Abstract

One of the core tasks of recommender systems is often defined as follows: Find good items. Recommender systems are thus designed to support our decision-making by helping us find our way around the online world and guiding us to the things we want. However, relying on recommender systems has a profound effect on our decision-making because they structure the environment in which we make choices. In this contribution, I examine how recommender systems affect our practical reasoning and whether they pose a threat to autonomy, i.e., what influence recommender systems have on our capacity for making our own choices. I argue that a basic requirement for integrating automated recommendations in autonomous decision-making consists in being able to identify the rationale behind recommendations: only if we understand why we are being presented with certain recommendations is it possible for them to be integrated into decision-making in a way that preserves autonomy.