The grave of Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery reads:

吨他的坟墓卡尔·马克思在伦敦的海格特公墓写着：

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

“哲学家只是以各种方式解释了世界。 但是，重点是要更改它。

I’m in agreement with Marx and that’s probably why I quit philosophy.

我同意马克思的观点，这可能就是为什么我放弃哲学。

In a previous post, I laid out how and why the blurring of analog and digital realities confronts us with serious ethical questions related to what we do and who we wish to be. In this post, I would like to take a closer look at what some philosophers have said about what it means to say something is good for someone. Then, I’d like to consider how these accounts relate to the design of recommender systems, which ostensibly serve to recommend “good” items to persons in a process broadly referred to as personalization.

在以前的文章中，我制定了如何以及为什么模拟和数字的现实，我们面临的模糊关系到我们做什么 ，我们希望成为谁严重的道德问题 。 在这篇文章中，我想仔细研究一些哲学家所说的说对某人有益的含义。 然后，我想考虑一下这些帐户与推荐系统的设计之间的关系，这些系统表面上是用来在广泛称为个性化的过程中向人员推荐“好”项目的。

In particular, this post was inspired by a reading of philosopher Richard Kraut’s insightful book, What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being. There, Kraut gives us three competing versions of the good: the conative, the hedonistic, and the developmentalist accounts of the good.

特别是，这篇文章的灵感来自于哲学家理查德·克劳特(Richard Kraut)的有见地的著作《 什么是好的，为什么：幸福的伦理学》 。 在那里，克劳特(Kraut)为我们提供了商品的三种竞争版本：商品的对立 ， 享乐主义和发展 主义者的解释。

善意的描述 (The Conative Account of the Good)

Let’s start with arguably the most intuitive and simple view about the good. The conative (its Latin root, conari, means to try or exert effort) account goes like this:

让我们从关于商品的最直观，最简单的观点开始。 conative(其拉丁语词根， conari ，表示尝试 或 施加努力的意思 )帐户如下所示：

“If G is good for S, that must be because S pursues it, or desires it, or likes it — or would, under certain conditions, pursue, desire, or like it.”

“如果G对S有好处，那一定是因为S追求，渴望或喜欢它，或者在某些条件下会追求，渴望或喜欢它。”

On this view, we assume that what a person searches for or likes or clicks on must be good for the person, why else would he have spent his time searching for it or clicking on it? By collecting your browsing history, we can pretty well infer what’s good for you. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have been looking for it. As Kraut points out, the conative account is naively appealing for several reasons. Mostly, it gives the person a “special role” in determining what is good for him.

从这种观点出发，我们假设一个人搜索，喜欢或点击的东西必须对该人有利，为什么他还要花时间去搜索或点击它呢？ 通过收集您的浏览历史记录，我们可以很好地推断出什么对您有好处。 如果不是，您就不会一直在寻找它。 正如克劳特(Kraut)所指出的那样，出于某些原因，这种保守的说法很幼稚。 通常，它使人在确定对自己有好处的方面具有“特殊作用”。

According to the conative account of the good, if I want to figure out the best ways to fake my own death to collect life insurance using Google search, faking my death is good for me. Google will then look to serve me ads that match this interest (assuming such ads exist). This approach seems to mirror the Internet’s Postmodern “anything goes” culture; it fortunately also makes for a good business strategy when you do not judge your customers’ interests. For instance, Facebook still will not fact-check political ads delivered on its platform, though Google and Twitter have taken some steps to monitor (Google) or outright ban political ads on their platforms (Twitter).

根据善意者的说法，如果我想找出伪造自己的死亡以使用Google搜索收集人寿保险的最佳方法，那么伪造死亡对我是有好处的。 然后，Google会向我投放与这种兴趣相匹配的广告(假设存在此类广告)。 这种方法似乎反映了互联网的后现代 “一切皆有”的文化。 幸运的是，当您不判断客户的兴趣时，它也会制定一个好的业务策略。 例如，尽管谷歌和推特已经采取了一些措施来监控(谷歌)或彻底禁止其平台 (推特) 上的政治广告 ，但Facebook仍然不会事实检查其平台上投放的政治广告 。

自由主义与习惯 (Liberalism and Conation)

Westerners are particularly enamored of the conative account. It seems to respect the liberal principle of autonomy we so highly esteem. The idea is that one ought to have a free choice in what one pursues, without external pressure from one’s government, for example. In America this belief is sacrosanct. Case in point, there are currently people protesting against being told to wear face masks during the resurgence of a worldwide pandemic.

