Philosophy

The Philosophy Department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are proud to present the second talk of our Philosophy and AI speaker series, by Professor Deborah Hellman (University of Virginia). Please see below for information about the talk. A reception will follow in Griffin-Floyd 303.

Title: Proxies and Their Significance

Abstract:What is a proxy and why does it matter? These questions are likely to become critical if, as expected, the Supreme Court rules that the explicit consideration of race in university admissions is constitutionally impermissible.  Can a university deliberately adopt other admissions criteria to increase the racial diversity of its classes? The answer to this question will have far-reaching implications including, for example, whether a bank using an algorithm to select borrowers may deliberately tweak the algorithm to increase the percentage of minority borrowers. These examples suggest that intentions are critical to proxies.  But perhaps that is not so.  Suppose an algorithm programmed to select for skilled engineers removes from consideration all graduates of single-sex women’s colleges? Is attendance at a women’s college a proxy for sex?  And if so, does that matter?  This talk will explore these and other questions related to the normative significance of proxies.