Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

The importance of fairness in machine learning models is widely acknowledged, and ongoing academic debate revolves around how to determine the appropriate fairness definition, and how to tackle the trade-off between fairness and model performance. In this paper we argue that besides these concerns, there can be ethical implications behind seemingly purely technical choices in fairness interventions in a typical model development pipeline. As an example we show that the technical choice between in-processing and post-processing is not necessarily value-free and (...) may have serious implications in terms of who will be affected by the specific fairness intervention. The paper reveals how assessing the technical choices in terms of their ethical consequences can contribute to the design of fair models and to the related societal discussions. (shrink)

John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for (...) selection and how this selection ought to be carried out. (shrink)

John Rawls's work has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality, and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for selection and how (...) this selection ought to be carried out. (shrink)