The Carl Jean Journal

  The Diffusion of Responsibility: Moral Latency and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Carl Jean Abstract This essay examines how artificial intelligence transforms moral responsibility by redistributing decision-making across complex socio-technical systems. It introduces the concept of moral latency , defined as the diffusion, delay, and weakening of accountability within AI-mediated processes. Drawing on Kantian ethics, Arendtian political theory, and contemporary AI governance scholarship, the essay argues that responsibility increasingly fails to arrive where decisions take effect. While some argue that AI reveals the inherently collective nature of responsibility, this essay contends that accountability must remain actionable to be meaningful. It proposes an ethical threshold at which systems cease to assist human judgment and begin to displace it. The essay concludes that artificial intelligence is ethically legitimate only when responsibility remains enforceable—capabl...

  Note to the Reader If writing is one of the primary conditions under which thinking is formed, then the most urgent question in the age of artificial intelligence is not whether students will continue to produce writing, but who will ensure that writing still requires thought. Artificial intelligence does not abolish language; it detaches language from the labor that once made it cognitively formative, creating a condition in which expression can exist without the sustained effort that gives it intellectual substance. A student can now generate a paragraph that appears complete, structurally coherent, and rhetorically persuasive without ever having undergone the uncertainty, revision, and judgment that would normally produce such writing. The sentence is present, but the thinking is not necessarily so, and that distinction alters the meaning of learning itself. What appears to be understanding may instead be the simulation of understanding’s visible outcomes, a performance of coh...