Fairness

What Fairness means when using AI

You help choose colleagues for a limited training opportunity. An automated shortlist puts someone from your own team first, and you admire its objectivity. Then you notice that presentation polish has counted heavily, although the opportunity is meant to develop people who need the training. A colleague you dislike also benefits from that weighting, and your doubts suddenly become eloquent. You examine whether the criterion serves the purpose and apply the same questions to both applicants. The ranking has not changed its manners; only the name beside it has changed yours.

Fairness gives…

Applicants can be considered for reasons connected to the opportunity rather than to the selector’s loyalties. A clear account of the criteria makes it possible to question a result and improve the decision.

Finding the balance

Impartial scrutiny may change both the criterion and the ranking. A number, an agreed rule or removal of names does not by itself establish that relevant circumstances have received their due.

In ordinary life

Volunteer applications

Consider the role’s purpose and the information available about each applicant, including what a summary leaves out.

A favored team

Ask whether the reasons you accept for your own team would satisfy you if another team benefited.

Nearby virtues, different work

Discernment

Discernment tests the support for a ranking; Fairness attends to whose relevant claims receive weight.

Integrity

Integrity keeps the ethical standard in force when an exception would help your own side.

Recognizing a counterfeit

A counterfeit of Fairness is calling a recommendation neutral because it favors your group. Make the criterion and its application answerable to the same questions when the result changes.

How to cultivate Fairness

• State the purpose of the opportunity before inspecting who ranks first.
• Ask which relevant circumstances are missing from the summary.
• Compare your reasons for a favored and an unfavored applicant.

Try it today

Invent two applicants for a fictional training place and a short statement of the training’s purpose. Write the same questions about each person’s relevant needs and preparation. Swap their fictional team labels and see whether your reasons change. Use no real application or allocation.

Questions worth returning to

• Which concern becomes urgent only when someone else benefits?
• Does this criterion serve the opportunity’s purpose for both applicants?

Choose your practice

The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.

1. These manners did not please Catherine; but he was James’s friend and Isabella’s brother; and her judgment was further bought off by Isabella’s assuring her, when they withdrew to see the new hat, that John thought her the most charming girl in the world, and by John’s engaging her before they parted to dance with him that evening.

   The narrator, in Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
   Chapter 7 · excerpt

   The narrator shows Catherine’s judgment being softened by friendship and flattery. A favorable association can change how readily one accepts a person’s claims.

2. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child’s character, formed in early years or during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts which suit with his preconception; and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.

   Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers
   IV.—Truth of Intercourse · excerpt

   Stevenson describes a parent selecting facts to preserve an early opinion of a child. Familiarity can become a filter that prevents the person being judged from receiving a fair hearing.

3. When he has the power to see things detached from self-interest and from the insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then alone can he have the true vision of the beauty that is everywhere.

   Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
   The Realisation of Beauty · excerpt ·
   English arrangement by Rabindranath Tagore; preface credits translated passages to Satish Chandra Roy and Ajit Kumar Chakravarti, with revisions by Ernest Rhys; individual passage shares unspecified.

   Tagore connects the perception of beauty with freedom from insistent self-interest. The passage asks what personal preference prevents a person from seeing.

4. We contended that to the anarchist above all men it must be demonstrated that law is impartial and stands the test of every strain.

   Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes
   Chapter XVII · excerpt

   Addams insists that impartiality must reach an unpopular person too. A standard has not been seriously tested if it is applied only where the decision-maker feels sympathy.

5. His frank, cordial, affectionate, and expansive character; a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and ardent nature, which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me as to all others who knew him as well as I did.

   John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
   Chapter V — Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward · excerpt

   Mill’s portrait of John Sterling joins vigorous disagreement with eagerness to do justice to opponents. Disliking a position need not decide how its holder’s relevant claims are treated.

6. But to return; there belongeth further to the handling of this part, touching the duties of professions and vocations, a relative or opposite, touching the frauds, cautels, impostures, and vices of every profession, which hath been likewise handled; but how? rather in a satire and cynically, than seriously and wisely; for men have rather sought by wit to deride and traduce much of that which is good in professions, than with judgment to discover and sever that which is corrupt.

   Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
   Book II · excerpt

   Bacon distinguishes examining faults in a profession from indiscriminately mocking it. Judgment should identify the relevant defect instead of allowing dislike of a group to substitute for assessment.

7. So that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions.

   John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive — Work
   Work · excerpt

   Ruskin says honest work and idleness cut across social ranks. A label attached to a person does not settle the qualities that should bear on a judgment.

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