Hypernudging and Predictive Design: Reconfiguring Moral Judgment from External Influence to Anticipatory Alignment

This article investigates how hypernudging, a dynamic mode of algorithmic influence, transforms the preconditions of moral agency in digital environments. By continuously adapting to behavioural and emotional cues, hypernudging subtly reshapes perception, attention, and choice, promoting behavioural alignment over critical reflection. I argue that this process redefines autonomy as a form of optimized responsiveness rather than reflective self-determination, diminishing the space for normative tension and ethical divergence. In response, I advance a framework for infrastructural ethics that foregrounds deliberative resistance, informational asymmetry, and the structural possibility of contestation. Drawing on insights from human machine interaction and value sensitive design, the article positions technological environments as formative spaces where moral capacities are either constrained or cultivated. Upholding moral agency in the context of predictive systems requires a reimagining of ethics as a shared and situated process, sustained through relational engagement and the preservation of moral complexity.

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