Suppose you were designing a system to allocate organ donations for the greater good. From one perspective, an optimized program might give organs to the youngest possible recipient, to maximize the number of life-years gained from each organ donation. However, such a system would likely be regarded as discriminatory based on its use of age, and would be unlikely to gain society-wide approval. “That’s not going to be acceptable in practice,” says Nikos Trichakis, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. This kind of problem, broadly speaking,…
