Distributive Justice as the Foundational Premise of Fair ML: Unification, Extension, and Interpretation of Group Fairness Metrics

Joachim Baumann, Corinna Hertweck, Michele Loi, Christoph Heitz

Keywords: algorithmic decision making, group fairness, distributive justice, welfare, egalitarianism, maximin, prioritarianism, sufficientarianism

Abstract: Group fairness metrics are an established way of assessing the fairness of prediction-based decision-making systems. However, these metrics are still insufficiently linked to philosophical theories, and their moral meaning is often unclear. We propose a general framework for analyzing the fairness of decision systems based on theories of distributive justice, encompassing different established "patterns of justice" that correspond to different normative positions. We show that the most popular group fairness metrics can be interpreted as special cases of our approach. Thus, we provide a unifying and interpretative framework for group fairness metrics that reveals the normative choices associated with each of them and that allows understanding their moral substance. At the same time, we provide an extension of the space of possible fairness metrics beyond the ones currently discussed in the fair ML literature. Our framework also allows overcoming several limitations of group fairness metrics that have been criticized in the literature, most notably (1) that they are parity-based, i.e., that they demand some form of equality between groups, which may sometimes be harmful to marginalized groups, (2) that they only compare decisions across groups, but not the resulting consequences for these groups, and (3) that the full breadth of the distributive justice literature is not sufficiently represented.

TL;DR: We propose a general framework for analyzing the fairness of decision systems based on theories of distributive justice that unifies and extends existing definitions of group fairness metrics.