CONCEPT
The Objectivity Alibi
Kafka’s term, avant la lettre, for the move by which an institution evades the demand for justification by invoking its own systematic, mechanical, impersonal character—as if being a procedure were itself a guarantee of being right.
The objectivity alibi is the claim that a decision is trustworthy because of the form it takes rather than the substance it delivers.
Kafka’s
In the Penal Colony identifies the logic precisely: the officer does not justify the condemned man’s sentence; he points to the perfection of the apparatus. In the same way, contemporary automated systems are marketed not as correct but as
objective—more consistent than humans, free from the biases that impair individual judgment, data-driven rather than merely opinionated. The appeal is to the mechanism’s impersonality as a proxy for its accuracy. But impersonality is not impartiality: a system trained on historically biased decisions reproduces those biases with mechanical consistency and presents them as neutral computation. The alibi does something more damaging than simple error: it
relocates the decision from the domain of contestable judgment, where reasons must be supplied and challenged, to the domain of computed fact, where the output appears to describe reality rather than