Machine Translation Weekly 80: Deontological ethics and MT
At this year’s NAACL, there will be a paper that tries to view NLP from the
perspective of deontological ethics and promotes an unusual and very insightful
view on NLP ethics. The title of the paper is Case Study: Deontological Ethics
in NLP, it was written by authors from
CMU and discusses several NLP applications from the perspective of
deontological ethics.
Usually, ethics in NLP is discussed from the consequentialist
perspective. In this view, the
morality of an action is determined by its consequences. Consequentialist
ethics considers an action right if it causes as much happiness to as many
people as possible, or negatively defined, the right action minimizes overall
harm. This sounds beautiful in theory, but the problem is how to exactly weigh
the positive and negative