Thread by @StarFeuri

Our paper "Oh No, Not Another Trolley!" has been accepted to @IEEESSIT. We survey CS majors about their exposure to ethics in CS courses and their ethical reasoning in 5 scenarios from real-world examples of algorithmic decision-making support in healthcare & #COVID19. 🧵

While many students were able to articulate potential threats to equity and mortality for people marginalized by racial, gender, and class oppression, none concurrently recognized disabled or chronicaly ill people as a specific class vulnerable to systemic bias.

(additionally, students that recognized racial discrimination in algorithmic decision-making did not recognize how ableism strengthens racism.)

We urge CS instructors to expand their pedagogy and curriculum to engage w/ the negative impacts of technology for marginalized groups & explicitly attend to the intersections of race, gender, queerness, disability, and class.

Don't settle for the simplicity of applying prescriptivist ethical frameworks (such as utilitarian, duty, or virtue) in the absence of critical analysis (feminist, Indigenous, queer, and race-critical perspectives).

We (@StarFeuri, @SimoneSmarr, Diandra Prioleau, @DrJuanGilbert) would like to thank @Cal__Montgomery, @Imani_Barbarin, @RutiRegan, and @DisVisibility. Your disability activism directly informs this work.

We are also indebted to the scholarship of @ruha9 and @ashleyshoo.

This manuscript was originally submitted elsewhere, to a special issue on "Fairness" in AI for People with Disabilities. It was rejected outright. I share some of the reviews from that rejection here, to encourage scholars working at the intersections to keep fighting.

"Because the survey focused on healthcare systems, without explicitly exposing the relationship to "the lives of people with disabilities," both R1 and R3 believe that the article is not relevant"

Equitable access to Healthcare isn't relevant to the lives of disabled people!? 🤯

"I’m concerned that the paper does not differentiate matters of truth vs. matters of pragmatism under adverse circumstances."

I did not know that pragmatism changes the definition of murder! 🤯

No eugenics here folks! Only Pragmatism™!

"the submission engages with the broader concerns of discrimination built into technical systems... but presents disability as just one of the ways people are structurally discriminated against. Disability is treated peripherally and never really examined as a central concern" 🙄

I did not realize that providing an an analysis that centers how racialized disabled people face multiple and unique vectors for discrimination was decentering disability. I guess only white people are allowed to be centered on matters of disability? 🤯

I close with some pull quotes from the paper.

"While a fairness lens compels us to look at the popular Trolley Problem and equivocate over the fairness of trading one life for many, or the ethics of in/action and choice, a justice lens requires us to ask—Why are those people on the tracks in the first place?"

"we’ve spent so much time naturalizing the Trolley Problem we haven’t noticed how much time disabled people spend trying to avoid metaphorical trolleys."

“[One participant] related ethics as the distinction between “can you” and “should you”. Engineers and scientists especially encounter this dilemma daily. There are many things we can do. Are we teaching our students how to evaluate whether they /should/?"

"Overall, participants conceptualized society as those that survive the discretionary power of such technosocial systems. This begs the question – What are we teaching our CS students, through our implications or our silence, about who gets to be society?"

"The pandemic is an ongoing event that has magnified the cultural entanglements of ableism and racism. Black and Indigenous people have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 infection and consequent death."

"Much public discourse around the relative risk of death by the novel coronavirus centers around pre-existing conditions... which are found more frequently in Black and Indigenous populations. These are... embodied responses to pervasive trauma from systemic oppression"

"To begin from a position of benevolence – of granting access, bestowing charity, or ensuring fairness – is to have already failed in the pursuit of justice."

I'm not done being mad about this one. HOW THE FUCK is it acceptable for reviewers of a special issue about disability to not be aware of how much time disabled people spend just navigating Healthcare/trying not to die. It's not just a checkup 1/yr. DAMN.