CONCEPT
The Publicity Condition
Rawls's requirement that a just society must be one in which the principles of justice are publicly known, understood, and endorsed by citizens — and in which institutions can be seen to operate according to those principles.
The publicity condition is constitutive, not decorative. An arrangement that is just in substance but opaque in operation fails the publicity condition and is therefore, in Rawls's framework, not fully just. The requirement has two dimensions. The first is that the principles themselves must be publicly known — citizens must be able to articulate the principles under which their institutions operate. The second is that the operation of the institutions must be sufficiently transparent that citizens can evaluate whether the institutions actually follow the stated principles. Both dimensions are threatened, in the AI transition, by the opacity of algorithmic decision-making. Hiring algorithms, credit-scoring algorithms, content recommendation algorithms, models that determine which workers are retained and which are displaced — these systems operate with a degree of opacity that would have troubled Rawls profoundly, because citizens cannot evaluate what they cannot see, cannot endorse principles they do not know, and cannot hold institutions accountable for standards they have never