CONCEPT
Moral Friction
The specific psychological discomfort — the resistance of a value against a proposed action — that signals a conflict between what the agent is doing and what the agent believes, and whose preservation is the operational condition of moral identity.
Moral friction is not a metaphor. It is a specific psychological event: the tightening in the chest before the ship decision, the hesitation before the approval click, the uncomfortable flicker that surfaces when the tool's fluent output does not match one's uncertain conviction. The friction is unpleasant. That is its function. It marks the moments where moral identity is being tested and where the test can be honored or overridden. Honored repeatedly, the friction strengthens the muscles that produced it. Overridden repeatedly, the friction weakens until it stops firing at all. Glover's career was a study of what happens to institutions and individuals when moral friction is systematically suppressed. His framework, applied to the AI moment, identifies a new form of suppression: not the coercion that eliminated friction in totalitarian regimes but the convenience that eliminates it in the smooth workflow of AI-assisted production. The mechanism is different; the consequence — atrophy of the muscle that makes
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