Attempts to apply moral brakes seem to have failed, why?

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very rich and difficult question — and one that goes to the heart of modernity itself.
The failure of the “moral brakes” (the Kantian, deontological, or even communitarian restraints on acceleration) can be traced through several overlapping dimensions: structural, cultural, and philosophical.
Below is an integrated account that connects the historical with the conceptual.

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Why the Moral Brakes Failed

1. Structural acceleration: the system outpaced the subject

The first and most obvious reason is that the machinery of modern life accelerates faster than moral reasoning can adapt.
Technological innovation, financialization, and global communication create feedback loops of ever-increasing speed and complexity.

In such a system:

• Consequences outstrip foresight (AI, climate change, biotechnology).

• Decision-making becomes reactive and instrumental, not reflective.

• Ethics becomes crisis management, not first philosophy.

The Kantian or Rawlsian moral subject presupposes a world where rational agents can deliberate within stable conditions. That world no longer exists.
The subject that would apply the brake has been displaced by systems that have no brakes — automated, algorithmic, or market-driven systems whose imperatives are growth, efficiency, and optimization.

In this sense, the “failure” is less moral weakness than structural impotence: there is no longer a coherent moral agent with the capacity to act at the relevant scale or speed.

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2. The market’s moral colonization

Sandel himself points to this in What Money Can’t Buy: the utilitarian logic of markets has not just infiltrated the economy but redefined the moral landscape.
Once everything—from education to healthcare to intimacy—can be priced, all values are expressed in a single unit: money.

This colonization is devastating for moral brakes, because:

• Markets translate qualitative goods into quantitative exchange.

• Calculation replaces deliberation.

• Cost-benefit reasoning substitutes for justice.

The Kantian warning—never treat persons merely as means—has been reinterpreted as an inefficiency problem, not a moral one.
The result: even moral limits are valued in utilitarian terms (“human rights are good for productivity,” “ethical business attracts customers”).
When the brake itself becomes part of the market mechanism, braking no longer slows anything down.

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3. The fragmentation of moral authority

Kantian ethics presumes a shared rational structure of obligation—that people can, in principle, converge on the moral law.
But pluralism, postmodernism, and cultural fragmentation have eroded that shared ground.
Today, there is no single, authoritative discourse of the good: moral reasoning competes with lifestyle preference, identity politics, or technological determinism.

Without shared norms, the moral brake becomes subjective—a matter of taste, not of duty.
Everyone has their own version of what it means to “slow down,” and acceleration continues unimpeded.

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4. The inversion of moral prestige

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, restraint, moderation, and self-limitation were considered virtues.
Today, speed and disruption are moralized—they signify progress, courage, and innovation.
To brake is to be seen as fearful, nostalgic, or reactionary.

This reversal of prestige has philosophical roots:
Nietzsche’s critique of Kantian morality as life-denying, combined with the techno-scientific valorization of mastery and overcoming, made acceleration itself appear moral.
Even left-wing movements now often define themselves through disruption rather than the cultivation of limits.

Thus the brake is no longer just neglected; it is suspect.

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5. The failure of mediation and the rise of immediacy

Here we reach a more metaphysical diagnosis:
Modernity increasingly seeks unmediated connection—between desire and fulfillment, production and consumption, perception and reaction.
Technological systems and social media are structured to remove friction.

Kantian ethics, by contrast, is a philosophy of mediation:
the will mediates between inclination and law; duty mediates between self and other.
When mediation itself is eroded—when the immediate becomes the ideal—then the very possibility of braking disappears.
The moral law is too slow, too deliberative, for the tempo of our world.

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6. The privatization of conscience

Rawls hoped that just institutions could express our shared sense of justice. But neoliberalism privatized moral responsibility: each individual must optimize their own life within given constraints.
The public sphere, where moral brakes might once have been collectively applied, has been hollowed out.
Instead, we get personal ethics of consumption (recycling, veganism, self-care) that substitute for structural restraint.

The result: moral feeling remains, but without leverage—it cannot alter the machinery that produces the acceleration.

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7. The collapse of futurity

Kant and Rawls both assume that morality is future-oriented—that rational beings plan for the long term.
But late modernity operates on short-term horizons: quarterly reports, news cycles, dopamine loops.
The moral brake requires a temporal distance from action; acceleration collapses that distance.
Everything must happen now, and “now” is no place for deliberation.

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8. In sum

The moral brakes failed not because the ideas were wrong, but because:

• The systems of modernity (markets, media, technologies) reward acceleration.

• The institutions of reflection (philosophy, politics, education) lost authority.

• The moral subject itself has been dispersed into networks of incentive and affect.

The result is what Paul Virilio called “dromocratic” society—a civilization governed by speed as its own end.

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9. The paradox

We have never been more aware of the need to slow down—climate collapse, burnout, the politics of exhaustion—and yet our tools of deceleration have never been weaker.
The Kantian and Rawlsian models assumed that reflection could master motion; what we face now is motion that consumes reflection itself.

The accelerator no longer needs a driver.
The brake has no purchase on the surface it tries to grip.