Victoria Akoleowo

As machine learning (ML) systems become increasingly embedded in areas such as healthcare, education, hiring, and criminal justice, concerns about fairness and bias have intensified. This paper explores what it means for an algorithm to be fair, focusing on the concept of justice and how it can guide the design and evaluation of ML systems. Drawing insights from social and political philosophy, particularly theories of distributive justice and equality of opportunity, the paper examines the strengths and limitations of common fairness metrics, such as demographic parity and equalised odds. These metrics, while useful, are normatively incomplete, as they presuppose contested moral assumptions and cannot, on their own, determine what justice requires in algorithmic decision-making. The paper argues for a deeper understanding of fairness that goes beyond technical solutions; one that considers the ethical, social, and systemic dimensions of justice. By connecting the bioethical principle of justice to fairness in ML, the paper proposes a more comprehensive framework to better navigate the complexities of fairness-aware learning, while ensuring greater accountability and transparency in AI systems. The aim is to bridge the gap between technical approaches to fairness and their real-world impacts, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration to shape more equitable and responsible AI technologies. The paper therefore defends the claim that algorithmic fairness must be explicitly grounded in substantive theories of justice if it is to address real-world algorithmic harms in ethically defensible ways.

The colonial experience in Africa, characterised by an exhibition of Eurocentric attitudes which questioned the very humanity of the colonised, upheld ‘Whiteness’ as the standard of purity and civilisation. It also subjugated the endogenous epistemologies of the colonised to the ‘pure’ epistemologies and worldviews of the colonialists. This experience occasioned a disruption of the organic trend of Africa’s development, truncating its socio-political and economic trajectories and stagnating/destroying traditional African socio-political values and institutions through its imposition of western standards on colonised societies. The resultant effect – an epistemicide against pre-colonial epistemes, suppressing, vilifying and/or partially destroying such epistemes and labelling them as local, uncivilised and traditional. In contrast, the colonial-imposed Eurocentric, western episteme was upheld as modern and civilised, the standard to which all other knowledge systems had to comply. Such Eurocentric hegemony persists to date. This chapter, therefore, builds on the notion of ‘colonial legacy’ as an insidious challenge to Africa’s development. Utilising the analytic and synthetic methodologies, it avers that epistemic decolonisation is an essential factor in development ethics. Epistemic decolonisation, the demand for the dismantling of Eurocentric hegemonies in African educational systems, and its replacement with African-centered epistemes which identify Africa as the heuristic core of the episteme presents as an imperative for justice, a means for Africans to (re)construct their worldviews to reflect themselves as the centre of such worldviews in relationship with others and for the African educational curricula to be (re)constructed to reflect contextual concerns.

Contemporary views of African states paint pictures of nation-states where the right not to tolerate the intolerant is erroneously applied, with varying degrees of decrials of supposedly intolerant groups by political and religious leaders. Karl Popper advocates a notion of limited toleration, with a dictum, “Do not tolerate the intolerant”. This paper contends that such applications result in state-sanctioned suppression of alternate views, some of which are based on ideologies that require critically rational discourse. Without discounting genuine cases of intolerant groups whose intolerance should not be tolerated, this paper asserts that consistent and universal applications of the right to be intolerant of intolerance should be discouraged; rather, a consistent engagement with intolerant groups should be undertaken with a view to ascertaining which among such intolerant groups are truly intolerant, and which are genuinely advocating for mutual recognition and respect.

Traditional African cosmological and sociological accounts delineate pictures of complementary gender relations. Such narratives denote the active participation of both gender in the traditional African society. This is contradicted by the Victorian ideology of the colonial era which restricted women’s role solely to the private sphere. This colonial ideology is further perpetuated by contemporary interpretations of holy texts which birth religious fundamentalism, an ideology that reinforces unequal gender relations. This chapter therefore interrogates traditional African gender constructs with the goal of emphasizing the complementary roles played by members of both gender in the traditional African society. Contra Oyeronke Oyewumi, this chapter argues that gender constructs existed prior to colonialism, and should be redefined contemporaneously as complementary, rather than hierarchical or binary opposed.