Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)
Modernityās most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Queteletās statistical conjuring trick ā lāhomme moyen, the āaverage manā āand ending in our age of wearable psychometrics and algorithmic empathy, it traces how normality became both the instrument and the idol of Western governance.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this essay.
Along the way it dissects:
The arithmetic imagination that turned virtue into a mean value.
Psychologyā¢ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
Critical theoryās recursion, where resistance becomes a management style.
The palliative society, in which every emotion is tracked, graphed, and monetised.
Audio: ElevenLabs reading of the whole essay (minus citations, references, and metacontent). NB: The audio is split into chapters on Spotify to facilitate reading in sections.
What begins as a genealogy of statistics ends as an autopsy of care. The normal is revealed not as a condition, but as an administrative fantasy ā the stateās dream of perfect legibility. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal of wholeness, a discipline of remaining unsynthesised.
Lucidity, not liberation, may be the only virtue left to us ā knowing the apparatus intimately enough to refuse its metaphysics while continuing to breathe within it.
The Myth of Homo Normalis is the sixth instalment in the Anti-Enlightenment Project, joining Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together they map the slow disassembly of reasonās empire ā from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.
Read or cite: š Zenodo DOI š PhilArchive page ā forthcoming link
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason ā that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity ā the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say āI choseā was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed ā not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness ā a systemās fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call āfreedomā is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of āfreeā and āunfree.ā There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales ā widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not āWho is to blame?ā but āWhere did the circuit break?ā
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth ā a physics of care.
Itās an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics ā one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. Itās realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process ā bodies, institutions, meanings ā held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project ā Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre ā insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project Iāve begun ā call it my anti-Enlightenment collection ā is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the essay underlying this post.
This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenmentās misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenmentās poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment ā a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.
It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism ā our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.
Why a Collection?
Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenmentās hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenmentās bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism ā or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.
Ghost by Ghost
Rational Ghosts ā Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcetās paradox, Arrowās impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
Temporal Ghosts ā The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenmentās “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.
There may be more hauntings to come ā economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests theyāll linger through DĆa de Muertos and Halloweāen; after that, who knows whether theyāll still materialise on the page.
At some point in history ā some smoke-filled Enlightenment salon, some powdered wig convention ā someone floated the idea that when opinions differ, the “fairest” way forward is to count hands and let the larger number win. On the surface, it feels intuitive. If ten want tea and nine want coffee, surely the tea-drinkers deserve their kettle.
But the trick lies in the numbers. By this logic, 49% of the people get exactly what they did not want, and their consolation prize is the promise of “next time”. What passes as fairness is simply coercion with polite manners.
The problem is structural:
Majority ā Mandate. A slim majority is just a statistical accident elevated into divine authority.
Minorities Lose by Default. If you belong to a permanent minority ā ethnic, cultural, ideological āyou may never taste victory, yet youāre still bound to abide by everyone elseās āconsensus.ā
Abstainers Become Scapegoats. When two candidates split a third of the population each and the rest sit out, the āwinnerā is crowned with less than half the electorate behind them. The abstainers are then blamed for ānot preventingā the outcome, as though voting for a candidate they disliked would have saved them.
Why did this formula gain traction? Because it looked neat. It gave the appearance of fairness, a clean heuristic: count, declare, move on. Like democracy itself, it was born of Enlightenment rationalismās obsession with rules, numbers, and abstraction. The premise was that humans are rational agents, and rational agents could submit to a rational procedure. The reality: humans are messy, tribal, irrational.
Majority rule became a ritual of laundering domination into legitimacy. “The people have spoken” is the priestly incantation, even if two-thirds of the people didnāt.
If we strip the veneer, what remains is not fairness but a convenient shortcut ā one that was accepted, then sanctified, because it seemed better than monarchy and cheaper than perpetual stalemate. And so weāve been living under the ghost of that decision ever since, confusing arithmetic with justice.
