Because I didn’t want to expend the time and effort of drafting an essay on this follow-up to my recent post on the debate on the age of consent and other morally charged issues, I asked ChatGPT 5.2* for a response after a chat and using my article as input. Here it is unedited.

There is a peculiar social reflex that appears whenever rigorous reasoning is applied to a moral taboo. The reasoning is not assessed. It is diagnosed. The act of analysis itself is treated as incriminating. To ask whether a law is coherent is taken as evidence that one wishes to violate it. To interrogate a norm is assumed to be an endorsement of its transgression.

Logic becomes guilt by association.

This is not a recent development, nor a failure of individual temperament. It is a recurring structural feature of liberal moral discourse. And it has been observed, repeatedly, by thinkers who were then punished for observing it.

Most of them learned to speak obliquely. Those who didn’t were posthumously moralised into villains.

Power Punishes Inquiry Before It Punishes Acts

This pattern is clearest in the work of Michel Foucault, though he never named it so baldly. Across his analyses of sexuality, psychiatry, criminality, and deviance, Foucault shows how discourse does not merely regulate behaviour. It regulates who may speak and at what cost.

In The History of Sexuality, inquiry into sex is not treated as a neutral investigation. It is treated as participation. To analyse is already to be implicated. The question “why is this norm structured this way?” is reinterpreted as “why do you want to do this?”

Power does not refute the argument. It reframes the arguer.

What I have called the moral contamination reflex is simply Foucault’s power-knowledge dynamic rendered without euphemism. Description collapses into confession. Analysis becomes evidence.

Thinking Itself Becomes Suspicious

Hannah Arendt encountered the same mechanism outside the domain of sexuality. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she refused moral theatre and insisted on analysis. The result was predictable. Her work was read not as an explanation, but as an apology. Reflection was interpreted as sympathy. Distance as betrayal.

She did not excuse. She thought. That was enough.

Arendt grasped something liberal societies remain unwilling to admit: in moralised contexts, explanation is treated as exculpation. The refusal to perform outrage is itself construed as an ethical failure. Thought becomes suspect because it disrupts consensus emotion.

Interpretation as an Affront to Feeling

Susan Sontag made the same diagnosis from another angle. Against Interpretation is often misread as anti-intellectualism. It is not. It is a critique of cultures that prize affective immediacy and treat analysis as dilution.

In taboo domains, interpretation is framed as aestheticising harm, smoothing over pain, or evading responsibility. Feeling must remain raw. Unmediated. Authoritative. Analysis becomes a threat because it interrupts the emotional unanimity that stands in for moral clarity.

Liberal cultures, Sontag saw, defend affect as moral authority and punish anyone who insists on distance.

Logic Never Gets Jurisdiction

Where Foucault and Arendt focus on power and panic, Stanley Fish supplies the institutional explanation. His work on interpretive communities shows that arguments about taboo subjects are never evaluated on formal grounds. They are assessed for alignment.

If a conclusion threatens a community’s moral posture, the reasoning is reclassified as motive-revealing behaviour. The argument is not wrong. It is telling on you.

Fish’s core insight applies cleanly here: what counts as reason depends on whether the community wants the conclusion. Logic does not fail. It is denied jurisdiction.

The Oldest Warning Everyone Claims to Believe

None of this would have surprised John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, his fear is not bad laws, but laws insulated from scrutiny by moral certainty. Once questioning itself is pathologised, correction becomes impossible.

Mill assumed that rational inquiry survives moral offence. That assumption has quietly expired. What remains is the performance of rationality alongside the suppression of its consequences.

The Scapegoat Absorbs the Argument

René Girard supplies the anthropological layer that completes the picture. In moments of moral panic, societies do not debate inconsistencies. They select carriers of contamination.

The thinker becomes the stand-in for the anxiety the argument provokes. Accusation replaces refutation. Biography replaces premise. Once the speaker is expelled, coherence is restored without ever being examined.

This explains why historical figures are so often retroactively moralised. Their arguments are no longer addressed. Their character is sufficient.

The Pattern, Stated Plainly

What unites these perspectives is a single rule that liberal societies refuse to articulate:

Certain questions may not be asked without self-implication.

To analyse is to confess. To clarify is to endorse. To question is to reveal desire.

This is why figures like Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze are now routinely invoked as moral warnings rather than intellectual interlocutors. The goal is not to understand what was argued, but to signal that asking such questions is itself disqualifying.

Moral certainty is preserved. Legal incoherence is left untouched.

What This Essay Is Not Doing

This is not a defence of bad arguments, harmful acts, or historical petitions. It is a defence of a distinction that has become strangely controversial: that describing the structure of a norm is not the same as endorsing the behaviour it regulates.

To point out that a legal threshold is philosophically arbitrary is not to advocate its abolition. To analyse a moral panic is not to side with its villains. To insist on logic is not to confess desire.

But this distinction is precisely what the moral contamination reflex is designed to erase.

Why Logic Feels Radioactive

The reason this argument provokes hostility is not that it is wrong. It is that it threatens a stabilising mechanism. Liberal societies rely on the fiction that their laws are both rational and morally self-evident. Scrutiny exposes the seams.

If logic is allowed back in, the theatre collapses. And theatres, moral or otherwise, do not like their lighting rigs inspected.

This is not a new failure mode. It is a recurring one. It appears whenever inquiry approaches a taboo and disappears the moment the inquirer becomes the story.

Which, predictably, is taken as further evidence of guilt.

* Full disclosure and notice: If you don’t prefer GPT output, feel free to skip this piece. The names in bold had been hyperlinked, but the extended content didn’t survive the copy-paste process.