Constantly evoked, but always equivocal: the fate of equity. Who hasn't wondered about fairness in the face of a pandemic, for example? Or about the use of algorithms, which are asked to make decisions on the basis of data already biased by inequalities in society? Or about the need to take equity into account when designing climate policies?
Equity is not to be confused with equality, even if it shares the same root: equity is the taking into account of differences. Sometimes it serves to rebalance, but often it merely maintains these differences. Hence the fascination it inspires, but also the difficulty of integrating it into any project for life in society.
Like differences, fairness has a long history: it was shaped by Antiquity, in the art of discourse, in ethics and above all in law. It then spread to many modern and contemporary fields, multiplying its facets: from economics to sociology, from philosophy to public health, from multilingualism to algorithms and environmental protection.
This colloquium brings together specialists from different disciplines, from Antiquity to the present day, to achieve a conceptual clarification: each speaker will try to make the public and specialists from other fields understand what meaning and what role the notion of equity has taken on in his or her own field.