CONCEPT
Ethics Washing
Metzinger’s term for the performance of moral concern as a substitute for, and a shield against, actual moral constraint—the production of ethics guidelines engineered to look serious while binding no one, coined from his experience inside the European Commission’s AI ethics process.
Ethics washing is what happens when the institutions meant to constrain a technology are captured by the industry they were supposed to govern, and the result—the ethics board, the principles document, the voluntary commitment—becomes not a limit on harmful practice but a legitimating cover for it.
Thomas Metzinger coined the term by analogy to greenwashing—the performance of environmental concern as a substitute for environmental action—and grounded it in direct observation. From 2018 to 2020 he served on the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, where he watched the language of red lines and non-negotiable principles systematically removed from official guidelines under industry pressure, and where the group charged with constraining AI was composed overwhelmingly of representatives from the industry it was meant to constrain. The final document contained no non-negotiable principles. Everything had become a matter of balance and trust. Mid-term and long-term risks—including the possible creation of
artificially suffering minds—were