What Is the Point of Equality in Machine Learning Fairness? Beyond Equality of Opportunity

Fairness in machine learning (ML) has become a rapidly growing area of research. But why, in the first place, is unfairness in ML wrong? And why should we care about improving fairness? Most fair-ML research implicitly appeals to distributive equality: the idea that desirable benefits and goods, such as opportunities (e.g., Barocas et al., 2023), should be equally distributed across society. Unfair ML models, then, are seen as wrong because they unequally distribute such benefits. This article argues that this exclusive focus on distributive equality offers an incomplete and potentially misleading ethical foundation, especially in the context of text- and image-generation models. Grounding ML fairness in egalitarianism—the view that equality is a fundamental moral and social ideal—requires challenging structural inequality: systematic, institutional, and durable arrangements that privilege some groups while disadvantaging others. Structural inequality manifests through ML systems in two primary forms: allocative harms (e.g., economic loss) and representational harms (e.g., stereotypes, erasure). While distributive equality helps address allocative harms, it fails to explain why representational harms are wrong—that is, why it is wrong for ML systems to reinforce social hierarchies that stratify people into superior and inferior groups—and why ML systems should aim to foster a society where people relate as equals (i.e., relational equality). To address these limitations, the article proposes a novel multifaceted egalitarian framework for ML fairness that integrates both distributive and relational notions of equality. Drawing on critical social and political philosophy, including the work of Anderson, Young, and Fraser, this framework offers a more comprehensive ethical foundation for tackling the full spectrum of harms perpetuated by ML systems. The article also outlines practical pathways for implementing the framework across the entire ML pipeline.