Judgment Cannot Be Delegated: A Subject-Preserving Framework for AI Governance

Abstract

Contemporary institutions increasingly treat optimised procedures as decisions in their own right. This article advances an ontological limit claim for AI governance: moral judgment is constitutively personal and therefore non-delegable. Building on a minimal philosophical anthropology — five axioms drawn from the Western tradition (person/thing distinction, irreducibility of phronesis, the person as an end, responsibility as constitutive, and the capacity to initiate) — we argue that algorithmic assistance can legitimately expand human deliberation, whereas delegation dissolves the very subject who judges. We situate the claim within current debates on artificial agency and Meaningful Human Control (MHC), and show how a subject-preserving reading supplements tracking/tracing by specifying what must remain human in dignity-touching domains. Two diagnostic cases — criminal-justice risk scoring and AI-steered coverage decisions in healthcare — illustrate a structural tendency to displace judgment by optimisation. From our axioms we derive governance theorems for non-delegability, contestability, reversibility, and subsidiarity, and we identify education as the decisive site where societies either cultivate persons capable of judgment or produce specialised agents optimised for systems. The result is a framework that welcomes instrumental progress while marking a principled boundary: systems may optimise for us; they may not judge instead of us. This article is the first in a triptych on AI and personhood. The foundational manifesto is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18650485.

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