✶ Affective Governance: AI, Moral Non-Realism, and the Affective-Value Balancing Model

This paper argues that artificial intelligence may become an influential factor in a cultural movement away from belief in objective morality and toward practical forms of moral non-realism. The claim is not that AI will settle metaethics or demonstrate the falsity of moral realism. Rather, AI is likely to change the public conditions under which moral realism feels plausible, necessary, and socially useful. It will do so by stress-testing claimed objective moral systems, making value pluralism more visible, exposing the psychological dynamics through which humans reify real values and emotions into alleged moral facts, and demonstrating that social coordination can often be achieved through negotiated compromise rather than shared metaphysical commitment. The paper proposes an Affective-Value Balancing Model (AVBM) for post-realist value coordination. The model treats moral claims as compressed expressions of emotionally charged values, empirical beliefs, identity commitments, social expectations, and proposed norms. AI systems can help decompose these claims, identify conflicts and overlaps, model tradeoffs, expose hidden assumptions, and generate candidate settlements among agents who do not share a moral ontology. The model does not ask AI to discover moral truth. It asks AI to assist humans in balancing real, affectively grounded values under conditions of pluralism, vulnerability, institutional constraint, and mutual dependence. The paper also proposes a Societal Moral-Realism Displacement Model (SMRDM), which identifies the factors that may contribute to a cultural shift away from moral realist schools of thought. These factors include comparative stress-testing, psychological de-reification, pluralism exposure, alignment debates, institutional adoption of AI mediation, declining confidence in inherited moral authorities, increased tolerance for procedural compromise, and public recognition of value-laden emotions as human constructions. The model also includes countervailing forces, including religious revival, nationalist absolutization, distrust of AI, algorithmic manipulation, moral realist counter-use of AI, and public backlash against technocratic governance.