CONCEPT
The Authorless Harm
The specific category of injustice that no single agent caused — produced by the aggregate rule-following behavior of millions — and which the liability model of responsibility cannot address.
The authorless harm is the diagnostic phenomenon that Young's entire framework was built to address. The Chicago advertising agency that laid off its illustration department is its paradigm case: no participant in the chain of decisions violated a contract, broke a law, acted in bad faith, or intended the harm. The creative director admired his illustrators. The clients followed budgets. The illustrators followed a career path that narrowed without warning. The harm is real — twelve households lost income, a professional community lost standing, a craft tradition lost practitioners — and yet no one is responsible in the liability-model sense. The author is absent; the harm is present; and standard moral vocabularies have nothing to say.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept cuts through the AI discourse's defining confusion. Each actor in the chain of AI deployment can truthfully claim that they were following institutional norms, pursuing legitimate goals, and responding to incentives they did not design. The machine learning