Tag: free will

Footnotes from the House: Justice as a Casino Game

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
4–6 minutes

This is part 2 of a structural critique of Justice™. Read Part 1, The Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation.

If you want a useful metaphor for how justice actually operates, don’t picture a blindfolded goddess with scales. Picture a casino.

Image: Lady Justice in Casino. The dice are rigged. haha

The rules are printed. The games look fair. Everyone is technically allowed to play. But the mathematics are tuned in advance, the exits are discreet, and the house never risks its own solvency. You don’t walk into a casino to discover whether chance is fair. You walk in to participate in a system whose advantage has already been engineered.

Justice works the same way
– like a casino with house-favoured odds.

By the time a defendant appears, the ontological dice have already been loaded. The system has quietly asserted a set of metaphysical commitments that make certain outcomes legible, actionable, and punishable – whilst rendering others incoherent, inadmissible, or ‘unreasonable’. Because I am a philosopher of language and not a lawyer, I am free from the indoctrination and selection bias inherent in that system. This allows me to critique the system directly without being excommunicated from the club.

Justice Ontology Rev 1Download

What follows are not neutral assumptions. They are ontological wagers, each chosen because its alternative would tilt the field away from institutional power.

Ontology 1: The Self

Asserted (g): Diachronic, continuous self
Excluded (h): Episodic, fragmented, or non-self

Justice presumes that the person who acted yesterday is meaningfully the same entity standing in court today. This is not discovered; it is asserted.

Why? Because retribution requires persistence. Desert cannot attach to a momentary configuration of consciousness. Responsibility requires a carrier that survives time, memory gaps, psychological rupture, intoxication, trauma, and neurological variance.

An episodic self – Parfit’s reductionism, trauma-fractured identity, or situational selfhood – collapses the attribution pipeline. If the ‘self’ is a series of loosely connected episodes, punishment becomes conceptually incoherent. Who is being punished for whom?

So the law treats episodic accounts not as alternative ontologies but as defects: insanity, automatism, incompetence. The self is patched, not replaced.

The house needs continuity.
Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.

Ontology 2: Agency

Asserted (i): Robust individual agency
Excluded (j): Distributed, constrained, or illusory agency

Justice requires that actions originate somewhere. Agency is that somewhere.

The system asserts that agents could have done otherwise in a morally relevant sense. This is compatible with compatibilism, folk psychology, and everyday moral intuitions – but deeply hostile to hard determinism, strong situationism, or neurobiological deflation.

Why exclude weaker agency models? Because if agency dissolves into causation, environment, or neurochemistry, responsibility evaporates. At best, you get risk management. At worst, you get treatment or containment. Retribution has nowhere to land.

So the law nods politely to influences – upbringing, coercion, impairment – whilst ring-fencing agency as the default. Mitigation is permitted. Ontological revision is not. The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise, even if that claim grows increasingly fictional under scrutiny.

The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise

Ontology 3: Choice

Asserted (k): Discrete, identifiable choice points
Excluded (l): Continuous, coerced, or structurally constrained decision spaces

Justice models human action as a series of forks in the road. At some point, the agent ‘chose’ X over Y. This is enormously convenient.

Continuous decision spaces – poverty gradients, addiction loops, survival trade-offs – are messy. They resist clean counterfactuals. ‘What should they have done instead?’ becomes a sociological question, not a moral one.

So the system discretises. It locates a moment. A click. A trigger pull. A signature. A punch. A text sent.

Once the choice is frozen, the rest of the apparatus can proceed. Without discrete choice points, proportionality and culpability lose their anchor.

The house needs moments, not milieus.

Ontology 4: Causation

Asserted (m): Local, linear causation
Excluded (n): Diffuse, systemic, or emergent causation

Justice prefers causes that point: Who did this? When? How directly?

Systemic causation – economic pressure, cultural narratives, institutional design – creates attribution problems. If harm is emergent, no individual carries it cleanly. Responsibility smears.

So causation is narrowed. Chains are shortened. Proximate cause replaces contributing conditions. Structural violence becomes background noise.

This is not because systemic causation is false. It is because it is unmanageable within a retributive frame.

The house needs causes that fit inside a sentence.

