ECHOES OF POWER: BIAS, OBJECTIVITY AND CULPABILITY IN ALGORITHMIC AND STATISTICAL WORLDS

Abstract

Algorithms, increasingly deployed in domains such as welfare, credit, hiring, policing, and healthcare, are often celebrated as neutral tools of efficiency and rationality. This study argues otherwise: algorithms do not merely process data but inscribe and reproduce the values of their designers, amplifying existing inequities and diminishing human agency. Drawing on Nietzsche’s deconstruction of truth as a myth, Foucault’s analysis of power relations, and Kierkegaard’s concept of responsibility, the article contends that algorithmic outputs are not neutral projections of reality but socially sanctioned fictions—echoes of entrenched power that present themselves as objectivity. Philosophical critique is set in dialogue with technical accounts of decision-making, including Kochenderfer et al.’s Algorithms for Decision Making (2022) and Christian and Griffiths’ Algorithms to Live By (2016). These works reveal how optimization under uncertainty translates complex moral and political questions into ostensibly technical procedures. In doing so, algorithms reshape normative life: reducing ethics to efficiency, justice to probability, and responsibility to statistical thresholds. The analysis challenges the persistent belief that bias can be eradicated through better data or technical refinement. Instead, it argues for a reconfiguration of objectivity—not as detached neutrality but as reflexive responsibility. By reframing culpability as distributed across coders, institutions, and societies, this study develops a theoretical grammar of socio-technical networks. Algorithms are not judge-like arbiters standing above human affairs but narrative actors embedded within them, shaping and reflecting humanity’s moral order. They echo existing structures of power while amplifying new forms of asymmetry. To engage them critically requires listening to these echoes, recognizing where they distort, and reclaiming responsibility for what is projected through their seemingly impartial voices.