Big Data and the Risk of Misguided Responsibilization

In a culture in which individual responsibility continues to be celebrated, this raises questions about new opportunities for institutional design with a stronger focus on individual responsibility. But what is it that can be drawn from big data? In her talk, Lisa Maria Herzog argues that we should not expect a “god’s eye view” on choice versus circumstances from big data. “Responsibility” is a social construct that depends on the logic of different social situations, as well as our epistemic access to certain counterfactuals (e.g., whether an agent “could have acted differently”). It is this epistemic dimension that changes with the arrival of big data. But while it might help overcome some epistemic barriers, it might also create new problems, e.g., because of polluted data. This is not just a theoretical problem; it is directly connected to the regulation of insurance. The new developments force us to directly confront questions about mutualist versus solidaristic forms of insurance, and more generally about how much weight to ascribe to individual responsibility, given all we know about unequal background circumstances.

Lisa Maria Herzog is Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She is currently working on the relation between markets and democracy from an epistemic perspective, and workplace democracy and the future of work.