Ontology 5: Reasonableness

Asserted (a): Normative moderation
Excluded (b): Atypical intensity, outsider rationalities

‘Reasonableness’ is the softest and most insidious ontology of the lot.

It pretends to be procedural, but it functions as cultural enforcement. The reasonable person is not an average human. They are an acculturated one.

Intensity becomes suspect. Rage becomes irrational. Grief becomes excessive. Radical interpretations become unreasonable not because they’re false, but because they disrupt cadence.

This ontology stabilises the game by disciplining tone. It doesn’t matter what you argue if you fail to argue it reasonably. Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.

Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.

The house needs calm players, not correct ones.

Why These Ontologies, and Not Their Rivals?

Because every excluded ontology threatens legibility. Justice is not designed to discover truth. It is designed to terminate cases. Ontologies that complicate attribution, disperse responsibility, or destabilise narrative continuity slow the machine. So they are ruled out – not explicitly, but structurally.

Once these commitments are in place, disagreement downstream becomes theatre. Arguments about fairness, proportionality, or intent occur within a rigged metaphysical envelope. That’s why reform debates feel sincere yet go nowhere. People argue outcomes whilst the house quietly keeps the rules.

The Point

None of this means justice is a scam. Casinos aren’t scams either. They do exactly what they are designed to do.

The problem is pretending the odds are neutral.

If you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you don’t start with sentencing guidelines or evidentiary thresholds. You start by asking which ontologies are being asserted – and why alternatives are unplayable.

Most people won’t make that move. Not because it’s wrong. Because it requires leaving the table.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
7–10 minutes

Now that A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has been put to bed — not euthanised, just sedated — I can turn to the more interesting work: instantiating it. This is where LIH stops being a complaint about words and starts becoming a problem for systems that pretend words are stable enough to carry moral weight.

Read part 2 of this essay.

What follows is not a completed theory, nor a universal schema. It’s a thinking tool. A talking point. A diagram designed to make certain assumptions visible that are usually smuggled in unnoticed, waved through on the strength of confidence and tradition.

Justice Ontology Rev 1Download

The purpose of this diagram is not to redefine justice, rescue it, or replace it with something kinder. It is to show how justice is produced. Specifically, how retributive justice emerges from a layered assessment process that quietly asserts ontologies, filters encounters, applies normative frames, and then closes uncertainty with confidence.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Most people are willing to accept, in the abstract, that justice is “constructed”. That concession is easy. What is less comfortable is seeing how it is constructed — how many presuppositions must already be in place before anything recognisable as justice can appear, and how many of those presuppositions are imposed rather than argued for.

The diagram foregrounds power, not as a conspiracy or an optional contaminant, but as an ambient condition. Power determines which ontologies are admissible, which forms of agency count, which selves persist over time, which harms are legible, and which comparisons are allowed. It decides which metaphysical configurations are treated as reasonable, and which are dismissed as incoherent before the discussion even begins.

Justice, in this framing, is not discovered. It is not unearthed like a moral fossil. It is assembled. And it is assembled late in the process, after ontology has been assumed, evaluation has been performed, and uncertainty has been forcibly closed.

This does not mean justice is fake. It means it is fragile. Far more fragile than its rhetoric suggests. And once you see that fragility — once you see how much is doing quiet, exogenous work — it becomes harder to pretend that disagreements about justice are merely disagreements about facts, evidence, or bad actors. More often, they are disagreements about what kind of world must already be true for justice to function at all.

I walk through the structure and logic of the model below. The diagram is also available as a PDF, because if you’re going to stare at machinery, you might as well be able to zoom in on the gears.

Why Retributive Justice (and not the rest of the zoo)

Before doing anything else, we need to narrow the target.

“Justice” is an infamously polysemous term. Retributive, restorative, distributive, procedural, transformative, poetic, cosmic. Pick your flavour. Philosophy departments have been dining out on this buffet for centuries, and nothing useful has come of letting all of them talk at once.

This is precisely where LIH draws a line.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not interested in pedestrian polysemy — cases where a word has multiple, well-understood meanings that can be disambiguated with minimal friction. That kind of ambiguity is boring. It’s linguistic weather.

