CONCEPT
Moral Injury (Alford)
The specific wound to conscience — distinct from PTSD — inflicted when a person participates in, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that violate her moral beliefs. The injury the AI transition is producing in builders, users, and bystanders who see costs they cannot fully refuse.
Developed by Jonathan Shay in his work with Vietnam veterans and extended by Alford into organizational contexts, moral injury names a conscience-based wound categorically different from fear-based trauma. PTSD is produced by what was done to you; moral injury is produced by what you did or failed to do. You On AI's confession of building addictive products whose downstream harms became visible only later is, in Alford's framework, a textbook case of moral injury. The AI transition generates moral injury at scale: among builders who know what they are amplifying, among users who know the cost of their dependence, among bystanders who saw a colleague destroyed for testifying and chose not to intervene.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Shay's original work showed that Vietnam veterans suffered a form of lasting psychological damage that standard PTSD diagnoses could not capture — damage that tracked not