The Root of Algocratic Illegitimacy

Abstract Would a political system where the governance was overseen by an algorithmic system be legitimate? The intuitive answer seems to be no. This paper considers the philosophical effort to justify this intuition that argue for algocracy, a rule by algorithms, being illegitimate. Taking as the paradigmatic example the anti-algocratic argument from Danaher that attempts to ground algocratic illegitimacy in the opacity of algocratic decision-making, it is argued that the argument oversimplfies the matters. Opacity can delegitimise—but not simpliciter. It delegitimises because of the presence of certain downstream violations of obligations and rights of the public that result from the opaque governance. Algocratic decision-makers, however, seem not to be subjects to these normative constraints in the relevant sense. The paper therefore argues that the standards of legitimacy that have been deployed for or against different kinds of human governance do not apply to the algorithmic decision-making systems with quite the same force. New avenues for rooting the illegitimacy of algocratic decision-makers have to be developed.