In celestial mechanics, the three-body problem is notorious. Give Newton two bodies ā a planet and a sun ā and the equations sing. Add a third, and the song collapses into noise. No general solution exists. Even the smallest nudge in one orbit cascades unpredictably through the system.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Now swap out planets for people. Not three, but millions. Each voter tugging with their own gravity ā preferences, fears, biases, identities, the entire mess of human subjectivity. Democracy insists that by tallying these forces, weāll arrive at something stable: the will of the people. But what we actually get is the millions-body problem: unstable coalitions, contradictory mandates, endlessly shifting orbits.
almost any outcome can be engineered by manipulating the order of votes
Condorcetās Dilemma
The French mathematician Marquis de Condorcet spotted this flaw in the 18th century. His paradox showed that even if every individual voter ranks choices rationally, the group as a whole may not. Collective preferences can loop in circles: A beats B, B beats C, C beats A. Itās not dysfunction; itās baked into the math.
Later, political scientists proved the paradox was only the beginning. McKelveyās āchaos theoremā demonstrated that in a system with three or more options, almost any outcome can be engineered by manipulating the order of votes. In other words, democratic choice is not stable; itās sensitive to framing, sequence, and agenda control.
Condorcet was brilliant enough to see the cracks, but like his Enlightenment peers, he decided that the fiction of order was preferable to the reality of chaos. Better to promise tidy majorities than to admit that majority rule is structurally incoherent.
majority rule a ritual of laundered coercion
The Tidy Lie
Why did majority rule catch on? Because it looked fair, even if speciously so. It gave the appearance of impartiality: count, declare, move on. It was simple enough to administer, and more palatable than monarchy or deadlock.
But neatness is not truth. If 51% of people vote for one candidate, 49% are compelled to live under a government they explicitly rejected. If a third of the population abstains altogether, the āwinnerā might rule with the backing of barely one-third of the country ā yet claim a mandate.
This is what makes majority rule a ritual of laundered coercion. The losers are told, ānext time you might win,ā even though whole minorities may never win. Abstainers are scapegoated for outcomes they opposed. And everyone is asked to keep pretending that arithmetic equals legitimacy.
Like the three-body problem, democracy has no general solution.
The Millions-Body Orbit
Elections give us final numbers ā 34% here, 33% there ā and we mistake them for laws of motion, as if the cosmos has spoken. But what weāre really seeing is a freeze-frame of chaos. The actual trajectories ā coalitions, grievances, shifting identities ā continue to wobble beneath the surface.
Like the three-body problem, democracy has no general solution. It isnāt clockwork; itās turbulence. The miracle is not that it works, but that we pretend it does. Every āmandateā is a temporary illusion, a centre of gravity that exists only until the next disturbance knocks it off course.
And yet, the illusion persists. Because without it, the truth is unbearable: that there is no singular āwill of the people,ā only the millions-body problem, endlessly unstable, masked by the ritual of counting hands.
We are governed by phantoms. Not the fun kind that rattle chains in castles, but Enlightenment rational ghosts ā imaginary citizens who were supposed to be dispassionate, consistent, and perfectly informed. They never lived, but they still haunt our constitutions and television pundits. Every time some talking head declares “the people have spoken”, what they really mean is that the ghosts are back on stage.
The conceit was simple: build politics as if it were an engineering problem. Set the rules right, and stability follows. The trouble is that the material ā actual people ā wasnāt blueprint-friendly. Madison admitted faction was “sown in the nature of man”, Rousseau agonised over the “general will”, and Condorcet managed to trip over his own math. They saw the cracks even while laying the foundation. Then they shrugged and built anyway.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The rational ghosts were tidy. Real humans are not. Our brains run on shortcuts: motivated reasoning, availability cascades, confirmation bias, DunningāKruger. We donāt deliberate; we improvise excuses. Education doesnāt fix it ā it just arms us with better rationalisations. Media doesnāt fix it either ā it corrals our biases into profitable outrage. The Enlightenment drafted for angels; what it got was apes with smartphones.
Even if the ghosts had shown up, the math betrayed them. Arrow proved that no voting system can translate preferences without distortion. McKelvey showed that whoever controls the sequence of votes controls the outcome. The “will of the people” is less an oracle than a Ouija board, and you can always see whose hand is pushing the planchette.
Scale finishes the job. Dunbar gave us 150 people as the human limit of meaningful community. Beyond that, trust decays into myth. Benedict Anderson called nations “imagined communities”, but social media has shattered the illusion. The national conversation is now a million algorithmic Dunbars, each convinced they alone are the real people.
Audio: This is a longer (40-minute) NotebookLM podcast on the essay itself.
