In the digitalized society all citizens are digitally vulnerable

On April 2nd, 2024, Cecilie Eriksen, PhD, researcher at the SHAPE-center at Aarhus University specialised in moral change, visited the DIS-TRUST Research Team, and sparked an insightful discussion on the profound impacts of decision-making algorithms within Danish public administration. Eriksen, who is currently working on a philosophical exploration of digital techno-moral revolutions, provided a critical perspective on digital vulnerability. Her current research investigates the use of decision-making and decision supporting algorithms for administration in public sectors, in particular Denmark's infamous EFI-system. This automated tax debt recovery system, initiated in 2005 and actively used between 2013 and 2018, was eventually discontinued due to significant errors and lack of legality. 

In connection with the DIS-TRUST project, Eriksen noted the importance and timeliness of the project because of the huge influence of digital technologies on our everyday lives, on democracies, on vital infrastructures, on our work lives, and the extensive digitalisation of the Danish welfare state. One of the main insights to emerge from the discussion was that Eriksen underlined the importance of recognizing that digital vulnerability is not only a problem for certain marginalized groups. Rather, all Danish citizens are in a multi-facetted digitally vulnerable position.

Eriksen has written about vulnerability in relation to trust in her 2021 paper “Each Other’s World, Each Other’s Fate: Løgstrup’s Conception of Basic Trust”, co-authored with Anne-Marie S. Christensen. Here Christensen and Eriksen explored the understanding of basic or natural trust in the Danish philosopher K.E. Løgstrup’s work and delved deeper into how trust has a fundamentally relational character. Trusting other humans and the world is something humans cannot not do – it is as natural, necessary, and spontaneous to us as breathing is. Løgstrup points out that in trusting another human “the individual delivers themselves up, goes out of themselves, places something of their life in the hands of the other person” (Løgstrup 2020; 16). Therefore, through trust human lives are interwoven. This interwovenness, according to Løgstrup, connectes with another “fact of human life: The fact that we are always (at least partly) vulnerable to other people”, as it is impossible for two people to have anything to do with each other without one having some degree of power over the other (Christensen & Eriksen, 2021). Eriksen adds that along the same lines, human lives are also interwoven with and vulnerable to the world in general, and she consider vulnerability a core aspect of all forms of trust and reliance. 

In the DIS-TRUST project digital vulnerability is seen particularly to derive from the opacity of the digital systems through which power and control are nowadays exercised, for instance in public administration, where such opacity can challenge citizens’ rights to an explanation for a legal decision. Eriksen stresses the importance of moving the Danish politician’s debate away from only focussing on securing that citizens trust public sector digitalization and data use towards ensure that they are trustworthy. Trust is not inherently morally positive, as the projects PI, Esther Oluffa Pedersen, has argued (Pedersen 2018).
The group also discussed situations in which the use of algorithms consistently leads to better results than the work of human intelligence alone (e.g., in the medical field, in traffic regulation, and in some military uses). One question is whether there is a moral obligation to rely on these systems when they have the potential of saving lives, and evidence shows that the collaboration of humans and machines leads to better results than humans alone. 

Lastly, the discussion also focused on another characteristic of the DIS-TRUST project, that is the combination of philosophical explorations and empirical work. Eriksen believes it is a strengths of the DIS-TRUST project that the researchers are considering how empirical materials, research and methods can enrich their philosophical reflection. In her paper “What’s Reality Got to Do with It? Wittgenstein, empirically informed philosophy, and the missing methodological link”, Eriksen discusses how empirical cases, investigations and research can inform philosophy (Eriksen, 2023). Eriksen's visit not only encouraged the DIS-TRUST team to think critically of crucial aspects of technological advancements, but also reinforced the necessity of doing so with an eye out for rich empirical cases that can demonstrate the positive, negative and sometimes just different ways in which trust in each other, in institutions, in oneself and in technology is changing in the digital society.

References:
Løgstrup, K.E. 2020. The Ethical Demand, translated by Bjørn Rabjerg and Robert Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christensen, A. M. S., & Eriksen, C. (2021). Each Other’s World, Each Other’s Fate—Løgstrup’s Conception of Basic Trust. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 29(1), 24-43.
Eriksen, C. (2023). What’s Reality Got to Do with It? Wittgenstein, Empirically Informed Philosophy, and a Missing Methodological Link. Nordic Wittgenstein Review.
O’Neill, O. ( 2002). A Question of Trust. The BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pedersen, E. O. (2018). “An Outline of Interpersonal Trust and Distrust.” In Anthropology and Philosophy. Dialogues on Trust and Hope, edited by Sune Liisberg, Esther Oluffa Pedersen and Anne Line Dalsgård. New York: Berghahn Books.