Practical Fairness

Chapter 1. Fairness, Technology, and the Real World

What is fairness? Everyone has a slightly different definition. Many of the great divides in society result from differing ideas about fairness. It’s an age-old debate.

In this book, I won’t delve into the philosophy or social histories of how fairness has been defined over time and geography. Rather, I’ll take a practical perspective on the matter. Practical considerations most often come up in the form of three fundamental questions a society needs to answer in order to function:

• Who gets what? (Rules of allocation)

• How do we decide who gets what? (Rules of decision)

• Who decides who decides? (Rules of political authority)¹

Some of the social and philosophical divides in the world originate from these basic questions. Now there’s a new and interesting wrinkle in the age of algorithms—one that is not sufficiently acknowledged. We are still asking and answering these same questions, but now algorithms are part of that process.

Software engineers and UX designers don’t usually ask these questions at team meetings. And yet they make such determinations every day in their work. The downstream effects of their products have social ramifications that affect who gets what and why.

This book provides both conceptual tools and coding examples to address fairness questions from the point of view of writing computer code and designing digital products. Much of the content emphasizes machine learning, but I also discuss digital products ...