This paper proposes that morality functions not as a fixed ethical constant, but as a socially transmissible phenomenon subject to dilution, decay, and collapse — analogous to an epidemiological process within large populations. As civilisation scales, moral responsibility fragments. Individual ethical agency becomes statistically negligible, absorbed into institutional structures, bureaucratic abstraction, and technological mediation. The result is not the sudden disappearance of morality, but its progressive thinning: a moral load spread so widely that it loses functional mass. War, mass governance, and industrialised violence are examined as expressions of moral diffusion — where accountability dissolves into systems, procedures, and chains of command, enabling atrocities without identifiable perpetrators. The paper argues that modern power structures do not merely permit moral erosion; they structurally require it. The analysis further explores how technological acceleration outpaces moral development, producing an imbalance in which capacity for harm scales faster than capacity for ethical regulation. This asymmetry transforms human life into expendable statistical mass, while emotional and moral weight is displaced into spectacle, ideology, and narrative control. Drawing on concepts of moral contagion, social dilution, and ethical entropy, the paper frames contemporary civilisation as undergoing a slow moral pandemic — one characterised not by malice, but by structural indifference. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, this work aims to formalise the diagnosis: that morality, untreated and unmanaged, does not naturally persist at civilisational scale. It degrades. The paper concludes that without conscious, structural counterweights, modern societies will continue to convert human suffering into abstract mass, rendering ethical collapse not a failure of individuals, but an emergent property of large systems.
Samuel James Willoughby (Fri,) studied this question.