CONCEPT
The Higher Immorality
Mills's term for the structural condition in which well-intentioned decision-makers produce catastrophic consequences for populations from whom they are geographically, temporally, and epistemically insulated — not the corruption of bad people but the moral condition of the system itself.
The higher immorality is Mills's name for the systematic irresponsibility that characterizes a social order in which the people who make the most consequential decisions are institutionally insulated from their consequences. The factory owner who closed the plant did not watch the town die. The general who ordered the bombing did not walk through the rubble. The insulation was not accidental but architectural — built into the institutional structure and reproducing regardless of the character of the individuals operating within it. The AI transition has produced a higher immorality of unprecedented scope: decisions affecting billions are made by a few hundred people whose professional, geographic, and epistemic separation from the affected populations is architectural, not personal.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanisms of insulation are four and they operate simultaneously. Geographic separation places decision-makers in San Francisco and Seattle while consequences unfold in Trivandrum, Lagos, Dhaka, and thousands of other sites