D.5:6 - Archetypal Grounding (Worked Slice)

A hiring-screening model has high aggregate accuracy and an internal note says it is “fair.” D.5 first asks what fairness claim is being made. If the claim is only a metric disparity comparison, give the metric or evaluation result with its affected groups, intended use, and material limits, then stop. A recipient can reuse or publish that bounded comparison without treating it as a conclusion that hiring is fair. An intended stronger conclusion reopens its actual missing basis. If the team claims counterfactual fairness, C.28 must expose the causal estimand, additional counterfactual-identifiability assumptions, and an estimate with its consistency result when that estimate is relied on. Missing conditions lower the C.28 support result before D.5 decides its audit use. If the audit exposes a conflict between company efficiency and applicant harm across declared scopes, D.3 describes that conflict and D.4 guides its decision use.