna tolerancja” dla szkodliwych lub błędnych idei. Wolności słowa można bronić również ze względu na wpisaną w nią możliwość wyrażania indywidualnych opinii i uczuć, bez której nie ma mowy o jednostkowej autonomii. Trzecia funkcja wolności słowa ma charakter performatywny: język może służyć do działania w świecie. Współcześnie najczęściej mówi się w tym kontekście o ograniczaniu „mowy nienawiści” jako aktu przemocy symbolicznej, jednak konsekwencje tak rozumianej wolności słowa mogą być również pozytywne. Czwarty telos wolności wypowiedzi – semantyczny raczej niż epistemologiczny, ekspresywny czy performatywny – to tworzenie nowych znaczeń kulturowych bądź krytyka konwencjonalnych. Ponieważ wolność słowa może służyć jednej lub większej liczbie z tych funkcji, warto jej bronić również w niedoskonałym społeczeństwie, niezależnie od tego (przy całym szacunku dla Marcusego), że nie ma ona wartości bezwzględnej. (shrink)

This article surveys the classic and contemporary literature on the nature and limits of freedom of expression (or free speech). It begins by surveying the main philosophical justifications for free speech, before moving to consider the two most discussed topics in the free speech literature: hate speech and pornography. The article offers some brief reflections on the large number of arguments which have been offered on these topics. Three newer battlegrounds for free speech are examined at the end: no platforming, (...) fake news and online shaming. (shrink)

The essay opens with some background information about the period in which J.S. Mill wrote. The discussion revolves around the concept of blasphemy which Mill considered to be highly problematic. Tagging unpopular views as ‘blasphemous’ amounted to abuse of governmental powers and infringed on the basic liberties of the out-of-favour speakers. The discussion on blasphemy sets the scene to the understanding of Mill's concerns, his priorities and consequently his emphasis on the widest possible liberty of expression. Section 2 presents the (...) Millian principles that are pertinent to his philosophy of free speech: liberty and truth. Section 3 analyzes Mill's very limited boundaries to freedom of expression, asserting that the consequentialist reasoning had led Mill to ignore present tangible harm. It is argued that democracy is required to develop protective mechanisms against harm-facilitating speech. (shrink)

My main argument in this paper is that the right to freedom of expression is not a single right, complex as it may be, but spans two separate rights that I label the right to speak and the right to hear. Roughly, the right to speak stands for the right of a person to express freely whatever they wish to communicate to some other persons or to the public at large. The right to hear stands for the right to have (...) free and unfettered access to any kind of content that has been communicated by others. The right to speak and the right to hear are two separate rights, grounded in different kinds of interests. I try to show that this division of rights and their respective rationales can be utilized to explain how we think about some of the limits of the right to freedom of expression, particularly in the context of conflicts between the right to speak and the right to hear, conflicts that are rather pervasive. I also argue, though perhaps less conclusively, that in thinking about the limits of freedom of expression, an exclusive focus on the harm principle would be misguided. There is no reason to deny that speech is often harmful, sometimes very much so, but the prevention of harm is not sufficient to justify legal prohibition, at least not in this case. (shrink)