The Ethics of Misplacement: Why AI Ethics Keeps Assigning Moral Responsibility to the Wrong Object

Conceptual working paper on moral attribution and responsibility placement in contemporary AI discourse. This paper argues that much of contemporary AI ethics rests on a structural misplacement of moral focus. Large language models are frequently treated as though they were quasi-human moral actors, while the human and institutional arrangements shaping their behavior become harder to see. The paper distinguishes among causal involvement, moral agency, operational responsibility, and institutional failure, and argues that these layers are often collapsed into simplified public narratives. Rather than treating AI ethics primarily as a problem of constraining artificial moral agents, this paper reframes it as a problem of tracing and structuring responsibility within human socio-technical systems. Preprint / not peer reviewed. Working draft, March 2026. This paper is conceptual rather than empirical. It proposes an interpretive framework for analyzing the structural misplacement of moral attribution in AI discourse.