What is your professional background and primary research domain?

My primary research domain is moral changes: How to conceptualize them, which dynamics drive them, and how they can unfold.
I have a master’s degree in philosophy from Aarhus University. As a student, I edited an anthology about The Meaningfull Life, which in 2003 was published at Aarhus University Press. During the editorial process, I was offered a position as an editor at the press. It was an exceptional rewarding job, where I also had a lot of fun with my colleagues, but I was not done with philosophy. So, in 2012, I started as a PhD student at the Department of Law at Aarhus University. Here, I researched how moral changes have unfolded in the practice of law.

After finishing my PhD, I was offered a postdoc at the Department of Philosophy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University, in an interdisciplinary project with both philosophers and anthropologists. My task was to develop a theoretical frame for the project, which turned in to the minimalistic meta ethical theory ‘contextual ethics’. I was also given the opportunity to visit The Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. During my six months stay, I finished my book on Moral Change (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and researched how moral anthropologists have understood moral changes. Together with a fellow visitor, philosopher Nora Hämäläinen, I edited the anthology New Perspectives on Moral Change – Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage with Transformations of Life Worlds (Berghahn Press 2022). After that, I had a Corona and double taxation affected postdoc in an ERC-project at the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where we explored the idea of moral progress. Here, I also became an affiliate of the research program Esdit (the Ethics of Distruptive Technologies), which I still take part in today. Before I became a part of SHAPE, I worked as a special consultant in the secretary of the Danish Data Ethics Council, where I, for instance, was part of creating a teaching resource on data ethics for the “Folkeskole” (Danish municipal primary and lower secondary school).  
 
What is your ongoing project in SHAPE about?

My SHAPE-project is a pilot study, where I investigate what characterizes the Danish administration’s ‘moral landscape’, and I look at different fields’ research into the use of algorithmic systems in the public sector in Denmark to assess whether they report any changes or change-pressures to this landscape. This spring I will also make a series of interviews with relevant professionals, who will contribute to my knowledge on whether decision-making and decision-supporting algorithmic systems can change the moral values and ideals characteristic for the public sector in Denmark. I’m also the initiator of the SHAPE conference called The Data Driven Welfare State: Value revolution, reform or status quo?, which I organize together with Helene Ratner from the ADD-project and The Danish Data Ethics Council. The conference will take place on April 18, 2024, at Arhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University. Registration and program can be found here. 

What future projects do you have in the pipeline?  

I’m working on an application to a research project about digital technologies and changes in the moral landscape on the Danish public sector, which shall build on the findings in my SHAPE pilot study. Furthermore, I’m writing on three articles; the first one is a text-genre experiment, which is about methodological challenges in contextual ethics. The second article is a follow up on an article about historical ’techno-moral revolutions’, which I wrote with other researchers from Esdit last year, and it is about ’digital techno-moral revolutions’. The last article is about Wittgenstein’s understanding of moral certainty, which I’m writing together with Anne-Marie Christensen (SDU).  

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Recent academic publications by Cecilie Eriksen: 

“What’s Reality Got to Do with It? Wittgenstein, empirically informed philosophy, and the missing methodological link”. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 11. https://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3610/6  

Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty. Editors Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, Neil O’Hara, and Nigel Pleasants, New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003178927