On September 4, 2025 we kicked off fall semester of the ICGE Speaker Series with Vikram Bhargava of The George Washington University School of Business. Vikram presented “Artificial Intelligence and the Value of Choice” and ICGE Research Director of Business Ethics, Suneal Bedi, moderated.
Vikram reminded us that even if AI can eliminate issues like bias or accuracy concerns, there’s still something important at stake: the ethical value of humans making choices themselves. Algorithms can predict a lot, but they can’t replace the meaning that comes from our decisions.
+ Artificial Intelligence and the Value of Choice
Many of the most widely discussed ethical concerns regarding AI algorithms—for example, hiring algorithms—pertain to bad outcomes: Were its decisions accurate? Were there unforeseen bad consequences? Were untoward biases reflected in the judgments of the algorithms? In this presentation, Dr. Bhargava argues even if these bad outcomes are ultimately engineered away, it still doesn’t settle the question of whether managers should defer to algorithms. This is not because managerial gut instincts are far superior—often they’re not. Rather, there are important (and overlooked) ethical values created through us making choices that would be jeopardized, were certain choices abdicated to an algorithm. This is so no matter how sophisticated algorithms ultimately become at predicting fit and performance.
Vikram R. Bhargava is an assistant professor of strategic management & public policy and philosophy (by courtesy) at the George Washington University School of Business and an International Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Centre for Corporate Reputation. He holds a joint Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Ethics & Legal Studies (The Wharton School) and Philosophy (School of Arts and Sciences). He also is co-editor of the Journal of Business Ethics‘s section on technology & business ethics. His research centers around the distinctive ethics and policy issues that technology gives rise to in organizational contexts. He is interested in topics including technology addiction, mass social media outrage, hiring algorithms and the future of work, autonomous vehicles, and other topics related to artificial intelligence (AI) policy and ethics. His research has been published by the Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and the Oxford University Press. Dr. Bhargava has been interviewed by press outlets including Marketplace, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and has spoken at the Harvard Business School, Stanford Law School, and the University of Oxford. He also has written for popular audiences at the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek. He has won the Outstanding Undergraduate Faculty of the Year award, V.I.P. Professor Award, and Career Influencer Award. He delivers annual visiting lectures on digital technology policy and ethics to graduate students at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Thayer School of Engineering, and he has taught courses at Wharton on multiple occasions.