What LIH is interested in are terms that appear singular while smuggling incompatible structures. Words that function as load-bearing beams across systems, while quietly changing shape depending on who is speaking and which assumptions are already in play.

“Justice” is one of those words. But it is not usefully analysable in the abstract.

So we pick a single instantiation: Retributive Justice.

Why?

Because retributive justice is the most ontologically demanding and the most culturally entrenched. It requires:

  • a persistent self
  • a coherent agent
  • genuine choice
  • intelligible intent
  • attributable causation
  • commensurable harm
  • proportional response

In short, it requires everything to line up.

If justice is going to break anywhere, it will break here.

Retributive justice is therefore not privileged in this model. It is used as a stress test.

The Big Picture: Justice as an Engine, Not a Discovery

The central claim of the model is simple, and predictably unpopular:

Justice is not discovered. It is produced.

Not invented in a vacuum, not hallucinated, not arbitrary — but assembled through a process that takes inputs, applies constraints, and outputs conclusions with an air of inevitability.

The diagram frames retributive justice as an assessment engine.

An engine has:

  • inputs
  • internal mechanisms
  • thresholds
  • failure modes
  • and outputs

It does not have access to metaphysical truth. It has access to what it has been designed to process.

The justice engine takes an encounter — typically an action involving alleged harm — and produces two outputs:

  • Desert (what is deserved),
  • Responsibility (to whom it is assigned).

Everything else in the diagram exists to make those outputs possible.

The Three Functional Layers

The model is organised into three layers. These are not chronological stages, but logical dependencies. Each layer must already be functioning for the next to make sense.

1. The Constitutive Layer

(What kind of thing a person must already be)

This layer answers questions that are almost never asked explicitly, because asking them destabilises the entire process.

  • What counts as a person?
  • What kind of self persists over time?
  • What qualifies as an agent?
  • What does it mean to have agency?
  • What is a choice?
  • What is intent?

Crucially, these are not empirical discoveries made during assessment. They are asserted ontologies.

The system assumes a particular configuration of selfhood, agency, and intent as a prerequisite for proceeding at all. Alternatives — episodic selves, radically distributed agency, non-volitional action — are not debated. They are excluded.

This is the first “happy path”.

If you do not fit the assumed ontology, you do not get justice. You get sidelined into mitigation, exception, pathology, or incoherence.

2. The Encounter Layer

(What is taken to have happened)

This layer processes the event itself:

  • an action
  • resulting harm
  • causal contribution
  • temporal framing
  • contextual conditions
  • motive (selectively)

This is where the rhetoric of “facts” tends to dominate. But the encounter is never raw. It is already shaped by what the system is capable of seeing.

Causation here is not metaphysical causation. It is legible causation.
Harm is not suffering. It is recognisable harm.
Context is not total circumstance. It is admissible context.

Commensurability acts as a gatekeeper between encounter and evaluation: harms must be made comparable before they can be judged. Anything that resists comparison quietly drops out of the pipeline.

3. The Evaluative Layer

(How judgment is performed)

Only once ontology is assumed and the encounter has been rendered legible does evaluation begin:

  • proportionality
  • accountability
  • normative ethics
  • fairness (claimed)
  • reasonableness
  • bias (usually acknowledged last, if at all)

This layer presents itself as the moral heart of justice. In practice, it is the final formatting pass.

Fairness is not discovered here. It is declared.
Reasonableness does not clarify disputes. It narrows the range of acceptable disagreement.
Bias is not eliminated. It is managed.

At the end of this process, uncertainty is closed.

That closure is the moment justice appears.

Why Disagreement Fails Before It Starts

At this point, dissent looks irrational.

The system has:

  • assumed an ontology
  • performed an evaluation
  • stabilised the narrative through rhetoric
  • and produced outputs with institutional authority

To object now is not to disagree about evidence. It is to challenge the ontology that made assessment possible in the first place.

And that is why so many justice debates feel irresolvable.

They are not disagreements within the system.
They are disagreements about which system is being run.

LIH explains why language fails here. The same words — justice, fairness, responsibility, intent — are being used across incompatible ontological commitments. The vocabulary overlaps; the worlds do not.

The engine runs smoothly. It just doesn’t run the same engine for everyone.

Where This Is Going

With the structure in place, we can now do the slower work:

  • unpacking individual components
  • tracing where ontological choices are asserted rather than argued
  • showing how “reasonableness” and “fairness” operate as constraint mechanisms
  • and explaining why remediation almost always requires a metaphysical switch, not better rhetoric

Justice is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.

That should worry us more than if it were merely malfunctioning.

The rest of the story

Read part 2 of this essay.

This essay is already long, so I’m going to stop here.

Not because the interesting parts are finished, but because this is the point at which the analysis stops being descriptive and starts becoming destabilising.

The diagram you’ve just walked through carries a set of suppressed footnotes. They don’t sit at the margins because they’re trivial; they sit there because they are structurally prior. Each one represents an ontological assertion the system quietly requires in order to function at all.

By my count, the model imposes at least five such ontologies. They are not argued for inside the system. They are assumed. They arrive pre-installed, largely because they are indoctrinated, acculturated, and reinforced long before anyone encounters a courtroom, a jury, or a moral dilemma.

Once those ontologies are fixed, the rest of the machinery behaves exactly as designed. Disagreement downstream is permitted; disagreement upstream is not.

In a follow-up essay, I’ll unpack those footnotes one by one: where the forks are, which branch the system selects, and why the alternatives—while often coherent—are rendered unintelligible, irresponsible, or simply “unreasonable” once the engine is in motion.

That’s where justice stops looking inevitable and starts looking parochial.

And that’s also where persuasion quietly gives up.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after a couple of days of back and forth

microglyphics

Justice as a House of Cards

Posted in Culture & Society, language, modernism, ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theory, post-enlightenmentTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–6 minutes

How retribution stays upright by not being examined

There is a persistent belief that our hardest disagreements are merely technical. If we could stop posturing, define our terms, and agree on the facts, consensus would emerge. This belief survives because it works extremely well for birds and tables.

It fails spectacularly for justice.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) isn’t especially interested in whether people disagree. It’s interested in how disagreement behaves under clarification. With concrete terms, clarification narrows reference. With contested ones, it often fractures it. The more you specify, the more ontologies appear.

Justice is the canonical case.

Retributive justice is often presented as the sober, adult conclusion. Not emotional. Not ideological. Just what must be done. In practice, it is a delicately balanced structure built out of other delicately balanced structures. Pull one term away and people grow uneasy. Pull a second and you’re accused of moral relativism. Pull a third and someone mentions cavemen.

Let’s do some light demolition. I created a set of 17 Magic: The Gathering-themed cards to illustrate various concepts. Below are a few. A few more may appear over time.

Card One: Choice

Image: MTG: Choice – Enchantment

The argument begins innocently enough:

They chose to do it.

But “choice” here is not an empirical description. It’s a stipulation. It doesn’t mean “a decision occurred in a nervous system under constraints.” It means a metaphysically clean fork in the road. Free of coercion, history, wiring, luck, trauma, incentives, or context.

That kind of choice is not discovered. It is assumed.

Pointing out that choices are shaped, bounded, and path-dependent does not refine the term. It destabilises it. Because if choice isn’t clean, then something else must do the moral work.

Enter the next card.

Card Two: Agency

Image: MTG: Agency – Creature – Illusion

Agency is wheeled in to stabilise choice. We are reassured that humans are agents in a morally relevant sense, and therefore choice “counts”.

Counts for what, exactly, is rarely specified.

Under scrutiny, “agency” quietly oscillates between three incompatible roles:

  • a descriptive claim: humans initiate actions
  • a normative claim: humans may be blamed
  • a metaphysical claim: humans are the right kind of cause

These are not the same thing. Treating them as interchangeable is not philosophical rigour. It’s semantic laundering.

But agency is emotionally expensive to question, so the discussion moves on briskly.

Card Three: Responsibility

Image: MTG: Responsibility – Enchantment – Curse

Responsibility is where the emotional payload arrives.

To say someone is “responsible” sounds administrative, even boring. In practice, it’s a moral verdict wearing a clipboard.

Watch the slide:

  • causal responsibility
  • role responsibility
  • moral responsibility
  • legal responsibility

One word. Almost no shared criteria.

By the time punishment enters the picture, “responsibility” has quietly become something else entirely: the moral right to retaliate without guilt.

At which point someone will say the magic word.

Card Four: Desert

Image: MTG: Desert – Instant

Desert is the most mystical card in the deck.

Nothing observable changes when someone “deserves” punishment. No new facts appear. No mechanism activates. What happens instead is that a moral permission slip is issued.

Desert is not found in the world. It is declared.

And it only works if you already accept a very particular ontology:

  • robust agency
  • contra-causal choice
  • a universe in which moral bookkeeping makes sense

Remove any one of these and desert collapses into what it always was: a story we tell to make anger feel principled.

Which brings us, finally, to the banner term.

Card Five: Justice

Image: MTG: Justice – Enchantment

At this point, justice is invoked as if it were an independent standard hovering serenely above the wreckage.

It isn’t.

“Justice” here does not resolve disagreement. It names it.

Retributive justice and consequentialist justice are not rival policies. They are rival ontologies. One presumes moral balance sheets attached to persons. The other presumes systems, incentives, prevention, and harm minimisation.

Both use the word justice.

That is not convergence. That is polysemy with a body count.

Why clarification fails here

This is where LIH earns its keep.

With invariants, adding detail narrows meaning. With terms like justice, choice, responsibility, or desert, adding detail exposes incompatible background assumptions. The disagreement does not shrink. It bifurcates.

This is why calls to “focus on the facts” miss the point. Facts do not adjudicate between ontologies. They merely instantiate them. If agency itself is suspect, arguments for retribution do not fail empirically. They fail upstream. They become non sequiturs.

This is also why Marx remains unforgivable to some.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” isn’t a policy tweak. It presupposes a different moral universe. No amount of clarification will make it palatable to someone operating in a merit-desert ontology.

The uncomfortable conclusion

The problem is not that we use contested terms. We cannot avoid them.

The problem is assuming they behave like tables.

Retributive justice survives not because it is inevitable, but because its supporting terms are treated as settled when they are anything but. Each card looks sturdy in isolation. Together, they form a structure that only stands if you agree not to pull too hard.

LIH doesn’t tell you which ontology to adopt.

It tells you why the argument never ends.

And why, if someone insists the issue is “just semantic”, they’re either confused—or holding the deck.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis with ChatGPT 5.2

microglyphics

Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, free will, identity, intelligence, language, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
2–3 minutes

The Enlightenment’s Most Beloved Lie

“The world does not need more confession;
it needs better design.”

— Against Agency

🔗 Read the full preprint on Zenodo
🔗 Explore the Anti-Enlightenment Project

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.

microglyphics's avatar

Posted by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Keeping Ourselves in the Dark: Depressive Realism and the Fiction of Agency

Posted in agency, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Philosopher Muse brought Colin Feltham to my attention, so I read his Keeping Ourselves in the Dark. It’s in limited supply, so I found an online copy.

So much of modern life rests on promises of improvement. Governments promise progress, religions promise redemption, therapists promise healing. Feltham’s Keeping Ourselves in the Dark (2015) takes a blunt axe to this edifice. In a series of sharp, aphoristic fragments, he suggests that most of these promises are self-deceptions. They keep us busy and comforted, but they do not correspond to the reality of our condition. For Feltham, reality is not an upward arc but a fog – a place of incoherence, accident, and suffering, which we disguise with stories of hope.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this post.

It is a book that situates itself in a lineage of pessimism. Like Schopenhauer, Feltham thinks life is saturated with dissatisfaction. Like Emil Cioran, he delights in puncturing illusions. Like Peter Wessel Zapffe, he worries that consciousness is an overdeveloped faculty, a tragic gift that leaves us exposed to too much meaninglessness.

Depressive Realism – Lucidity or Illusion?

One of Feltham’s recurring themes is the psychological idea of “depressive realism.” Researchers such as Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson suggested that depressed individuals may judge reality more accurately than their non-depressed peers, particularly when it comes to their own lack of control. Where the “healthy” mind is buoyed by optimism bias, the depressed mind may be sober.

Feltham uses this as a pivot: if the depressed see things more clearly, then much of what we call mental health is simply a shared delusion, a refusal to see the world’s bleakness. He is not romanticising depression, but he is deliberately destabilising the assumption that cheerfulness equals clarity.

Here I find myself diverging. Depression is not simply lucidity; it is also, inescapably, a condition of suffering. To say “the depressed see the truth” risks sanctifying what is, for those who live it, a heavy and painful distortion. Following Foucault, I would rather say that “mental illness” is itself a category of social control – but that does not mean the suffering it names is any less real.

Video: Depressive Realism by Philosopher Muse, the impetus for this blog article

Agency Under the Same Shadow

Feltham’s suspicion of optimism resonates with other critiques of human self-concepts. Octavia Butler, in her fiction and theory, often frames “agency” as a structural mirage: we think we choose, but our choices are already scripted by language and power. Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, insists on the opposite extremity: that we are “condemned to be free,” responsible even for our refusal to act. Howard Zinn echoes this in his famous warning that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

My own work, the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, takes a fourth line. Like Feltham, I doubt that our central myths – agency, freedom, progress – correspond to any stable reality. But unlike him, I do not think stripping them away forces us into depressive despair. The feeling of depression is itself another state, another configuration of affect and narrative. To call it “realistic” is to smuggle in a judgment, as though truth must wound.

Agency, Optimism, and Their Kin

Feltham’s bleak realism has interesting affinities with other figures who unpick human self-mythology:

  • Octavia Butler presents “agency” itself as a kind of structural illusion. From the Oankali’s alien vantage in Dawn, humanity looks like a single destructive will, not a set of sovereign choosers.
  • Sartre, by contrast, radicalises agency: even passivity is a choice; we are condemned to be free.
  • Howard Zinn universalises responsibility in a similar register: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
  • Cioran and Zapffe, like Feltham, treat human self-consciousness as a trap, a source of suffering that no optimistic narrative can finally dissolve.

Across these positions, the common thread is suspicion of the Enlightenment story in which rational agency and progress are guarantors of meaning. Some embrace the myth, some invert it, some discard it.

Dis-integration Rather Than Despair

Where pessimists like Feltham (or Cioran, or Zapffe) tend to narrate our condition as tragic, my “dis-integrationist” view is more Zen: the collapse of our stories is not a disaster but a fact. Consciousness spins myths of control and meaning; when those myths fail, we may feel disoriented, but that disorientation is simply another mode of being. There is no imperative to replace one illusion with another – whether it is progress, will, or “depressive clarity.”

From this perspective, life is not rescued by optimism, nor is it condemned by realism. It is simply flux, dissonance, and transient pattern. The task is not to shore up agency but to notice its absence without rushing to fill the void with either hope or despair.

Four Ways to Mistake Agency

I’ve long wrestled with the metaphysical aura that clings to “agency.” I don’t buy it. Philosophers – even those I’d have thought would know better – keep smuggling it back into their systems, as though “will” or “choice” were some indispensable essence rather than a narrative convenience.

Take the famous mid-century split: Sartre insisted we are “condemned to be free,” and so must spend that freedom in political action; Camus shrugged at the same premise and redirected it toward art, creation in the face of absurdity. Different prescriptions, same underlying assumption – that agency is real, universal, and cannot be escaped.

What if that’s the problem? What if “agency” is not a fact of human being but a Modernist fable, a device designed to sustain certain worldviews – freedom, responsibility, retribution – that collapse without it?

Sartre and Zinn: Agency as Compulsion

Sartre insists: “There are no innocent victims. Even inaction is a choice.” Zinn echoes: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Both rhetorics collapse hesitation, fatigue, or constraint into an all-encompassing voluntarism. The train is rolling, and you are guilty for sitting still.

Feltham’s Depressive Realism

Colin Feltham’s Keeping Ourselves in the Dark extends the thesis: our optimism and “progress” are delusions. He leans into “depressive realism,” suggesting that the depressive gaze is clearer, less self-deceived. Here, too, agency is unmasked as myth – but the myth is replaced with another story, one of lucidity through despair.