Why did democracy limp along for two centuries if it was this haunted? Because it was on life-support. Growth, war, and civic myth covered the cracks. External enemies, national rituals, and propaganda made dysfunction look like consensus. It wasnāt design; it was borrowed capital. That capital has run out.
Cue the panic. The defences roll in: Churchill said democracy was the “least bad” system (he didnāt, but whatever). Voters self-correct. Education will fix it. Itās only an American problem. And if you donāt like it, what ā authoritarianism? These are less arguments than incantations, muttered to keep the ghosts from noticing the creaks in the floorboards.
The real task isnāt to chant louder. Itās to stop pretending ghosts exist. Try subsidiarity: smaller-scale politics humans can actually grasp. Try deliberation: citizensā assemblies show ordinary people can think, when not reduced to a soundbite. Try sortition: if elections are distorted by design, maybe roll the dice instead. Try polycentric governance: let overlapping authorities handle mismatch instead of hammering “one will”. None of these are perfect. Theyāre just less haunted.
Enlightenment democracy was built to fail because it was built for rational ghosts. The ghosts never lived. The floorboards are creaking. The task is ours: build institutions for the living, before the house collapses under its own myths.
The Argument in Skeleton Form
Beneath the prose, the critique of Enlightenment democracy can be expressed as a syllogism: a foundation that assumed rational citizens collides with psychological bias, mathematical impossibility, and sociological limits. The outcome is a double failure ā corrupted inputs and incoherent outputs ā masked only by temporary props.
Figure: Logical skeleton of āRational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail.ā For the complete essay, with sources and elaboration, see the open-access preprint on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17250225
The fashionable complaint is that large language models ‘hallucinate’. They spit out confident nonsense: the tech pundits are scandalised. A chatbot invents a book, attributes it to Plato, and spins a dialogue about Quidditch. ‘Hallucination!’ they cry. Machines, it seems, are liars.
Spare me. Humans are the original hallucination engines. We fabricate categories, baptise them in blood, and call the result ‘truth’. At least the machine doesnāt pretend its fictions are eternal.
Take race and selfhood, our twin masterpieces of make-believe.
They carve boundaries out of fog. Race slices humanity into ‘Black’ and ‘White’. Selfhood cordons ‘I’ off from ‘you’. Arbitrary partitions, paraded as natural law.
Theyāre locked in by violence and paperwork. Race was stabilised by censuses, laws, and medical forms ā the same bureaucratic gears that powered slavery, eugenics, and apartheid. Selfhood was stabilised by diaries, court records, and psychiatric charts. Write it down often enough, and suddenly the fiction looks inevitable.
They make bodies manageable. Race sorts populations into hierarchies and facilitates exploitation. Selfhood sorts individuals for property, accountability, and punishment. Together, theyāre operating systems for social control.
They are fictions with teeth. Like money, they donāt need metaphysical foundations. They are real because people are willing to kill for them.
These hallucinations arenāt timeless. They were midwifed in the Enlightenment: anthropology provided us with racial typologies, the novel refined the autonomous self, and colonial administration ran the pilot projects. Theyāre not ancient truths ā theyāre modern software, installed at scale.
So when ethicists wring their hands over AI ‘hallucinations’, the joke writes itself. Machines hallucinate openly. Humans hallucinate and call it scripture, law, and identity. The only difference is centuries of institutional muscle behind our delusions.
And hereās the sting: what terrifies us isnāt that AI produces falsehoods. Itās that, given time, its inventions might start to look as solid as ours. Fifty years from now, people could be killing for an algorithmās hallucination the same way theyāve been killing for gods, races, and selves.
Radical Futures Studioās ā7 Signalsā deck has been circulating widely. Itās a striking example of Storytelling 101: identify a villain, chart the signs of its decline, and point toward an eventual resolution. In this case, the villain is white supremacy. The signs are its institutional and cultural fray. The resolution is its collapse.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As far as stories go, itās effective. It provides a framework, some memorable imagery, and the reassurance that the ugliness on display today is a death rattle, not a resurgence. No wonder it resonates. People want to believe the noise means the monster is dying.
Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask
But as analysis, the frame is too tight. Racism is not the root structure; it is a symptom, a mask. White supremacy is real enough in its effects, but its persistence and decline are contingent. The deeper system ā the scaffolding of late-stage capitalism, the Enlightenmentās brittle universalism, the institutions now staggering under their own contradictions ā remains the host. When whiteness peels away, the system does not vanish. It simply rebrands.
To point to the peeling paint and say ‘the house is collapsing’ is to mistake surface for structure. Yes, the paint matters; it shapes how people experience the walls. But the real rot lies deeper, in the beams. The Enlightenment project promised seamless cloth: rationality, universality, permanence. Capitalism promised endless expansion and renewal. Both promises are faltering, and the cracks are visible everywhere ā climate, finance, governance, identity. Racism, whiteness, supremacy: these are one set of cracks, not the foundation itself.
The risk of the ‘signals’ narrative is that it offers too neat a moral arc. It comforts the audience that the villain is cornered, that justice is baked into the future. But history is rarely so tidy. Supremacy does not die; it changes costumes. One mask slips, another is stitched on. If we mistake the collapse of whiteness for the collapse of the system, we blind ourselves to how easily the scaffolding survives in new guises.
Racism is a systemic lie
None of this is to reject the cause. Racism is a systemic lie, and its decline is worth cheering. But it is not enough to track the noise of its death rattle. To understand the larger story, we need to step back and see the woods for the trees. The true collapse underway is broader: the exhaustion of capitalismās last stage, the unravelling of Enlightenmentās promises, the loss of legitimacy in institutions that no longer hold. That is the forest in which the tree of whiteness withers.
If we focus only on the tree, we risk missing the landscape. And if we mistake peeling paint for the beams, we risk celebrating cosmetic decline while the house quietly reassembles itself under a different banner.
We live in an era where anyone can beam their thoughts into the ether at the push of a button. This would be a miracle if those thoughts werenāt so reliably idiotic. The internet promised democracy of speech; what it delivered was a landfill of charts no one understands, memes that spread faster than viruses, and the gnawing sense that humans are simply not rational enough to handle the privileges theyāve been given.
āDemocracy may trust everyone with a voice, but civilisation canāt survive everyone with a megaphone.ā
ā I just made this up – smh
The Enlightenment told us we were ārational animals,ā armed with Reason, the noble faculty that would lift us out of ignorance and into perpetual progress. What a joke. We arenāt Vulcans; weāre apes with Wi-Fi. We mash the publish button before our brains have caught up, then scream āfree speechā when anyone suggests that words might require responsibility.
Imagine if driving worked this way. No test, no licence, no consequences: just a toddler at the wheel, claiming God-given rights to swerve across lanes. Thatās social media in its current form. The people most in need of regulation are the least likely to pass even the most basic competency exam. Yet they strut about, convinced that posting a graph about Mississippiās GDP makes them the second coming of Adam Smith.
5 Brutal facts about Europeās economy. Europeās richest countries are now poorer than Mississippi. Americans have way more spending power, their companies are getting crushed, birth rates are tanking, and theyāve been left out of the industries that will define the future. Here are 5 hard truths Europe canāt afford to ignore.
NB: Under any condition, do not assume I endorse the misframed cherry-picking of this smug geezer, the progenitor of this post.
The truth is obvious but inconvenient: rationality is not humanityās natural state. Itās a rare, costly condition, summoned only with discipline, education, and luck. Most of the time, we prefer shortcuts ā tribal loyalties, gut feelings, dopamine hits. And yet we hand out the privileges of unfiltered speech, instantaneous broadcasting, and algorithmic amplification as if every citizen were Kantās ideal autonomous agent.
The result? Chaos. Outrage machines. āDebatesā about whether Europeans are backward barbarians for drinking water without ice cubes. These arenāt signs of liberty. Theyāre symptoms of a species drunk on its own mythology of reason.
Maybe we donāt need a new Marshall Plan for air conditioning in Europe. Maybe we need one for sanity. Start with a licence to post: a simple exam to prove you know what a source is, can tell a correlation from a cause, and wonāt confuse market cap with civilisation itself. Civilization would be quieter. And perhaps, mercifully, a little less stupid.
