Figure 1.
The conceptual flow diagram begins with risk amplifiers: automaticity, irreversibility, scale, opacity, and power asymmetry through dependency or retaliation. These amplify the shift towards deficit. Entrepreneurial conditions comprise moralised speed, concentrated decision authority, and informal governance. These conditions lead to a technology-enabled register shift from deliberative to executable register, where contestation becomes progressively more costly. This leads to an ethical friction deficit, defined as a gap between ethically required and actually available pre-execution contestability. Four diagnostic manifestations are identified: Decision, with no interval to question; Accountability, with no one answers; Data, with provenance unquestioned; and Dissent, with objection discouraged. Decision and Accountability connect to designed ethical friction mechanisms of pause points and accountability mapping, while Data and Dissent connect to data origin review and challenge rights or protection. Designed ethical friction uses default exposure thresholds for irreversibility, scale, and automaticity and is effective only with authority to suspend or revise. The ethical friction deficit leads to ethical governance failure, comprising loss of answerability, premature closure, accountability gaps, stakeholder harm, and legitimacy loss. The key identifies core mechanisms, amplifiers, constructs and diagnostic manifestations, corrective mechanisms, consequences, conditional causal pathways, amplifying influences, and links from manifestations to matching mechanisms. Each pathway represents a tendency rather than determinism. Power spans the model through concentrated authority as an antecedent, dependency or retaliation as an amplifier, and suspension or revision authority as an efficacy condition.Conceptual model of the ethical friction deficit
Source: Author’s own work