Private Power without Epistemic Preemption

Research question

When does a private institution acquire a duty to keep an algorithmically mediated determination open to informed challenge and consequential reconsideration?

Proposed argument

The paper distinguishes a system’s capacity to support warranted belief from an institution’s practical power to structure a person’s options. Predictive performance does not, by itself, establish the legitimacy of a chosen standard, threshold, or allocation.

The proposed account of Relational Institutional Answerability concerns institutions that intentionally make a purportedly reasons-responsive judgment operative, foreseeably contribute to a nontrivial effect, control grounds needed to investigate a reasonable question, and act within a relationship lacking adequate countervailing routes.

The normative bridge has three steps: operative evaluative use assigns responsibility for foreseeable epistemic and correction risks; control over both the judgment and its possible defeat conditions, under constrained alternatives, creates a relation of arbitrary private power; a proportionate and consequential answerability route supplies a constraint on that power.

The proposed threshold

1. Operative evaluative use. The institution intentionally gives a purportedly reasons-responsive judgment practical effect.
2. Material effects. That use foreseeably contributes nontrivially to an individual or cumulative effect that is not merely negligible.
3. Asymmetric control. The institution or its accountable decision chain has exclusive or materially superior control over grounds needed to investigate a reasonable contestational question.
4. Constrained alternatives. The affected person lacks a reasonably adequate route for avoidance, verification, correction, or representation.

Argument in outline

1. Distinguish epistemic, practical, normative, and legal authority.
2. Reconstruct rational dependence on expertise, including the strongest case for relying on a superior system.
3. Distinguish contributory evidence use from epistemic preemption and from institutional constraints on action.
4. Derive and defend the proposed answerability duty and its threshold.
5. Examine proportionate institutional routes, protected access, representation, and boundary cases.
6. Develop empirical implications while keeping behavioral evidence separate from normative justification.

What answerability adds

Information can support an objection while the institution remains unable or unwilling to act on it. Answerability connects an informed objection to a competent and sufficiently independent forum capable of giving reasons and producing consequences.

The route need not always involve full disclosure or personal technical mastery. It must make room for relevant grounds and an effective institutional response.

Boundaries and open questions

The theory must withstand a strong objection: a validated system may outperform the available reviewer, and poorly designed challenges may add inconsistency or strategic manipulation. The paper therefore asks what proportionate answerability requires even under favorable conditions of system reliability.

A person’s compliance does not prove belief in the determination. A reviewer’s private disagreement does not establish power to depart. The broader research program keeps beliefs, preferred actions, actual capabilities, and observed actions distinct.

Read Paper A’s informational architecture →