I’ve just published Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning, an essay that began as this blog post. I’m sharing the ‘official’ link and this first draft. As the essay matured, I added additional support, but I focused primarily on refuting the anticipated opposing arguments. Rather than regurgitate the final version here, I felt showing the genesis would be more instructive. Of course, the essay didnāt spring fully formed; Iāve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, Iām told Iām too slippery with words, that I treat truth as if it were just another game of persuasion, that I reduce morality to chalk lines on a playing field. The objection usually comes with force: ‘But surely you believe some things are objectively true?‘
I donāt. Or more precisely, I donāt see how ‘objectivity’ in the metaphysical sense can be defended without lapsing into stagecraft. Granite foundations have always turned out to be scaffolding with the paint touched up. Priests once told us their gods guaranteed truth; scientists later promised the lab would serve as granite; politicians assure us democracy is the stone pillar. But in each case the creaks remain.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This essay is written with an academic readership in mind. It assumes familiarity with figures like Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Ayer, and with the long quarrel over subjectivity, relativity, and objectivity. My aim is not to retell those arguments from the ground up, but to position my own framework within that ongoing dispute.
Scope
Before proceeding, some guardrails. When I say āobjectivity is illusion,ā I mean in the social and moral domain. Iām not denying quarks or mathematics. My claim is narrower: in human discourse, no truth escapes subjectivity or contingency.
This dovetails with my broader Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that even our words are leaky vessels, prone to misfire and misunderstanding. If language itself is unstable ground, then objectivity built upon it can hardly be granite. My claim here is not that nothing exists outside us, but that in the social world we inhabit together, every ‘truth’ rests on creaking boards.
One more note: just because social administration requires appeals to objectivity doesnāt mean objectivity exists. Courts, laboratories, and parliaments invoke it to secure trust, and it works well enough as theater. But necessity is not proof. And it is not my responsibility to conjure a granite replacement. What follows is an operating model, not a new altar.
Thesis
Objectivity is an illusion. Truth is rhetorical. Morality is prescriptive, not propositional. Our ethic is not granite but care: tending the planks we walk on, knowing they creak.
Operating Model: Five Premises
This framework is not a foundation. It is an operating model ā contingent, provisional, subject to revision as circumstances change. Like any model, it can (and should) be updated to fit the culture and times.
Premise 1: Subjectivity is the baseline. Every claim originates in a perspective. No statement is free of the lens through which it is made. Even to deny subjectivity is to speak from a subject.
Premise 2: Relativity is emergent. What we call ‘relative truth’ is not a separate category but the convergence of individual subjectivities into provisional consensus. Consensus is never neutral: it is formed rhetorically ā through persuasion, cultural resonance, and power [1]. MacIntyre made a similar point in After Virtue. The moral consensus of the Ancients was not grounded in objectivity but in a shared tradition ā a thick account of human flourishing that gave coherence to their claims. When that scaffolding collapsed, consensus fractured, leaving modern moral discourse in fragments. Critics accused MacIntyre of relativism, since different traditions yield different ‘truths’, but his point reinforces mine: what looks like objectivity is in fact the temporary overlap of subjectivities sustained by tradition [2].
Premise 3: Objectivity is illusion. Claims presented as objective are relative norms hardened by repetition and forgotten as contingent scaffolding. ‘Objectivity’ is consensus disguised as granite. Its invocation in courts or parliaments may be useful, but usefulness is not existence. The burden of proof belongs to anyone insisting on an independent, metaphysical anchor for moral or social truths (Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’ [3], Kuhnās paradigms [4], Latour’s laboratories [5]).
Even if one concedes, with Weber (as MacIntyre reminds us), that objective moral truths might exist in principle, they remain inaccessible in practice. What cannot be accessed cannot guide us; reconciliation of values and virtues must therefore take place within traditions and rhetoric, not in appeal to unreachable granite [13].
Premise 4: Rhetoric establishes truth. What counts as ‘true’ in the social and moral domain is established rhetorically ā through coherence, resonance, utility, or force. This does not mean truth is ‘mere spin’. It means truth is never metaphysical; it is enacted and enforced through persuasion. If a metaphysical claim convinces, it does so rhetorically. If a scientific claim holds, it does so because it persuades peers, fits the evidence, and survives testing. In short: rhetoric is the medium through which truths endure [6].
Premise 5: Non-Cognitivism, Stated Plainly. I take moral utterances to be prescriptions, not propositions. When someone says ‘X is wrong’, they are not reporting an objective fact but prescribing a stance, a rule, a line in chalk. This is my operating position: non-cognitivism (Ayer [7], Stevenson [8]).