西方人对迷恋的说法特别着迷。 似乎尊重我们如此推崇的自由主义自治原则。 这个想法是，人们应该在追求自己的目标上自由选择，而不必受到例如政府的外部压力。 在美国，这种信仰是神圣不可侵犯的。 恰当的例子是，目前有人抗议在全球大流行病复发时被告知要戴口罩。

Perhaps the most influential proponent of such a view was John Stuart Mill, who argued that a good society was one in which people had the freedom to develop their character, pursue their vision of the good life, and engage in public debate. Mill worried that individuals could not flourish without some protections from the tyranny of the majority and of society. He also believed that one could not be a “person of character” if one’s desires and impulses were not one’s own.

约翰·斯图尔特·米尔 ( John Stuart Mill)可能是这种观点的最有力支持者，他认为，一个良好的社会是人们可以自由发展自己的性格，追求美好生活的愿景并参与公众辩论的社会。 米尔(Mill)担心，如果没有来自多数人和社会的暴政的某种保护，个人就无法蓬勃发展。 他还认为，如果一个人的欲望和冲动不是一个人的自己，那么就不能成为一个“品格人物”。

More recently, the political philosopher John Rawls espoused a similar liberal, pluralistic conception of the good in his influential book A Theory of Justice. For Rawls, primary goods are objects of value “that every rational man is presumed to want.” Rawls was deeply impacted by the philosophical tradition of contractualism, dating back at least to Hobbes’ Leviathan. In the end, Rawls leaves it up to individual societies to decide how to distribute these primary goods in a just way, which he argues is achieved by following a very specific kind of distributive procedure (embodied in his veil of ignorance thought experiment) and attending to certain features of its final distribution.

最近，政治哲学家约翰·罗尔斯 ( John Rawls)在他的有影响力的著作《正义论 》( A Theory of Justice)中倡导了类似的自由，多元的商品概念。 对于罗尔斯来说，初级商品是“每个有理智的人都想拥有的”有价物品。 罗尔斯深受契约论哲学传统的影响，至少可以追溯到霍布斯的《 利维坦》 。 最后，罗尔斯让各个社会来决定如何公正地分配这些主要商品，他认为这是通过遵循一种非常特殊的分配程序(体现在他的无知思想实验的面纱中 )并参加的最终发布的某些功能。

As even Google has recognized, personalized recommendations and the personal data they are based on have the potential to negatively impact our personal identities and therefore may have great implications on a society-wide level. As it stands now, machine learning has no way to take into account one’s vision of the good life and the associated moral convictions while making so-called personalized predictions.

正如Google所认识到的那样，个性化推荐及其所基于的个人数据可能会对我们的个人身份产生负面影响，因此可能对整个社会产生重大影响。 就目前而言，机器学习在进行所谓的个性化预测时，没有办法考虑到自己对美好生活的看法和相关的道德信念。

In short, the conative account is appealing because it flatters us as unique individuals in the same way the old Apple slogan to “Think Different” did. The irony of course is that by deciding to think differently and buy an Apple product, we in fact think just like everyone else who buys the same mass-produced computer.

简而言之，通俗的说法之所以吸引人，是因为它像旧的苹果“想不同”的口号一样，使我们成为独特的个人。 具有讽刺意味的是，通过决定采取不同的思维方式并购买Apple产品，我们实际上认为与购买相同批量生产的计算机的其他所有人一样。

享乐主义的善举 (The Hedonist Account of the Good)

Let’s move on to the second major account of the good. Roughly speaking, hedonism is the view that:

让我们继续讨论商品的第二个主要方面。 大致说来， 享乐主义认为：

“Whenever it is good for S that some state of affairs occurs, that occurrence is good for S simply and only by virtue of his being pleased; and whenever S is pleased, that is good for S simply and only by virtue of his being pleased.”

“只要事物发生某种状态对S有益，那么这种发生简单地并且仅由于他感到高兴对S有益。 只要S感到满意，就简单地且仅凭他的高兴对S有好处。”

In other words, if buying a new pair of shoes recommended to me in a Facebook ad makes me feel pleased, then buying the shoes is good for me.

换句话说，如果买一双在Facebook广告中推荐给我的新鞋让我感到高兴，那么买鞋对我来说是件好事。

Again, John Stuart Mill’s distinction between the quality and quantity of pleasure might be useful to look at. Mill says that when deciding between two activities that will both give us some pleasure — and are therefore good for us — we ought to choose the activity giving us the greater quality of pleasure, not simply the greatest quantity.

