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https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-21961| Publication type: | Conference paper |
| Type of review: | Peer review (publication) |
| Title: | On the moral justification of statistical parity |
| Authors: | Hertweck, Corinna Heitz, Christoph Loi, Michele |
| et. al: | No |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3442188.3445936 10.21256/zhaw-21961 |
| Proceedings: | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency |
| Page(s): | 747 |
| Pages to: | 757 |
| Conference details: | 4th ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), online, 3-10 March 2021 |
| Issue Date: | Mar-2021 |
| Publisher / Ed. Institution: | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Publisher / Ed. Institution: | New York |
| ISBN: | 978-1-4503-8309-7 |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | Fairness; Independence; Statistical parity; Distributive justice; Bias |
| Subject (DDC): | 005: Computer programming, programs and data 170: Ethics |
| Abstract: | A crucial but often neglected aspect of algorithmic fairness is the question of how we justify enforcing a certain fairness metric from a moral perspective. When fairness metrics are proposed, they are typically argued for by highlighting their mathematical properties. Rarely are the moral assumptions beneath the metric explained. Our aim in this paper is to consider the moral aspects associated with the statistical fairness criterion of independence (statistical parity). To this end, we consider previous work, which discusses the two worldviews "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) and "We're All Equal" (WAE) and by doing so provides some guidance for clarifying the possible assumptions in the design of algorithms. We present an extension of this work, which centers on morality. The most natural moral extension is that independence needs to be fulfilled if and only if differences in predictive features (e.g. high school grades and standardized test scores are predictive of performance at university) between socio-demographic groups are caused by unjust social disparities or measurement errors. Through two counterexamples, we demonstrate that this extension is not universally true. This means that the question of whether independence should be used or not cannot be satisfactorily answered by only considering the justness of differences in the predictive features. |
| Further description: | The final publication is available in the ACM Digital Library via https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445936. |
| URI: | https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/21961 |
| Fulltext version: | Accepted version |
| License (according to publishing contract): | Licence according to publishing contract |
| Departement: | School of Engineering |
| Organisational Unit: | Institute of Data Analysis and Process Design (IDP) |
| Appears in collections: | Publikationen School of Engineering |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021_Hertweck-etal_Moral-Justification-of-Statistical-Parity.pdf | Accepted Version | 413 kB | Adobe PDF |  View/Open |
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Hertweck, C., Heitz, C., & Loi, M. (2021). On the moral justification of statistical parity [Conference paper]. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 747–757. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445936
Hertweck, C., Heitz, C. and Loi, M. (2021) ‘On the moral justification of statistical parity’, in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 747–757. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445936.
C. Hertweck, C. Heitz, and M. Loi, “On the moral justification of statistical parity,” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Mar. 2021, pp. 747–757. doi: 10.1145/3442188.3445936.
HERTWECK, Corinna, Christoph HEITZ und Michele LOI, 2021. On the moral justification of statistical parity. In: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Conference paper. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. März 2021. S. 747–757. ISBN 978-1-4503-8309-7
Hertweck, Corinna, Christoph Heitz, and Michele Loi. 2021. “On the Moral Justification of Statistical Parity.” Conference paper. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 747–57. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445936.
Hertweck, Corinna, et al. “On the Moral Justification of Statistical Parity.” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, pp. 747–57, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445936.
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