That said, I know the term feels alien. Many prefer the dialect of subjectivism ā ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ ā or the quasi-realist stance that moral language behaves like truth-talk without cosmic backing (Blackburn [9]). I have no quarrel with these translations. They name the same scaffolding in different accents. I am not defending any school as such; I am simply stating my plank: morality prescribes rather than describes.
Ethic: Care. Since scaffolding is all we have, the obligation is not to pretend it is stone but to keep it usable. By ‘care’, I do not mean politeness or quietism. I mean maintenance ā deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt ā so long as they acknowledge the scaffolding we share. Care is not optional: stomp hard enough and the floor collapses beneath us all.
Examples clarify: peer review in science is care in action, patching leaky vessels rather than proving granite. Civil rights movements practiced care by repairing rotten planks of law, sometimes with revolt. Communities rebuilding after disaster embody care by reconstructing scaffolding, not pretending it was indestructible. Care is maintenance, reciprocity, and survival.
Bridge: These five premises do not add up to a system or a foundation. They form an operating model: subjectivity as baseline, relativity as emergent, objectivity as illusion, rhetoric as truth, morality as prescription. Together they outline a practice: walk the planks with care, admit the creaks, patch where needed, and stop pretending we live in marble halls.
Rationale
Why prefer scaffolding to granite? Because granite has always been a mirage. The history of philosophy and politics is a history of crumbling temples and collapsing empires. The promises of permanence never survive the weather.
Think of Nietzsche, who called truths ‘a mobile army of metaphors’ [3]. Think of Foucault, who showed that what counts as ‘truth’ is always bound up with power [1]. Think of Rorty, who reduced truth to what our peers let us get away with saying [6]. These are not nihilists but diagnosticians: they exposed the creaks in the floorboards and the wizard behind the curtain.
Metaphors drive the point home:
Scaffolding and granite: What holds is temporary, not eternal. Granite is an illusion painted on timber.
Chalk lines: Rules of play ā binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire ā each built like beachfront villas with a fine view and bad footing. Storms came, sand eroded, and down they went.
Bias as framing: Kahneman himself admitted ‘bias’ is not a thing in the world [10], only a deviation from a chosen model. Gigerenzer [11] and Jared Peterson [12] remind us heuristics are adaptive. To call them ‘biases’ is not neutral ā itās allegiance to a standard of rationality.
The point is simple: what holds today is scaffolding, and pretending otherwise is self-deception.
Counterarguments and Refutations
Objection: Moral Paralysis. Without objective morality, why abolish slavery or defend rights?
Refutation: Chalk lines still bind. Speed limits arenāt cosmic, but they regulate conduct. Abolition endured not because it tapped a cosmic truth but because it persuaded, resonated, and took root. Slavery was once ‘in bounds’. Now it is ‘offsides’. That shift was rhetorical, emotional, political ā but no less binding.
Objection: Problem of Dissent. If all is subjective, the lone dissenter is ‘just another voice’.
Refutation: Dissent gains traction through coherence, predictive success, or resonance. Galileo, abolitionists, suffragists ā none relied on metaphysical granite. They persuaded, they resonated, they moved chalk lines. Truth was made through rhetoric, not uncovered in stone.
Objection: Performative Dependency. Even to say ‘subjective’ assumes the subject/object split. Arenāt you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But Iām the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, Iām in the house. But I refuse to pretend itās marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal ā itās porous, dynamic, and leaky, just like language itself.
Objection: Infinite Regress. Why stop at subjectivity? Why not de-integrate further?
Refutation: Subjectivity is not granite, but it is the last plank before void. Peel it back and you erase the possibility of claims altogether. If tomorrow we discover that the ‘subject’ is a swarm of quarks or circuits, fine ā but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesnāt disprove.
Conclusion: The Ethic of Care
This is not reintegration. It is dis-integration: naming the creaks, stripping polyvinyl from rotten boards, refusing granite illusions.
If you wish to build here, build. But know the ground shifts, the storms come, the shoreline erodes. The ethic is not certainty but care: to tend the scaffolding we share, to patch without pretending it is stone, and to let dissent itself become part of the maintenance.
Philosophics 