none 10.5325/critphilrace.14.1.0126 The Pennsylvania State University Press The Pennsylvania State University Press 3287 197469887 216428 2026070213514822800 10.5325 2026-08-12T09:34:43Z 2026-07-02T17:58:48Z 1 Critical Philosophy of Race 2165-8684 2165-8692 01 2026 06 19 2026 14 1 Alexander Williams Tolbert Emory University, United States of America Abstract Recent debates in political philosophy of science underscore the need for normative frameworks to determine which values should guide scientific inquiry.1 Philosophers of science increasingly draw on principles from political philosophy, such as democratic majoritarianism, deliberative proceduralism, and Rawlsian public reason, to inform scientific investigations.2 The article argues these approaches fail in societies where basic institutions developed through historical racial domination, including chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, COINTELPRO’s targeting of Black movements, racially exclusionary housing policies, and mass incarceration without reparative correction. Drawing on Charles Mills’s (2017) critique of ideal theory, the article contends that these frameworks abstract away from the racialized causal structures that shape the data, models, and decisions of contemporary scientific and technological practices, and that the normative constraints they propose are insufficient to secure democratic legitimacy under conditions of unrepaired racial domination.3 Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a case study, the article introduces the concept of the Racial Algorithm to show how machine-learning systems fitted to racially structured training distributions can reproduce and compound racial inequities through algorithmic training and deployment. The article concludes by sketching a framework for scientific legitimacy grounded in nonideal theory. 01 2026 06 19 2026 126 153 10.5325/critphilrace.14.1.0126 https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/cpr/article/14/1/126/411345/The-Racial-Algorithm-AI-and-Scientific-Legitimacy https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cpr/article-pdf/14/1/126/2436619/critphilrace_14_1_126.pdf https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cpr/article-pdf/14/1/126/2436619/critphilrace_14_1_126.pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/994737 2022 “Dismantling the ‘Black Opticon’: Privacy, Race Equity, and Online Data-Protection Reform.” Angwin, Julia, JeffLarson, SuryaMattu, and LaurenKirchner. 2016. “Machine Bias.”ProPublica, May23, 2016. www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing. Statistical Science 3 3 377 1988 “Science and Values in the Regulatory Process.” Philosophical Studies 182 1133 2025 10.1007/s11098-025-02323-x “Public Reason, Values in Science, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Political Forum.” California Law Review 104 3 671 2016 “Big Data’s Disparate Impact.” American Economic Review 94 4 991 2004 10.1257/0002828042002561 “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” 2020 “Recovering from Biased Data: Can Fairness Constraints Improve Accuracy?” American Sociological Review 82 5 977 2017 10.1177/0003122417725865 Synthese 195 2227 2018 10.1007/s11229-017-1333-z “Du Bois’ Democratic Defence of the Value Free Ideal.” Scientific Reports 12 1 4209 2022 10.1038/s41598-022-07939-1 “A Clarification of the Nuances in the Fairness Metrics Landscape.” AI and Ethics 5 3743 2025 10.1007/s43681-025-00680-1 “Hunting for Humans: On Slavery, the Emergence of the US as the World’s First Super Industrial State and Its Deployment of Artificial Intelligence and Other Military Technology to Repress Dissent and Neutralize Enemy Combatants.” Coate, Stephen, and Glenn C.Loury. 1993. “Will Affirmative-Action Policies Eliminate Negative Stereotypes?”American Economic Review83 (5): 1220–40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2117558. Curry, Tommy J. 2011. “The Political Economy of Reparations: An Anti-Ethical Consideration of Atonement and Racial Reconciliation under Colonial Moralism.”Race, Gender & Class18 (1/2): 125–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23884871. Philosophy of Science 67 4 559 2000 10.1086/392855 “Inductive Risk and Values in Science.” Douglas, Heather E. 2008. “The Role of Values in Expert Reasoning.”Public Affairs Quarterly22 (1): 1–18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40441475. Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal 2009 Eppur si Muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer 83 2017 Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science ix 2017 Science Advances 4 1 eaao5580 2018 10.1126/sciadv.aao5580 “The Accuracy, Fairness, and Limits of Predicting Recidivism.” Environmental Health Perspectives 122 7 647 2014 10.1289/ehp.1408107 “Science, Policy, and the Transparency of Values.” Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor 2018 Journal of Consumer Affairs 55 2 366 2021 10.1111/joca.12297 “Digital Redlining and the Fintech Marketplace: Evidence from US Zip Codes.” Fryer, Daniel. 2020. “Race, Reform, and Progressive Prosecution.”The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology110 (4): 769–802. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48595414. Criminal Law and Philosophy 17 553 2023 10.1007/s11572-023-09700-9 “Idealizing Abolition.” Journal of Finance 77 1 5 2022 10.1111/jofi.13090 “Predictably Unequal? The Effects of Machine Learning on Credit Markets.” Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022) 2022 “Pushing the Limits of Fairness Impossibility: Who’s the Fairest of Them All?” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 4 1145 2019 10.1093/bjps/axy007 “What Is Epistemic Public Trust in Science?” Kleinberg, Jon, SendhilMullainathan, and ManishRaghavan. 2016. “Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores.”https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807. Significance 13 14 2016 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x “To Predict and Serve?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 90 102 2021 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.08.009 “Does Democracy Require Value-Neutral Science? Analyzing the Legitimacy of Scientific Information in the Political Sphere.” McLeod, Allegra M. 2015. “Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice.”UCLA Law Review62: 1156–1239. https://www.uclalawreview.org/prison-abolition-and-grounded-justice/. Teaching Philosophy 17 3 223 1994 10.5840/teachphil199417327 “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience.” The Racial Contract 1997 Hypatia 20 3 165 2005 “Ideal Theory as Ideology.” Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism 2017 92 69 2018 2020 Science 366 6464 447 2019 10.1126/science.aax2342 “Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations.” Educational Work beyond Carceral Logics: Stereoscopic Engagements with Educational Philosophy and Abolitionism. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis: Gothenburg Studies in Educational Sciences 504 2025 Liberalism without Perfection 2011 10.2307/1600311 Rawls, John. 1997. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.”University of Chicago Law Review64(3): 765–807. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1600311. A Theory of Justice Rev. 1999 Richardson, Rashida, JasonSchultz, and KateCrawford. 2019. “Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice.”New York University Law Review Online94: 192–233. ssrn.com/abstract=3333423. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 545 2021 10.1093/bjps/axz023 “Democratic Values: A Better Foundation for Public Trust in Science.” Insurrectionist Ethics: Radical Perspectives on Social Justice 157 2023