此外，约翰·斯图亚特·密尔的快感的质量和数量之间的区别可能是看有用。 米尔说，在两个活动之间做出选择时，既要给我们带来一些乐趣，又对我们有好处，我们应该选择给我们带来更多乐趣的质量 ，而不仅仅是最大数量的活动。

I am not quite sure how one can determine the quality of pleasure without reference to some external “objective” list of pleasures. Socrates famously stated, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” Similarly, the quantity of pleasure seems nearly impossible to measure reliably or accurately across different persons, as Amartya Sen and others have argued.

我不确定如果不参考某些外部“客观”的愉悦清单，如何确定愉悦的质量。 苏格拉底曾有句著名的话：“做一个不满意的人胜过养猪。 苏格拉底不满意比傻瓜更满意。” 同样，正如阿玛蒂亚·森 ( Amartya Sen)和其他人所辩称的那样，要在不同的人之间可靠或准确地衡量快乐程度似乎几乎是不可能的。

Another interesting critique of such a view is given by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson in her 2003 book Goodness and Advice. She argues that equating the good with what brings us the most pleasure or happen is so general as to be meaningless. According to her, “Good is always good in some way, in some context, for some beings.”

哲学家朱迪思•贾维斯•汤姆森 ( Judith Jarvis Thomson)在2003年的“ 善良与忠告”中提出了另一种有趣的评论方式。 她认为，将商品与带给我们最大的乐趣或成就的事物等同起来是如此笼统，以至于毫无意义。 根据她的说法，“在某些情况下，对某些人来说，善总是好。”

Thomson’s account is reminiscent of Aristotle’s teleological, or functional account of the good. Teleology (‘end’ or ‘purpose’) presupposes things have a specific goal or function by their nature. A knife is good for cutting vegetables, but bad for massage. We cannot give simple, blanket statements about what is good, Thomson would argue. Goodness is highly contextual and complex and will depend on certain facts about your identity and environment. While it may be good for you in the context of an app to recommend this particular product, that same product might be bad for you in another outside of the app.

汤姆森(Thomson)的叙述使人想起了亚里斯多德(Aristotle)的目的论或商品的功能性叙述。 目的论(“目的”或“目的”)以事物的性质为前提，即事物具有特定的目标或功能。 刀对切蔬菜有益，但对按摩不利。 汤姆森会辩称，我们不能简单地说出什么是好的。 善意与环境高度相关且复杂，并将取决于有关您的身份和环境的某些事实。 虽然在应用程序的上下文中推荐该特定产品可能对您有利，但在应用程序之外的其他产品中，同一产品可能对您不利。

货物的发展说明 (The Developmental Account of the Good)

Let’s move on to our final account of the good. This account relies heavily on the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing. According to Kraut, flourishing (you know its cognate term “flower”) means:

让我们继续对商品的最终解释。 这个说法在很大程度上依赖于亚里士多德关于人类繁荣的概念。 根据Kraut所说，蓬勃发展(您知道它的同源词“花”)意味着：

“Developing properly and fully, that is, by growing, maturing, making full use of the potentialities, capacities, and faculties that (under favorable conditions) [one] naturally [has] at an early stage of [one’s] existence.”

“适当和充分地发展，也就是说，通过成长，成熟，充分利用(在有利条件下)[一个]自然[存在]于[一个人]存在的早期阶段的潜力，能力和才能。”

The developmental theory assumes that human lives follow, at least in general form, a basic developmental structure and that it is good for one to allow the unfolding of this structure over one’s life.

发展理论假设人类的生活至少遵循一种普遍的基本发展结构，并且允许这种结构在其生命中展开是有益的。

On the developmental view, what is good for someone is anything which promotes the flourishing of the person’s potentialities, capacities and faculties; similarly, what is bad, is anything that reduces these same things. More specifically, Kraut says that a human life comprises the “maturation and exercise of certain cognitive, social, affective, and physical skills.”

从发展的观点来看，对某人有益的是能促进该人的潜力，能力和才能发展的任何事物。 同样，不好的是，减少这些事情的任何事情。 更具体地说，克劳特(Kraut)说，人类生活包括“某些认知，社交，情感和身体技能的成熟和锻炼”。

One relevant cognitive skill alluded to above is the ability to make decisions about one’s own life. Kraut writes,

上面提到的一项相关的认知技能是对自己的生活做出决定的能力。 克劳特写道，

“One of the great goods that a child must be trained to acquire and enjoy is the ability to make up his own mind about areas of his life that are important to him — what job he will have, whom he will marry, with whom he will associate, where he will live, and so on. If major choice points do not exist, if every important aspect of his life is planned for him, his cognitive powers are not challenged, and he is not called upon to exercise his imagination…If I take it upon myself to control everything in your environment, so that you no longer have effective control over anything that you do, then I do you great harm by turning you into a passive creature who has no decision-making powers or skills.”

