CONCEPT
The Mediation Dilemma
The specifically absurd ethical condition produced when a technology does not merely present ethical problems but restructures the normative framework within which those problems must be evaluated—so that the judgment must be formed using tools that have already been altered by the object being judged.
The mediation dilemma names the specifically recursive ethical difficulty of the AI transition: the technology does not merely present new problems for existing moral frameworks to evaluate; it restructures the moral frameworks themselves. The ground shifts while we are trying to build on it. This is the condition that the 2025 Springer paper “An Absurdist Ethics of AI” identifies as making AI uniquely resistant to standard ethical analysis—not because AI is uniquely complex but because it restructures the normative order at the same speed at which it presents problems for that order to resolve. The practitioner who must decide whether a particular AI deployment is ethical must make that judgment in a context where the deployment has already altered the criteria by which such judgments are normally made. The Hirschman response to this condition is precisely possibilist: not the resolution of the dilemma but the discipline for navigating it. Camus’s response
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