Prediction-based decisions, which are often made by utilizing the tools of machine learning, influence nearly all facets of modern life. Ethical concerns about this widespread practice have given rise to the field of fair machine learning and a number of fairness measures, mathematically precise definitions of fairness that purport to determine whether a given prediction-based decision system is fair. Following Reuben Binns (2017), we take ‘fairness’ in this context to be a placeholder for a variety of normative egalitarian considerations. We (...) explore a few fairness measures to suss out their egalitarian roots and evaluate them, both as formalizations of egalitarian ideas and as assertions of what fairness demands of predictive systems. We pay special attention to a recent and popular fairness measure, counterfactual fairness, which holds that a prediction about an individual is fair if it is the same in the actual world and any counterfactual world where the individual belongs to a different demographic group (cf. Kusner et al. (2018)). (shrink)

According to telic egalitarianism, it is, in one respect, noninstrumentally bad if some people are unfairly worse off than others. This paper is about two ambiguities in telic egalitarianism. The first ambiguity concerns the so-called temporal unit of egalitarian concern. This is the question of whether inequality during whole lives, inequality during certain segments of lives, or some combination of these, is what generates egalitarian concern. The second ambiguity concerns the so-called currency of welfarist egalitarian concern. In the present context, (...) this is the question of whether inequality in overall welfare, inequality in some of the constituents of welfare, or some combination of these, is what generates egalitarian concern. In this paper I argue that the debates about how these two ambiguities are to be resolved are not unrelated. The same reasons that, according to some telic egalitarians, support rejecting the whole-lives-only view about the temporal unit of egalitarian concern support rejecting the overall-welfare-only view about the currency of welfarist egalitarian concern. (shrink)

In this paper, we raise and discuss a puzzle about the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status. Suppose you have it within your power to give someone something they would enjoy. The following claims seem platitudinous: you can use this power to reward whatever kind of option you want, thereby making that option better and generating a reason for that person to perform it; this reason is then weighed alongside and against the other reasons at play; and altogether, the (...) reasons determine the deontic statuses of that person’s options. We show, however, that in a certain class of cases at least one of these apparent platitudes must be false. In particular, we show that in a certain kind of case wrongfulness cannot be rewarded. In some cases, if one tries to reward wrongfulness, something surprising must go awry: either what you attempt to give as a reward would not, in fact, be good, or it would not generate a reason, or it would have a surprising effect on the deontic status of the relevant options. The upshot is that the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status are complicated in ways that have not previously been remarked. (shrink)