Malaises of Modernity

In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Taylor identifies three sources of worry about the trajectory of modern Western civilization that are not mere complaints about change but genuine moral concerns grounded in the structure of the modern moral framework itself. The first is the loss of meaning that accompanies radical individualism. The second is the eclipse of ends by instrumental reason — the tendency to treat everything as a means and nothing as an end in itself. The third is the loss of political freedom through what Tocqueville called soft despotism — a form of unfreedom operating through the erosion of the capacity for self-governance. The Taylor volume on AI argues that each malaise is not merely continued but amplified to a degree that transforms it from background condition to acute existential crisis.