Title: Epistemic Infrastructure and Moral Agency: How Digital Architectures Reshape the Conditions for Responsible Action
Dissertation Abstract: This project examines how moral agency is transformed when digital epistemic infrastructure is systematically shaped by platform design to serve ends other than truth and responsible deliberation. Rather than framing moral agency as an internal achievement of the individual, this study defines it relationally as an achievement that emerges from the interaction between individual capabilities and enabling environmental conditions. This agency relies on three interdependent capacities: the cognitive capacity to identify morally relevant features, the deliberative capacity to weigh competing considerations, and the control capacity to act on sound judgments, all of which depend on technological, institutional, and social systems to function.
Drawing on empirical research, the project demonstrates how mechanisms like algorithmic amplification, echo chambers, and identity-protective cognition erode these capacities, even in virtuous agents. To better illustrate this, consider a single agent placed in two different conditions: first, embedded in a transparent, fact-checked environment where the scaffolding for moral agency remains intact; and second, placed in an algorithmically distorted filter bubble. In the second situation, exercising virtue becomes more difficult, not because the individual has lost virtue, but because the structural conditions required to exercise it have been compromised. Methodologically, the study combines conceptual clarification, normative argument, and case study analysis of digitally mediated moral failure. Ultimately, it develops a taxonomy of agency-defeating environments, examines how epistemic virtues depend on external scaffolding to be effectively exercised, and proposes a nuanced, multi-level framework for assessing moral responsibility alongside the normative responsibilities of platform designers.