Reconsidering the Levelling-down Objection against Egalitarianism

Abstract

The levelling-down objection rejects the egalitarian view that it is intrinsically good to eliminate the inequality of an outcome by lowering the relevant good of those better off to the level of those worse off. Larry Temkin suggests that the position underlying this objection is an exclusionary version of the person-affecting view, in which an outcome can be better or worse only if persons are affected for better or worse. Temkin then defends egalitarianism by rejecting this position. In this essay, I avoid Temkin's conclusion by arguing that the levelling-down objection is best understood as resting on an alternative position, which involves a distinction between those non-person-affecting ideals that posit value as tied to individuals in a particular manner and those that do not. Taken as the basis of the levelling-down objection, this position allows us consistently to reject egalitarianism while accepting many plausible non-person-affecting ideals.

MEDFAIR: Benchmarking Fairness for Medical Imaging

“…This is in line with the "separability" criteria (Chen et al, 2021;Dwork et al, 2012) that algorithm scores should be conditionally independent of the sensitive attribute given the diagnostic label (i.e., Ŷ ⊥ S|Y ), which is also adopted by (Gardner et al, 2019;Fong et al, 2021). On the other hand, Zietlow et al (2022) find that for high-capacity models in computer vision, this is typically achieved by worsening the performance of the advantaged group rather than improving the disadvantaged group, a phenomenon termed as leveling down in philosophy that has incurred numerous criticisms (Christiano and Braynen, 2008;Brown, 2003;Doran, 2001). Worse, practical implementations often lead to worsening the performance of both subgroups (Zietlow et al, 2022), making it pareto inefficient and comprehensively violating beneficence and non-maleficence principles (Beauchamp, 2003).…”