State actors increasingly use machine-learning tools to make decisions that significantly affect people’s lives. The worry that human agency is increasingly eclipsed has, in turn, given rise to assertions of a novel ‘right to a human decision’ – roughly, a right not to be subject to fully automated decision-making.

In this month’s Balliol Online Lecture, Dr Linda Eggert (Early Career Fellow in Philosophy) explores how such a right might be justified and how, as AI becomes increasingly powerful and prevalent, working out what we owe to one another requires an understanding of not just what our values are, but also why we hold them.

Dr Linda Eggert is an Early Career Fellow in Philosophy; her work spans topics in moral, political, and legal philosophy, and mainly addresses issues in normative and practical ethics and theories of justice. She is especially interested in duties to rescue and the ethics of other-defence, issues in non-consequentialist ethics, and global and rectificatory justice. Her work also explores how these areas bear on the ethics of artificial intelligence and digital technology, particularly the ethics of delegating to AI.

Before joining Balliol as an Early Career Fellow, Linda was an Interdisciplinary Ethics Fellow at the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University, a Fellow-in-Residence with the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a Technology & Human Rights Fellow with Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Linda completed her DPhil at Oxford in 2021.