“必须训练孩子获得和享受的一项重要财富是能够对自己重要的生活领域做出自己的决定-他将从事什么工作，他将嫁给谁，与谁同住将交往，他将居住的地方等等。 如果没有主要的选择要点，或者为他的生活计划了每个重要方面，那么他的认知能力就不会受到挑战，也不会要求他发挥想象力……如果我自己去控制你周围的一切， ，这样您就无法再有效地控制自己所做的任何事情，那么，我将您变成一个没有决策权或技能的被动生物，会对您造成极大伤害。”

Now, one might argue that these recommender systems suggest relatively benign and unimportant things such as movies to watch or websites to visit. Yet the trend is moving increasingly in the direction of automated decision making and recommendation. Already, social media and dating apps are influencing whom we affiliate with and have romantic relations with. For more details on this topic, see my other Medium article on religion and recommender systems here.

现在，有人可能会争辩说，这些推荐系统暗示了相对良性和不重要的事物，例如观看电影或访问网站。 然而，趋势正在朝着自动决策和推荐的方向发展。 社交媒体和约会应用程序已经在影响我们与谁建立关系并与之建立浪漫关系。 有关此主题的更多详细信息，请参阅宗教和推荐系统我的其它文章中这里 。

Agentic Skills Of Autonomy: Becoming a Person

自治的特技：成为一个人

The feminist philosopher Diana Meyers comes to similar conclusions in her book Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action and Social Life. She argues that a constellation of three agentic skills are needed by persons in order to exercise autonomy: self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction. She refers to these three skills collectively as autonomy competency.

女权主义哲学家戴安娜·迈耶斯 ( Diana Meyers)在她的《做自己：身份，行动和社会生活随笔》一书中得出了类似的结论。 她认为，个人需要三个星座技巧才能行使自主权：自我发现，自我定义和自我指导。 她把这三种技能统称为自主能力 。

Meyers describes how autonomy competency is related to the development of the person over her life:

迈耶斯(Meyers)描述了自主能力如何与人的一生发展相关联：

By exercising autonomy competency, agentic subjects become aware of their actual affects, desires, traits, capabilities, values, and aims, conceive realisticpersonal ideals, and endeavor to bring the former into alignment with the latter. Autonomy competency sets in motion a piecemeal, trial-and-error process of self-understanding and self-reconstruction that underwrites a provisional authentic identity. Autonomous actions are those that enact attributes constitutive of one’s authentic identity and actions that prompt development of one’s authentic identity. In my view, then, the concept of autonomy competency provides a philosophical psychology and an epistemology of authentic identity and self-determination.

通过行使自主能力，特务主体会意识到他们的实际影响，欲望，特质，能力，价值和目标，构想现实的个人理想，并努力使前者与后者保持一致。 自治能力推动了自我理解和自我重建的零碎，反复试验的过程，该过程为临时的真实身份提供了保障。 自主行为是那些制定构成一个人的真实身份的属性的行为，以及促使一个人的真实身份发展的行为。 因此，在我看来，自主能力的概念提供了一种哲学心理学以及对真实身份和自决的认识论。

Meyer’s account aligns well with current discussion in the ethics of recommender systems, which focus on serendipity and filter bubble issues. We may be able, at least to some extent, to operationalize these constructs of self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction, and use them in generating recommendations. If we can do that, then we truly have personalized recommendations. In this last section, I’ll briefly explore an alternative approach to personalized recommendation centered on this notion of developmentalism.

Meyer的陈述与推荐系统道德规范中的当前讨论非常吻合，该系统侧重于偶然性和过滤器泡沫问题 。 我们可能至少能够在某种程度上将这些自我发现，自我定义和自我指导的构架付诸实践，并将其用于产生建议。 如果我们能够做到，那么我们确实有个性化的建议。 在最后一部分中，我将简要探讨以发展主义为中心的个性化推荐的另一种方法。

人文个性化：您决定好 (Humanistic Personalization: You Decide the Good)

The ideas of developmentalism go back thousands of years. Crucially, however, they must be periodically revisited, lest we forget them. The famed psychotherapist Carl Rogers pioneered the “person-centered approach” in the early 1960s, which strove to foster “fully-functioning persons” who fulfilled their full potential as persons. More recently, the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have championed the capabilities approach to human rights, based on similar ideas. We imagine something similar might provide a strong ethical foundation for personalized recommendation.

