Ethics of AI
What institutions owe the people their algorithmic systems govern.
In the legal and governance frameworks that regulate algorithmic systems — the GDPR, the EU AI Act, and the principlist codes that track them — consent and individual authorisation carry the load of legitimation and redress. The same frame organises the remedial debate over large algorithmic welfare systems, of which India’s Aadhaar is the paradigm case: clearer notice, meaningful opt-out, stronger data protection.
In “Beyond Consent” (AI and Ethics, 2026) I argue that for a distinctive class of these systems consent is not merely strained but conceptually misplaced. The elderly labourer whose worn fingerprints fail to authenticate at the ration shop is not failing to give informed consent; she is failing to be recognised as a subject who could give or withhold consent to anything at all. I call this condition constitutive dependence: the system does not constrain agents already recognised as rights-bearers but produces their operative standing as subjects of recognition and entitlement, and its architecture forecloses the standpoint from which refusal or correction could be issued.
The constructive half of the argument is the Constitutive Obligation Principle. Where an institution produces its subjects’ operative standing, its legitimacy depends not on their authorisation but on discharging non-waivable obligations of legibility, non-abandonment and remediation. The principle is a floor rather than a complete theory of legitimacy, and it reads Aadhaar not as an outlier but as an early instance of the architectural form toward which algorithmic governance is converging.