Denmark has long had the world's most digitalised public sector, and parts of this digitalisation have taken place in ways that legal experts have described as experimental (Motzfeldt and Waage, 2021: 32). The digitalisation of the Danish public sector has been driven by economic considerations, but also by political aspirations to enhance welfare and strengthen legal certainty. The hope is that this will be achieved for instance through shorter waiting times for citizens and businesses in case processing, and more consistent case processing across municipalities.
However, this rapid and widespread digitalisation has also raised concerns about adverse effects on the public sector's capacity to uphold core legal, democratic, and ethical values and principles. These concerns stem, among other things, from the observation of increasing inequality between so-called 'digitally vulnerable' citizens and the rest of the population, from examples of discriminatory bias in decision-making algorithms, and from instances of unlawful data harvesting and data leaks, whereby the maintenance of values such as equality, justice, and privacy has come under pressure.
In this presentation, I offer an overview of the moral landscape of the public sector, put forward three hypotheses on how this landscape is affected by digitalisation, and, in particular, by the increasing use of artificial intelligence for decision-making and decision-support in the public sector in order to open up a discussion of potential techno-moral changes and the extent to which legal judgement can be automated.
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