CONCEPT
Equal Concern and Respect
Ronald Dworkin's foundational principle that every person is owed treatment with equal concern, as someone whose life matters equally, and equal respect, as a responsible agent capable of forming her own conception of how to live—and the reason sorting systems violate it not incidentally but by design.
Beneath all of
Ronald Dworkin's particular doctrines—rights as trumps, law as integrity, the right-answer thesis—lies a single foundational principle from which the others derive their force: the right of each person to be treated with equal concern and equal respect. Equal concern means that the government must regard the life of each person as of equal worth, that no citizen's suffering is to be discounted or her flourishing preferred merely because of who she is. Equal respect means that each person must be treated as a responsible agent capable of forming and acting on her own conception of how to live—not as a predictable object whose behavior is to be forecast from her properties. Sorting systems violate the second dimension in the most literal sense. When an algorithm assigns a risk score to a defendant, a creditworthiness score to a borrower, a predicted-performance score to a