Frontiers | On Consequentialism and Fairness

Abstract Recent work on fairness in machine learning has primarily emphasized how to define, quantify, and encourage “fair” outcomes. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ethical foundations which underlie such efforts. Among the ethical perspectives that should be taken into consideration is consequentialism, the position that, roughly speaking, outcomes are all that matter. Although co

Abstract Recent work on fairness in machine learning has primarily emphasized how to define, quantify, and encourage “fair” outcomes. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ethical foundations which underlie such efforts. Among the ethical perspectives that should be taken into consideration is consequentialism, the position that, roughly speaking, outcomes are all that matter. Although consequentialism is not free from difficulties, and although it does not necessarily provide a tractable way of choosing actions (because of the combined problems of uncertainty, subjectivity, and…

related reading

• Frontiers | On Consequentialism and Fairnessfrontiersin.org
• Deontology and virtue ethics as "effective theories" of consequentialist ethics — LessWronglesswrong.com
• [arxiv] an algorithmic framework for fairness elicitationarxiv.org
• The Artificiality of Alignmentjoinreboot.org
• Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackarxiv.org
• [1907.10323] Fairness in Reinforcement Learningarxiv.org
• Relative notions of fairnessfairmlbook.org
• After Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI Alignmentthegradient.pub
• [2605.10310] Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishingarxiv.org
• Statistical Fairness - Turing Commonsalan-turing-institute.github.io
• [1911.03020] A Human-in-the-loop Framework to Construct Context-aware Mathematical Notions of Outcome Fairnessarxiv.org
• Alignment & Succession: Morality Lives in the Human Individualnosetgauge.com