Comment by luckylion
> It is considered to be unethical to discriminate upon things a person has no control over, such as their nationality, gender, age or natural hair color.
Nationality and natural hair color I understand, but age and gender? A lot of behaviors are not evenly distributed. Riots after a football match? You're unlikely to find a lot of elderly women (and men, but especially women) involved. Someone is fattening a child? That elderly women you've excluded for riots suddenly becomes a prime suspect.
> things like a car brand are entirely dependent on one's own actions
If you assume perfect free will, sure. But do you?
> A lot of behaviors are not evenly distributed.
That’s true. But the idea is that feeding it to a system as an input could be considered unethical, as one cannot control their age. Even though there’s a valid correlation.
> If you assume perfect free will, sure. But do you?
I’m not. If this matters, I’m actually currently persuaded that free will doesn’t exist. Which doesn’t change that if one buys a car, its make is typically all their decision. Whenever such decision is coming from them having a free will or entirely determined by antecedent causes doesn’t really matter for purposes of fraud detection (or maybe I fail to see how it does).
I mean, we don’t need to care why people do things (at all, in general) - it matters for how we should act upon detection, but not for detecting itself. And, as I understand it, we know we don’t want to cause unfair pressure on groups defined by factors they cannot change. Because when we did that it consistently contributed to various undesirable consequences. E.g. discrimination and stereotypes against women or men, or prejudice against younger or elder people didn’t do us any well.