“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, ch. 1
Stoicism
Stoicism starts by narrowing the question. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion by splitting everything into what is in our power and what isn't — and puts almost nothing there except one act: giving or withholding assent, the judgment you form about what happens to you. Chrysippus made the same point with a rolling cylinder, preserved by Cicero in De Fato: a push gets it moving, but its own shape decides how it rolls afterward. That's the whole doctrine. Everything is caused, and responsibility still lands somewhere, because judgment is the one link in the chain that's properly called yours.
Put an algorithm in the picture and the question sharpens rather than changes. A hiring system, a loan model, a self-driving car's crash logic — none of it was ever up to you. What's up to you is how you judge it and what you do next. That isn't resignation. It's where Stoics think your actual standing lives: not in outcomes you never controlled, but in the one act nothing external can reach.
What Stoicism gets wrong
Utilitarians would say this gives up on the world too easily — if only your own judgment counts, you have no real argument for building fairer systems, only for tolerating unfair ones with good posture. Virtue ethicists would say Stoicism treats character as a fortress you retreat into rather than something built by acting well among other people, and that a private act of judgment isn't the same as a public act of justice.