Chad Lee-Stronach

It is tempting to think that in an ideal world our social problems would be little more than coordination games. In such cases, all actors have aligned incentives and, moreover, reliable means of establishing a socially optimal convention. For one thing, those with compatible strategies can learn to interact more often with each other. For another, they can signal to others that they would adopt the optimal convention, so long as enough others are also willing. But what if coordination games are interdependent, such that the value of coordinating in one game depends on the degree of coordination in some other game? We show that in these cases, these once reliable mechanisms become unreliable and even counterproductive. We call this phenomenon the tragedy of the conventions.

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty.