Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)
Modernity’s most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Quetelet’s statistical conjuring trick – l’homme moyen, the “average man” –and 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.
Psychology™ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
Critical theory’s 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 – the state’s 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 – 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 reason’s empire – from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.
Read or cite: 🔗 Zenodo DOI 🔗 PhilArchive page – forthcoming link
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – 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 – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” 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 – 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 – a system’s 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 “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – 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 “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”
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 – a physics of care.
It’s 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 – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. It’s realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – 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 – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
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 didn’t spring fully formed; I’ve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, I’m told I’m 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 don’t. Or more precisely, I don’t 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 ‘objectivity is illusion,’ I mean in the social and moral domain. I’m 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 doesn’t 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 – 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 – 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 – 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], Kuhn’s 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 – 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 – ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ – 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 – deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt – 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 – binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire – 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 – it’s 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 aren’t 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 – 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 – 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. Aren’t you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But I’m the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, I’m in the house. But I refuse to pretend it’s marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal – it’s 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 – but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesn’t 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.
Humans can’t seem to stop clawing after morality. The primates among us chuck cucumbers when their neighbours get grapes, and the rest of us grumble about fairness on social media. The impulse is practically universal, an evolutionary quirk that kept us from throttling each other long enough to raise children and build cities.
Image: A seemingly perturbed capuchin monkey.
But universality is not objectivity. Just because every ape howls about fairness doesn’t mean “Justice” floats somewhere in Platonic space, waiting to be downloaded. It only means we’re the kind of animal that survives by narrating rules and enforcing them with shunning, shame, or, when necessary, cudgels.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This is where Alasdair MacIntyre trips over his own robes. After Virtue skewers Enlightenment rationalists who tried to prop morality on reason, it then dismisses Nietzsche for being “irrational.” MacIntyre’s fix? Resurrect Aristotle’s teleology. If reason can’t save morality, maybe an ancient oak tree can. But this is wish-thinking with a Greek accent. He’s still arguing by reason that reason can’t do the job, then sneaking back in through Aristotle’s back door with a “firmer ground.” Firmer only because he says so.
Nietzsche, at least, had the decency to call the bluff: no telos, no floor, no cosmic anchor. Just will, style, and the abyss. Uncomfortable? Absolutely. Honest? Yes.
Deleuze went further. He pointed out that morality, like culture, doesn’t look like a tree at all. It’s a rhizome: tangled, proliferating, hybridising, never grounded in a single root. The fragments MacIntyre despairs over aren’t evidence of collapse. They’re evidence of how moral life actually grows—messy, contingent, interconnected. The only reason it looks chaotic is that we keep demanding a trunk where only tubers exist.
So here we are, apes with a craving for rules, building cities and philosophies on scaffolds of habit, language, and mutual illusion. We are supported as surely as the Earth is supported – by nothing. And yet, we go on living.
The need for morality is real. The yearning for telos is real. The floor is not.
We’ve entered an era where machines tell us how we’re doing, whether it’s an AI app rating our résumé, a model reviewing our fiction, or an algorithm nudging our attention with like-shaped carrots.
Recently, I ran a brutally raw scene through a few AI platforms. The kind of scene that’s meant to unsettle, not entertain. One of them responded with effusive praise: “Devastating, but masterfully executed.”
Was it honest?
Was it useful?
Or was it merely reflecting my own aesthetic back at me, polished by a thousand reinforcement-learning smiles?
This is the ethical dilemma: If feedback is always flattering, what good is it? If criticism is only tolerated when couched in praise, how do we grow? And when machine feedback mimics the politeness of a mid-level manager with performance anxiety, we risk confusing validation with truth.
There’s a difference between signal and applause. Between understanding and affirmation.
The danger isn’t that AI flatters us. The danger is that we start to believe it and forget that art, inquiry, and ethics thrive on friction.
So, I wrote a book and published it under Ridley Park, the pseudonym I use for fiction.
It has aliens. But don’t get excited—they’re not here to save us, probe us, or blow up the White House. They’re not even here for us.
Which is, frankly, the point.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The book’s called Sustenance, and while it’s technically speculative fiction, it’s more about us than them. Or rather, it’s about how we can’t stop making everything about us—even when it shouldn’t be. Especially when it shouldn’t be.
Let’s talk themes. And yes, we’re using that word like academics do: as a smokescreen for saying uncomfortable things abstractly.
Language: The Original Scam
Language is the ultimate colonial tool. We call it communication, but it’s mostly projection. You speak. You hope. You assume. You superimpose meaning on other people like a cling film of your own ego.
Sustenance leans into this—not by showing a breakdown of communication, but by showing what happens when communication was never mutual in the first place. When the very idea of “meaning” has no purchase. It’s not about mishearing—it’s about misbeing.
Culture: A Meme You Were Born Into
Culture is the software you didn’t choose to install, and probably can’t uninstall. Most people treat it like a universal law—until they meet someone running a different OS. Cue confusion, arrogance, or violence.
The book explores what happens when cultural norms aren’t shared, and worse, aren’t even legible. Imagine trying to enforce property rights on beings who don’t understand “ownership.” It’s like trying to baptise a toaster.
Sex/Gender: You Keep Using Those Words…
One of the quiet joys of writing non-human characters is discarding human assumptions about sex and gender—and watching readers squirm.
What if sex wasn’t about power, pleasure, or identity? What if it was just a biological procedure, like cell division or pruning roses? Would you still be interested? Would you still moralise about it?
We love to believe our sex/gender constructs are inevitable. They’re not. They’re habits—often bad ones.
Consent: Your Framework Is Showing
Consent, as we use it, assumes mutual understanding, shared stakes, and equivalent agency. Remove any one of those and what’s left?
Sustenance doesn’t try to solve this—it just shows what happens when those assumptions fall apart. Spoiler: it’s not pretty, but it is honest.
Projection: The Mirror That Lies
Humans are deeply committed to anthropocentrism. If it walks like us, or flinches like us, it must be us. This is why we get so disoriented when faced with the truly alien: it won’t dance to our tune, and we’re left staring at ourselves in the funhouse mirror.
This isn’t a book about aliens.
It’s a book about the ways we refuse to see what’s not us.
Memory: The Autobiography of Your Justifications
Memory is not a record. It’s a defence attorney with a narrative license. We rewrite the past to make ourselves look consistent, or innocent, or right.
In Sustenance, memory acts less as a tether to truth and more as a sculpting tool—a way to carve guilt into something manageable. Something you can live with. Until you can’t.
In Summary: It’s Not About Them. It’s About You.
If that sounds bleak, good. It’s meant to.
But it’s also a warning: don’t get too comfortable in your own categories. They’re only universal until you meet someone who doesn’t share them.
Like I said, it’s not really about the aliens.
It’s about us.
If you enjoy fiction that’s more unsettling than escapist, more question than answer, you might be interested inSustenance. It’s live on Kindle now for the cost of a regrettable coffee:
Full Disclosure: I read the first volume of The Hunger Games just before the film was released. It was OK – certainly better than the film. This video came across my feed, and I skipped through it. Near the end, this geezer references how Katniss saves or recovers deteriorated morality. Me being me, I found issue with the very notion that a relative, if not subjective, concept could be recovered.
The OP asks if The Hunger Games are a classic. I’d argue that they are a categorical classic, like Harry Potter, within the category of YA fiction.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.
The Hunger Games doesn’t depict the death of morality — it’s a masterclass in how to twist it into a circus act.
Video: YouTube video that spawned this topic.
Let us dispense with the hand-wringing. The Hunger Games is not a parable of moral decay. It is something far more chilling: a vivid portrait of moral engineering — the grotesque contortion of ethical instincts into instruments of domination and spectacle.
Those who bemoan the “decline of morality” in Panem have rather missed the point. There is no absence of morality in the Capitol — only a different version of it. A rebranded, corporatised, state-sanctioned morality, lacquered in lipstick and broadcast in 4K. It is not immorality that reigns, but a hyperactive ideological morality, designed to keep the masses docile and the elites draped in silk.
This is not moral entropy; it’s moral mutation.
Children are not slaughtered because people have forgotten right from wrong — they are slaughtered because a society has been trained to believe that this is what justice looks like. That blood is penance. That fear is unity. That watching it all unfold with a glass of champagne in hand is perfectly civilised behaviour.
This isn’t the death of morality. It’s a hostile takeover.
The Moral PR Machine
If morality is, as many of us suspect, relative — a cultural construct built on consensus, coercion, and convenience — then it can no more “decline” than fashion trends can rot. It simply shifts. One day, shoulder pads are in. The next, it’s child-on-child murder as prime-time entertainment.
In Panem, the moral compass has not vanished. It’s been forcibly recalibrated. Not by reason or revelation, but by propaganda and fear. The Games are moral theatre. A grim ritual, staged to remind the Districts who holds the reins, all under the nauseating guise of tradition, order, and justice.
The citizens of the Capitol aren’t monsters — they’re consumers. Trained to see horror as haute couture. To mistake power for virtue. To cheer while children are butchered, because that’s what everyone else is doing — and, crucially, because they’ve been taught it’s necessary. Necessary evils are the most seductive kind.
Katniss: Not a Saint, But a Saboteur
Enter Katniss Everdeen, not as the moral saviour but as the spanner in the machine. She doesn’t preach. She doesn’t have a grand theory of justice. What she has is visceral disgust — an animal revulsion at the machinery of the Games. Her rebellion is personal, tribal, and instinctive: protect her sister, survive, refuse to dance for their amusement.
She isn’t here to restore some lost golden age of decency. She’s here to tear down the current script and refuse to read her lines.
Her defiance is dangerous not because it’s moral in some abstract, universal sense — but because it disrupts the Capitol’s moral narrative. She refuses to be a pawn in their ethical pageant. She reclaims agency in a world that has commodified virtue and turned ethics into state theatre.
So, Has Morality Declined?
Only if you believe morality has a fixed address — some eternal North Star by which all human actions may be judged. But if, as postmodernity has rather insistently suggested, morality is a shifting social fiction — then Panem’s horror is not a fall from grace, but a recalibration of what counts as “grace” in the first place.
And that’s the real horror, isn’t it? Not that morality has collapsed — but that it still exists, and it likes what it sees.
Conclusion: The Real Hunger
The Hunger Games is not about a society starved of morality — it’s about a world gorging on it, cooked, seasoned, and served with a garnish of guiltless indulgence. It is moral appetite weaponised. Ethics as edict. Conscience as costume.
If you feel sickened by what you see in Panem, it’s not because morality has vanished.
Kurt Gray’s Outraged! attempts to boil morality down to a single principle: harm. This, in his view, is the bedrock of all moral considerations. In doing so, he takes a swing at Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, trying to reduce its multi-faceted framework to a mere footnote in moral psychology. Amusingly, he even highlights how Haidt quietly modified his own theory after Gray and his colleagues published an earlier work—an intellectual game of cat-and-mouse, if ever there was one.
Audio: Podcast of this topic
Chapter 6: The Intuition Overdose
By the time we reach Chapter 6, Gray is charging full steam into reductio ad absurdum territory. He leans so hard on intuition that I lost count of how many times he invokes it. The problem? He gives it too much weight while conveniently ignoring acculturation.
Yes, intuition plays a role, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Enter Kahneman’s dual-system model: Gray eagerly adopts the System 1 vs. System 2 distinction, forcing his test subjects into snap moral judgments under time pressure to bypass rationalisation. Fair enough. But what he neglects is how even complex tasks can migrate from System 2 (slow, deliberate) to System 1 (fast, automatic) through repeated exposure. Kahneman’s example? Basic arithmetic. A child grappling with 1 + 1 relies on System 2, but an adult answers without effort.
And morality? The same mechanism applies. What starts as deliberation morphs into automatic response through cultural conditioning. But instead of acknowledging this, Gray behaves as if moral intuition is some mystical, spontaneous phenomenon untethered from socialization.
Let’s lay cards on the table. I’m a moral subjectivist—actually, a moral non-cognitivist, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s not frighten the children. My stance is that morality, at its core, is subjective. However, no one develops their moral compass in isolation. Culture, upbringing, and societal narratives shape our moral instincts, even if those instincts ultimately reduce to personal sentiment.
Gray does concede that the definition of “harm” is subjective, which allows him to argue that practically any belief or action can be framed as harmful. And sure, if you redefine “harm” broadly enough, you can claim that someone’s mere existence constitutes an existential threat. Religious believers, for example, claim to be “harmed” by the idea that someone else’s non-compliance with their theological fairy tale could lead to eternal damnation.
I don’t disagree with his observation. The problem is that the underlying belief is fundamentally pathological. This doesn’t necessarily refute Gray’s argument—after all, people do experience psychological distress over imaginary scenarios—but it does mean we’re dealing with a shaky foundation. If harm is entirely perception-based, then moral arguments become arbitrary power plays, subject to the whims of whoever is best at manufacturing grievance.
And this brings us to another crucial flaw in Gray’s framework: the way it enables ideological self-perpetuation. If morality is reduced to perceived harm, then groups with wildly different definitions of harm will inevitably weaponize their beliefs. Take the religious fundamentalist who believes gay marriage is a sin that dooms others to eternal suffering. From their perspective, fighting against LGBTQ+ rights isn’t just bigotry—it’s moral duty, a battle to save souls from metaphysical harm. This, of course, leads to moral contagion, where adherents tirelessly indoctrinate others, especially their own children, ensuring the pathology replicates itself like a virus.
The Problem with Mono-Causal Explanations
More broadly, Gray’s attempt to reduce morality to a single principle—harm—feels suspiciously tidy. Morality is messy, contradictory, and riddled with historical baggage. Any theory that purports to explain it all in one neat little package should immediately raise eyebrows.
So, sorry, Kurt. You can do better. Moral psychology is a tangled beast, and trying to hack through it with a single conceptual machete does more harm than good.
It’s interesting to me that as an atheist and non-cognitivist, I can take the moral high ground relative to health insurance concerns in the United States. So, I write about it.
Blood Money and Broken Principles
In the aftermath of the tragic killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of a health insurance conglomerate, a striking narrative has emerged. Many Americans view this act—shocking though it is—as emblematic of the anger and despair born of a system that profits by exploiting human vulnerability. Such reactions compel us to examine the ethics of industries that flourish on what can only be described as blood money. From health insurance to tobacco, alcohol, and the arms trade, these livelihoods raise profound ethical questions when viewed through the lens of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, specifically Right Livelihood and Right Action.
The Moral Framework: Buddhism’s Path to Ethical Livelihood
Buddhism’s Eightfold Path provides a blueprint for ethical living, with Right Livelihood and Right Action serving as its ethical cornerstones. These principles demand that one’s work and deeds contribute to the welfare of others, avoid harm, and align with compassion and integrity. In short, they urge us to earn a living in a manner that uplifts rather than exploits. The health insurance industry’s business model—which often prioritises profits over the preservation of life—challenges these tenets in ways that are difficult to overlook.
Consider the denial of coverage for life-saving treatments, the exploitation of legal loopholes to reduce payouts, or the systemic perpetuation of healthcare inequality. These actions, while legally sanctioned, conflict sharply with the Buddhist ideal of avoiding harm and promoting well-being. Yet, this industry is not alone in its ethical failings. Many others—both legal and illegal—fall similarly short.
Industries of Exploitation: Tobacco, Alcohol, and Arms
The tobacco and alcohol industries provide stark examples of livelihoods that thrive on human suffering. Their products, despite their legality, are designed to foster dependency and harm. They exact a heavy toll on both individual lives and public health systems, a reality that makes them incompatible with Right Livelihood. The arms trade—arguably the most egregious example—profits directly from conflict and human misery. How can such industries possibly align with the Buddhist ideal of ahimsa (non-violence) or the compassionate aspiration to alleviate suffering?
In these cases, the harm caused is not incidental; it is fundamental to their business models. Whether one manufactures cigarettes, brews alcohol, or sells weapons, the destruction wrought by these activities is integral to their profitability. The contradiction is stark: the greater the harm, the greater the profit. This stands in direct opposition to the Buddhist call for livelihoods that sustain and support life.
Organised Crime: The Dark Mirror
When we turn to organised crime, the parallels become even more unsettling. Whether it’s the drug trade, human trafficking, or financial fraud, these activities epitomise unethical livelihoods. They exploit the vulnerable, foster violence, and undermine social cohesion. Yet, when viewed alongside certain legal industries, the line between “organised crime” and “corporate enterprise” begins to blur. Is the denial of life-saving healthcare less egregious than a gang’s extortion racket? Both profit by preying on human suffering. Both thrive in systems that prioritise gain over humanity.
The Buddhist Response: From Outrage to Action
Buddhism does not condone violence, no matter how symbolic or righteous it may appear. Right Action demands non-violence not only in deeds but also in thoughts and intentions. The killing of Brian Thompson, though perhaps an act of desperation or symbolism, cannot align with Buddhist ethics. Yet this tragedy should not eclipse the broader systemic critique. The true challenge is not to exact retribution but to transform the systems that perpetuate harm.
To move forward, we must ask how our societies can pivot toward livelihoods that align with compassion and justice. This entails holding exploitative industries to account and fostering economic systems that prioritise well-being over profit. The Buddhist path offers not only a critique of harmful practices but also a vision for ethical living—a vision that demands courage, compassion, and unwavering commitment to the common good.
Conclusion: Choosing a Better Path
The case of Brian Thompson’s killing is a symptom of a much larger ethical crisis. It forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the industries that shape our world. Whether we scrutinise health insurance, tobacco, alcohol, the arms trade, or organised crime, the moral calculus remains the same: livelihoods that thrive on harm cannot be reconciled with the principles of Right Livelihood and Right Action.
As individuals and societies, we face a choice. We can continue to turn a blind eye to the suffering embedded in these industries, or we can commit to transforming them. The Buddhist path challenges us to choose the latter, to build systems and livelihoods rooted in compassion and justice. In doing so, we can begin to heal not only the wounds of individual tragedies but also the deeper fractures in our collective soul.
The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment that pits action against inaction. In the original version, a person faces a choice: a trolley hurtles down a track toward five people tied to the rails, but a lever allows the trolley to be diverted onto another track, where one person is tied. The dilemma is simple in its grotesque arithmetic: let five die or actively kill one to save them. A perennial favourite of ethics classes, the trolley problem is most often used to explore Consequentialism, particularly Utilitarianism, and its cool calculus of harm minimisation. Over the years, countless variations have been conjured, but few approach the nightmarish reality of its real-world application: the for-profit healthcare system in the United States.
With the recent death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the trolley dilemma takes on a new and morbid relevance. Let’s reframe the challenge.
The Healthcare Trolley Loop
Picture the trolley again on a bifurcated track. The lever remains, as does the moral agent poised to decide its fate. This time, the agent is Brian Thompson. The setup is simple: one track leads to the deaths of five people, and the other is empty. But here’s the twist: the trolley doesn’t just pass once in this version—it’s on a loop. At every interval, Thompson must decide whether to pull the lever and send the trolley to the empty track or allow it to continue its deadly course, killing five people each time.
But Thompson isn’t just deciding in a vacuum. The track with five people comes with a financial incentive: each life lost means higher profits, better quarterly earnings, and soaring shareholder returns. Diverting the trolley to the empty track, meanwhile, offers no payout. It’s not a single moral quandary; it’s a recurring decision, a relentless calculus of death versus dollars.
This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a business model. For-profit healthcare doesn’t merely tolerate death—it commodifies it. The system incentivises harm through denial of care, inflated costs, and structural inefficiencies that ensure maximum profit at the expense of human lives.
Enter the Shooter
Now, introduce the wildcard: the shooter. Someone whose loved one may have been one of the countless victims tied to the track. They see Thompson at the lever, his decisions ensuring the endless loop of suffering and death. Perhaps they believe that removing Thompson can break the cycle—that a new lever-puller might divert the trolley to the empty track.
Thompson is killed, but does it change anything? The system remains. Another CEO steps into Thompson’s place, hand on the lever, ready to make the same decision. Why? Because the tracks, the trolley, and the profit motive remain untouched. The system ensures that each decision-maker faces the same incentives, pressures, and chilling rationale: lives are expendable; profits are not.
The Problem of Plausible Deniability
The shooter’s actions are vilified because they are active, visible, and immediate. A single violent act is morally shocking, and rightly so. But what of the quiet violence perpetuated by the healthcare system? The denial of coverage, the refusal of life-saving treatments, the bankruptcy-inducing bills—all are forms of systemic violence, their harm diffused and cloaked in the language of economic necessity.
The for-profit model thrives on this plausible deniability. Its architects and operators can claim they’re simply “following the market,” that their hands are tied by the invisible forces of capitalism. Yet the deaths it causes are no less real, no less preventable. The difference lies in perception: the shooter’s act is direct and visceral, while the system’s violence is passive and bureaucratic, rendered almost invisible by its banality.
A System Built on Death
Let’s not mince words: the current healthcare system is a death loop. It’s not an accident; it’s a feature. Profit-seeking in healthcare means there is always a financial incentive to let people die. During the Affordable Care Act (ACA) debates, opponents of universal healthcare decried the spectre of “death panels,” bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies. Yet this is precisely what for-profit insurance companies do—only their decisions are driven not by medical necessity or moral considerations, but by spreadsheets and stock prices.
This is the logic of capitalism writ large: maximise profit, externalise harm, and frame systemic failures as unavoidable. Healthcare is merely one example. Across industries, the same dynamic plays out, whether in environmental destruction, labour exploitation, or financial crises. The trolley always runs on tracks built for profit, and the bodies left in its wake are just collateral damage.
How to Break the Loop
The death of Brian Thompson changes nothing. The system will simply produce another Thompson, another lever-puller incentivised to make the same deadly decisions. Breaking the loop requires dismantling the tracks themselves.
Remove the Profit Motive: Healthcare should not be a marketplace but a public good. Universal single-payer systems, as seen in many other developed nations, prioritise care over profit, removing the incentive to let people die for financial gain.
Recognise Passive Harm as Active: We must stop excusing systemic violence as “inevitable.” Denying care, pricing treatments out of reach, and allowing medical bankruptcy are acts of violence, no less deliberate than pulling a trigger.
Hold the System Accountable: It’s not just the CEOs at fault; the lawmakers, lobbyists, and corporations sustain this deadly status quo. The blood is on their hands, too.
Conclusion: The Real Villain
The shooter is not the solution, but neither is their act the real crime. The healthcare system—and by extension, capitalism itself—is the true villain of this story. It constructs the tracks, builds the trolley, and installs lever-pullers like Brian Thompson to ensure the loop continues.
When will it end? When we stop debating which track to divert the trolley toward and start dismantling the system that made the trolley inevitable in the first place. Until then, we are all complicit, passengers on a ride that profits from our suffering and death. The question isn’t who’s at the lever; it’s why the trolley is running at all.
Philosophics 