Concern 384 · Working draft · editorial review in progress
Individual vs group fairness
Individual and group fairness are two ways of asking whether a system treats people fairly, and each can miss what the other sees.
Understanding the concern
Individual fairness asks whether people who are similar for the relevant task receive similar treatment. Group fairness examines patterns across categories of people. A system can have balanced group averages while treating two comparable individuals differently. It can also treat similar records alike while the records themselves reflect unequal opportunity.
The hard part is deciding what counts as relevant similarity. Comparing applicants only by a past salary may preserve earlier injustice; comparing them by job-relevant skills asks another question. Group measures can reveal patterns, while individual review can expose particular mistakes. Neither approach supplies the values and context automatically.
An example
An audit finds balanced overall outcomes, but two applicants with equivalent job skills receive very different recommendations.
Illustrative unless identified as a documented case.
Evidence and its limits
These are formal frameworks with assumptions. They do not provide a universal similarity measure or settle every moral disagreement.
Dwork, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold and Zemel · Research paper
Fairness Through Awareness ↗ (opens in a new tab)Individual fairness based on a task-specific similarity measure and its assumptions.
Kearns, Neel, Roth and Wu · Research paper
Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering ↗ (opens in a new tab)Why coarse group checks can miss harms to subgroups and methods for auditing them.
Broader frameworks and background
These resources provide context. They do not establish every claim in this concern.
A question to discuss
Which differences between people are relevant to this decision, and are group averages hiding individual harms?
Keep track of different views, what needs checking, and any next step in your own discussion notes.
Open discussion notes →Principles for the conversation
Before you finish · reflect together
Virtues and principles to consider
Virtues are qualities we practice in how we treat people and make choices. They are not scores for judging someone. Use these ideas to explore what a thoughtful response could look like.
Justice
Justice means fair treatment, fair procedures, and attention to who receives benefits and burdens. It asks whether people with less power can be heard and seek repair.
Look at outcomes across different groups and individual cases. Provide a usable way to challenge decisions and correct harm. Equal wording in a policy does not guarantee equal treatment in practice.
Ask together: Who benefits, who bears the cost, and who can challenge the decision?
Dignity
Dignity means recognizing each person's worth regardless of usefulness, status, or a system's score. People deserve respect and a voice in matters that affect them.
Explain important decisions, avoid humiliating treatment, and keep room for a person's story. Do not treat a prediction as a complete account of who someone is.
Ask together: Does this use treat each person as someone whose experience matters?
Listening
Listening means trying to understand someone's experience before preparing an answer. People who use a service, work with it, or are judged by it may notice problems its designers miss.
Invite people to describe what happened in their own words. Repeat back what you understood and let them correct it. A quiet person or a complaint that is hard to measure may still reveal something important.
Ask together: Whose experience have we not heard yet?
Editorial ratings
These are editorial judgments from the register, not measured probabilities or predictions about your situation.
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