Structural Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Applying Psychological Architecture to the design and governance of intelligent systems.
This series applies Psychological Architecture to the ethics of artificial intelligence. It begins from a gap in the existing field: the principles that govern AI, fairness, transparency, accountability, name what systems should not do to people, but carry no account of the human structure those principles are meant to protect. This series supplies that structure. Each essay takes a question in AI ethics and examines what a system acting in that area does to the structured interior across all four domains of Psychological Architecture, Mind, Emotion, Identity, and Meaning, then moves from that structure to the design obligation that follows. The work is prescriptive rather than diagnostic, written for those who build, govern, and evaluate these systems. The series is ongoing.
Series Introduction & Anchor
AI ethics evaluates systems: whether their behavior is fair, transparent, accountable, and safe. What it does not evaluate is the structured interior of the person the system acts upon, the architecture through which meaning, identity, emotion, and attention hold.
This essay names that gap and introduces Structural Ethics: the claim that there are two objects of ethical evaluation, the system and the person, and that a design review adequate to what is at stake must assess both. As the anchor of the series, it sets the terms every later essay uses.
The Interior the Principles Protect: Structural Psychology as the Missing Substrate of AI Ethics
Contemporary AI ethics evaluates systems: whether their behavior is fair, transparent, accountable, and safe. It does not evaluate the structured interior of the person the system acts upon, the architecture through which meaning is formed, identity stabilizes, emotion is regulated, and attention is sustained. Structural Ethics supplies the missing layer, holding that there are two objects of evaluation, not one, and that a design review adequate to what is at stake must assess both.