Civic Vice in Digital Governance

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>It has become a new global trend that governments are partially automating decision-making processes by public agencies. This, however, has led to some scandals revealing grave injustices, including the Robodebt scandal in Australia and the childcare benefit scandal in the Netherlands. This chapter argues that the normative impacts of the move towards automated decision-making can be fruitfully understood and addressed through the lens of civic virtue. It starts by outlining the Dutch childcare benefit scandal, showing that what happened cannot be reduced solely to human intent or structural factors, but needs to address the in-between term of human moral dispositions. Following this insight, the chapter outlines a framework of civic virtue, which outlines ideal states (civic virtue) and their deviations (civic vice) for different temporal configurations (past-, present-, and future-oriented civic virtue). Finally, the chapter uses this framework to reflect on the much-touted principle of ‘explainability’ in addressing harms like the ones done to citizens in the childcare benefit scandal. Three impacts are laid bare through the lens of civic virtue, of servility, presumptuousness, and political recalcitrance. Explainability, the chapter argues, may successfully address these impacts, but only if it ceases to focus solely on narrow black box problems in AI and address public governance more holistically.</jats:p>