Justifiability and AI: putting explainability in its place

Abstract As artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems become increasingly pervasive in society, their opacity—i.e., the difficulty, and sometimes impossibility, of understanding why they make the decisions they make—has become a serious problem. This is especially true in sensitive decision-making contexts, such as criminal justice, health care, and finance, or in choices requiring allocation of scarce resources. One attempt to “open up” the AI/ML black box has been the emergence of post hoc explainability algorithms—algorithms which generate post hoc approximations to black box models. However, such algorithms have been criticized as merely providing after the fact rationalizations for the decisions these systems make. In this paper, we defend and articulate a different concept—AI/ML justifiability. We explore several ways in which an algorithm could be justifiable, and we argue that pursuing justifiability is a worthwhile goal. A key to our argument is a distinction from the philosophy of action between motivating and normative reasons: effective explanations require (but are unable to provide) motivating reasons, while effective justifications require (and can indeed provide) normative reasons alone. We conclude that as long as a model is justifiable, it can be trusted even if it cannot be explained.