The Erosion of Moral Restraint

Glover's career turned on a refusal: the refusal to explain twentieth-century atrocity through a theory of evil. The perpetrators, he found, were rarely wicked. They were eroded. The moral restraints that had governed their earlier lives — the reluctance to harm, the recognition of others as persons, the sense of themselves as people who would not do certain things — had worn down through identifiable mechanisms operating across identifiable periods. The erosion was not mysterious. It was structural. It proceeded through distance, diffusion of responsibility, the reclassification of persons into categories, the incremental escalation of demands, and the institutional suppression of the human response. The taxonomy matters for AI not because AI produces atrocity but because the mechanisms are substrate-independent. They operate wherever the conditions allow — in a Rwandan village, in a Nazi bureaucracy, in a Silicon Valley sprint.