The gap between epistemic and normative justification

Duránand Jongsma’s main claim is that black-box algorithms can confer epistemic justification.They helpfully note the scope of this claim’s implications: its truth would not alone give the ethical stamp of approval to decisions that are informed by black-box algorithms. For example, a clinician may be epistemically justified—on the basis of a black-box algorithm’s diagnosis—in believing that a patient has cancer without thereby being normatively justified in (say) administering chemotherapy. The epistemic justification can inform the decision, but further, moral considerations are needed to normatively justify it. This is a general point about the different natures of epistemic and normative justification.

Yet, especially in the medical context, the distinction between epistemic and normative considerations are not always clear-cut. For example, an algorithm that looks like it plays a …