Matthew M Young, Johannes Himmelreich, Justin B Bullock, Kyoung-Cheol Kim

Perspectives on Public Management and Governance 4(3), 244–258, 2021

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers challenges and benefits to the public sector. This article presents an ethical framework to analyze the effects of AI in public organizations, guide empirical and theoretical research in public administration, and inform practitioner deliberation and decision making on AI adoption. The article puts forward six propositions on how the use of AI by public organizations may facilitate or prevent unnecessary harm. The framework builds on the theory of administrative evil and contributes to it in two ways. First, the article interprets the theory of administrative evil through the lens of agency theory, examining how the mechanisms stipulated by the former relate to the underlying mechanisms of the latter. Specifically, it highlights how mechanisms of administrative evil can be analyzed as information problems in the form of adverse selection and moral hazard. Second, the article describes possible causal pathways of the theory of administrative evil and associates each with a level of analysis: individual (micro), organizational (meso), and cultural (macro). The article then develops both descriptive and normative propositions on AI’s potential to increase or decrease the risk of administrative evil, contributing an institutional and public administration lens to the growing literature on AI safety and value alignment.