Christopher Yeomans, Fairness as Equal Concession: Critical Remarks on Fair AI

Although existing work draws attention to a range of obstacles in realizing fair AI, the field lacks an account that emphasizes how these worries hang together in a systematic way. Furthermore, a review of the fair AI and philosophical literature demonstrates the unsuitability of ‘treat like cases alike' and other intuitive notions as conceptions of fairness. That review then generates three desiderata for a replacement conception of fairness valuable to AI research: (1) It must provide a metatheory for understanding tradeoffs, entailing that it must be flexible enough to capture diverse species of objection to decisions. (2) It must not appeal to an impartial perspective (neutral data, objective data, or final arbiter.) (3) It must foreground the way in which judgments of fairness are sensitive to context, i.e., to historical and institutional states of affairs. We argue that a conception of fairness as appropriate concession in the historical iteration of institutional decisions meets these three desiderata. About the speaker: DR. CHRIS YEOMANS is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in 2005 before joining the Purdue faculty in 2009. He is the author of three monographs, Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency, The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel's Pluralistic Philosophy of Action, and The Politics of German Idealism: Law & Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century (all from Oxford University Press). His work has been supported by the Purdue Provost's Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline (history), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.