Ethics-Based Auditing of Automated Decision-Making Systems: Nature, Scope, and Limitations

Jakob Mökander,Jessica Morley,Luciano Floridi,Mariarosaria Taddeo

doi:10.1007/s11948-021-00319-4

Jakob Mökander, Jessica Morley + Show 2 more

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Important decisions that impact humans lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment are increasingly being automated. Delegating tasks to so-called automated decision-making systems (ADMS) can improve efficiency and enable new solutions. However, these benefits are coupled with ethical challenges. For example, ADMS may produce discriminatory outcomes, violate individual privacy, and undermine human self-determination. New governance mechanisms are thus needed that help organisations design and deploy ADMS in ways that are ethical, while enabling society to reap the full economic and social benefits of automation. In this article, we consider the feasibility and efficacy of ethics-based auditing (EBA) as a governance mechanism that allows organisations to validate claims made about their ADMS. Building on previous work, we define EBA as a structured process whereby an entity’s present or past behaviour is assessed for consistency with relevant principles or norms. We then offer three contributions to the existing literature. First, we provide a theoretical explanation of how EBA can contribute to good governance by promoting procedural regularity and transparency. Second, we propose seven criteria for how to design and implement EBA procedures successfully. Third, we identify and discuss the conceptual, technical, social, economic, organisational, and institutional constraints associated with EBA. We conclude that EBA should be considered an integral component of multifaced approaches to managing the ethical risks posed by ADMS.

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BackgroundAutomated decision-making systems (ADMS), i.e. autonomous self-learning systems that gather and process data to make qualitative judgements with little or no human intervention, increasingly permeate all aspects of society (AlgorithmWatch, 2019)
To help organisations manage the ethical risks posed by automated decision-making systems (ADMS), we argue that ethics-based auditing (EBA) procedures should be: (1) Holistic, i.e. treat ADMS as an integrated component of larger sociotechnical contexts
Despite the methodological advantages identified in section A Vision for Ethicsbased Auditing of ADMS, it is important to remain realistic about what EBA can, and cannot, be expected to achieve

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Automated decision-making systems (ADMS), i.e. autonomous self-learning systems that gather and process data to make qualitative judgements with little or no human intervention, increasingly permeate all aspects of society (AlgorithmWatch, 2019). This means that many decisions with significant implications for people and their environments—which were previously made by human experts—are made by ADMS (Karanasiou & Pinotsis, 2017; Krafft et al, 2020; Zarsky, 2016). Delegating tasks to ADMS can help increase consistency, improve efficiency, and enable new solutions to complex problems (Taddeo & Floridi, 2018) These improvements are coupled with ethical challenges. ADMS risk enabling human wrongdoing, reducing human control, removing human responsibility, devaluing human skills, and eroding human self-determination (Tsamados et al, 2020)

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