The Numbing of Empathy

Vetlesen's analysis of collective evildoing identified the specific mechanisms by which moral perception is attenuated: bureaucratic distance, ideological framing, the diffusion of responsibility through institutional structures. The agent does not feel the weight of what she is doing because the systems in which she operates have been designed to eliminate the friction of moral perception. The structural — not moral — parallel to AI-mediated cognition is philosophically significant. Both cases involve systems optimized for efficiency that achieve that efficiency in part by eliminating the phenomenological friction through which morally important information is perceived.