PERSON
Mary Gentile
The ethics educator who replaced the question “What is the right thing to do?” with the only question that produces ethical outcomes: “Given that I know, how do I actually do it?”
In 2020, Mary Gentile and Adriana Krasniansky published a case study about a man named Timothy Brennan, whose company Northpointe had built COMPAS—an AI tool designed for American courts that predicted defendants’ likelihood to reoffend, with the stated goal of eliminating human bias from the criminal justice system. When ProPublica’s investigation found that COMPAS was more likely to mislabel Black defendants as higher risk and white defendants as lower risk, the case study did not ask whether the system was biased. That question had been answered. It asked something harder: Given that you know, what do you actually do about it? What does the engineer who first noticed the pattern say to her team lead? This is the territory that Gentile has spent her entire career mapping—the gap between moral knowledge and
moral performance, between knowing what is right and being able to say it in a specific room, to specific people, on a specific Monday morning. Her central empirical finding, consistent across