发展主义的思想可以追溯到数千年前。 但是，至关重要的是，必须定期重新检查它们，以免我们忘记它们。 著名的心理治疗师卡尔·罗杰斯(Carl Rogers)在1960年代初率先提出了“以人为中心的方法”，该方法致力于培养“充分发挥作用的人”，使其充分发挥人的潜能。 最近，哲学家玛莎·努斯鲍姆 ( Martha Nussbaum)和阿玛蒂亚·森(Amartya Sen)倡导了基于类似思想的能力方法。 我们认为类似的东西可能为个性化推荐提供强大的道德基础。

Humanistic personalization, as I envision it, would entail two major changes to the current paradigm of behavioral big data-based (BBD) recommender systems. These systems are largely trained on digitally afforded, non-conscious goal directed behaviors (Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge refer to these data as capta) and may not align with your self-narrative. This conflict introduces a fundamental hermeneutic tension in personalization:

正如我所预见的那样， 人性化的个性化将对基于行为大数据(BBD)推荐系统的当前范例进行两次重大更改。 这些系统在数字方式提供的 ，无意识的，目标导向的行为(Rob Kitchin和Martin Dodge将这些数据称为capta )上进行了充分的培训 ，可能与您的自我叙述不符。 这种冲突在个性化方面引入了根本的解释学张力：

What do these logged behaviors actually mean? And who decides?

这些记录的行为实际上是什么意思 ？ 谁来决定？

In addition, data about you —particularly if it derives from the databases of shadowy data brokers — may not reflect your self-identity. Ideally, humanistic personalization would allow you to select your own account of the good and modify the way in which things are recommended to you, given your own, conscious, reflective understanding of yourself.

此外，关于您的数据(特别是如果其来自影子数据代理的数据库)可能无法反映您的身份。 理想情况下，人性化的个性化设置可以让您选择自己对商品的描述，并根据自己对自身的自觉，反思性理解，来修改向您推荐事物的方式。

Second, humanistic personalization would shift away from the optimization of global cost functions (over all persons in the training set) and “objective” performance metrics, such as precision, recall, or NCDG. Enforcing mathematical formulations of “fairness,” as if we could just turn things into a constrained optimization problem, misses the point. Instead, we need a paradigm shift towards embracing the methods of qualitative social science. The tools of interpretivist social science were designed to tease out important qualitative dimensions of phenomena, such as meaning and narrative, that do not lend themselves well to quantification. Now is the time to use them.

其次，人性化的个性化将不再是优化全局成本函数(针对培训组中的所有人员)和“客观”绩效指标，例如精度，召回率或NCDG。 强制执行“公平 ”的数学公式，就好像我们可以将事情变成一个受约束的优化问题一样，这是错误的。 相反，我们需要向拥抱定性社会科学方法的范式转变。 解释主义社会科学的工具旨在弄清现象的重要定性维度，例如意义和叙事，它们不适合量化。 现在是时候使用它们了。

Narrative accuracy is the subjective fit of recommendations to one’s self-narrative.

叙事准确性是建议与主观自我叙事的主观契合。

Put simply, humanistic personalization would aim to optimize narrative accuracy, which is admittedly a much trickier and less well-defined task. But ultimately any “optimization” would be guided by the subjective assessment of the subject of personalization.

简而言之，人性化个性化旨在优化叙事准确性，这无疑是一项更加棘手且定义不明确的任务。 但是最终，任何“优化”都将以对个性化主题的主观评估为指导。

In closing, if we really hope to use technology such as machine learning to get closer to the good life, we must understand the essential aspects of what makes a human life worth living and how persons develop over the course of their lives. Philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Mead, Foucault, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler have deeply explored our innate need for recognition from others. Our self-conceptions are inherently tied to how others conceive of us. Humanistic personalization aims to return the terms of digital discourse back to the persons who ultimately know themselves best.

最后，如果我们真的希望使用诸如机器学习之类的技术来接近美好的生活，那么我们必须了解使人类生活值得生存的基本方面以及人们在生活过程中如何发展。 黑格尔，米德，福柯，阿克塞尔·霍内斯和朱迪思·巴特勒等哲学家广泛地探索了我们天生需要他人认可的需求。 我们的自我观念与其他人对我们的观念固有地联系在一起。 人文个性化旨在将数字话语的术语返回给最终最了解自己的人。

Until our recommendations begin to optimize for narrative accuracy, what we are doing more closely resembles behavioralized, not personalized, recommendation.

在我们的建议开始针对叙事准确性进行优化之前，我们正在做的事情与行为建议(而非个性化建议)非常相似。