Political Philosophy
Legitimacy, recognition and consent when institutions work through algorithms.
Political philosophy enters my work through the question of legitimacy. Liberal theory traces an institution’s legitimacy, through a chain of authorisations, back to individuals whose standing precedes it. Algorithmic systems increasingly break that assumption: they produce, rather than presuppose, the standing of the people they govern.
“Beyond Consent” locates this condition in the recognition-theoretic tradition — Honneth’s sphere of legal recognition, Fraser’s status model of misrecognition, Butler’s claim that recognisability is prior to recognition — and argues that it is a distinctively infrastructural form of misrecognition. A worn fingerprint that fails to authenticate is not an expression of cultural devaluation, yet it subordinates status as surely as one, by removing the operative standing on which participation depends. The paper also distinguishes the condition from Arendt’s loss of the right to have rights, since its subject is firmly inside a polity that acknowledges her in law, and from domination in Pettit’s republican sense, which presupposes an agent whose standing is not itself the institution’s product.
The same concern with legitimacy runs through “The Legitimacy of Foundation Models”, under review at Philosophy & Technology.