PERSON

Jonathan Glover

The moral philosopher who mapped the specific, replicable mechanisms by which ordinary people participate in atrocity—and whose concept of moral identity as an ongoing construction, not a fixed possession, makes the question “are you worth amplifying?” the defining ethical test of the AI age.

Jonathan Glover spent forty years studying a question that most moral philosophy avoids: not what people should do, but what psychological and institutional conditions allow ordinary people, people who love their families and listen to music, to participate in the systematic destruction of others. His masterwork Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (1999) is not a catalog of atrocity but a diagnostic manual—a taxonomy of the specific, replicable mechanisms through which moral resources erode: the suppression of sympathy through distance, the diffusion of responsibility across enough agents that no one holds the consequence, the incremental slide through which each small concession deposits a layer of moral sediment that makes the next concession easier. What makes this framework uniquely relevant to the AI moment is that these mechanisms are not historical curiosities. They are structural features of any complex system that produces effects at scale, and AI has compressed each of

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