CONCEPT

Moral Self-Construction

Glover’s insight that the self is not a fixed entity that then acts morally or immorally, but a self that is built through the accumulated choices one makes—each choice depositing a layer of moral sediment that shapes the kind of self available to make the next choice.

The most important contribution Jonathan Glover makes to the ethics of building is the refusal of a distinction that most moral philosophy takes for granted: the distinction between the self that has moral commitments and the actions that express or violate them. For Glover, this ordering is wrong. The self is not prior to its actions, waiting to be expressed or betrayed by them. The self is constructed through them. Every choice—every decision about whether to pause and encounter the person affected by one’s work, whether to accept the AI’s output without examination or to sit with the friction of articulating one’s actual view, whether to ship the engagement loop or to ask what it will do to the thirteen-year-old on the other end—deposits a layer of moral sediment that becomes the substrate on which the next choice is made. Moral self-construction is ongoing and cumulative, invisible in any

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