A Fourth Position: Dis-integration

Where I diverge is here: why smuggle in judgment at all? Butler, Sartre, Zinn, Feltham each turn absence into a moral. They inflate or invert “agency” so it remains indispensable. My sense is more Zen: perhaps agency is not necessary. Not as fact, not as fiction, not even as a tragic lack.

Life continues without it. Stabilisers cling to the cart, Tippers tip, Egoists recline, Sycophants ride the wake, Survivors endure. These are dispositions, not decisions. The train moves whether or not anyone is at the controls. To say “you chose” is to mistake drift for will, inertia for responsibility.

From this angle, nihilism doesn’t require despair. It is simply the atmosphere we breathe. Meaning and will are constructs that serve Modernist institutions – law, nation, punishment. Remove them, and nothing essential is lost, except the illusion that we were ever driving.

Octavia E Butler’s Alien Verdict

Not Judith Buthler. In the opening of Dawn, the Oankali tell Lilith: “You committed mass suicide.” The charge erases distinctions between perpetrators, victims, resisters, and bystanders. From their vantage, humanity is one agent, one will. A neat explanation – but a flattening nonetheless.

👉 Full essay: On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Why Feltham Matters

Even if one resists his alignment of depression with truth, Feltham’s work is valuable as a counterweight to the cult of positivity. It reminds us that much of what we call “mental health” or “progress” depends on not seeing too clearly the futility, fragility, and cruelty that structure our world.

Where he sees darkness as revelation, I see it as atmosphere: the medium in which we always already move. To keep ourselves in the dark is not just to lie to ourselves, but to continue walking the tracks of a train whose destination we do not control. Feltham’s bleak realism, like Butler’s alien rebuke or Sartre’s burden of freedom, presses us to recognise that what we call “agency” may itself be part of the dream.

On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, quote, science, sexuality, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve been working through the opening chapters of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. At one point, the alien Jdahya tells Lilith, “We watched you commit mass suicide.”*

The line unsettles not because of the apocalypse itself, but because of what it presumes: that “humanity” acted as one, as if billions of disparate lives could be collapsed into a single decision. A few pulled triggers, a few applauded, some resisted despite the odds, and most simply endured. From the alien vantage, nuance vanishes. A species is judged by its outcome, not by the uneven distribution of responsibility that produced it.

This is hardly foreign to us. Nationalism thrives on the same flattening. We won the war. We lost the match. A handful act; the many claim the glory or swallow the shame by association. Sartre takes it further with his “no excuses” dictum, even to do nothing is to choose. Howard Zinn’s “You can’t remain neutral on a moving train” makes the same move, cloaked in the borrowed authority of physics. Yet relativity undermines it: on the train, you are still; on the ground, you are moving. Whether neutrality is possible depends entirely on your frame of reference.

What all these formulations share is a kind of metaphysical inflation. “Agency” is treated as a universal essence, something evenly spread across the human condition. But in practice, it is anything but. Most people are not shaping history; they are being dragged along by it.

One might sketch the orientations toward the collective “apple cart” like this:

  • Tippers with a vision: the revolutionaries, ideologues, or would-be prophets who claim to know how the cart should be overturned.
  • Sycophants: clinging to the side, riding the momentum of others’ power, hoping for crumbs.
  • Egoists: indifferent to the cart’s fate, focused on personal comfort, advantage, or escape.
  • Stabilisers: most people, clinging to the cart as it wobbles, preferring continuity to upheaval.
  • Survivors: those who endure, waiting out storms, not out of “agency” but necessity.

The Stabilisers and Survivors blur into the same crowd, the former still half-convinced their vote between arsenic and cyanide matters, the latter no longer believing the story at all. They resemble Seligman’s shocked dogs, conditioned to sit through pain because movement feels futile.

And so “humanity” never truly acts as one. Agency is uneven, fragile, and often absent. Yet whether in Sartre’s philosophy, Zinn’s slogans, or Jdahya’s extraterrestrial indictment, the temptation is always to collapse plurality into a single will; you chose this, all of you. It is neat, rhetorically satisfying, and yet wrong.

Perhaps Butler’s aliens, clinical in their judgment, are simply holding up a mirror to the fictions we already tell about ourselves.

As an aside, this version of the book cover is risible. Not to devolve into identity politics, but Lilith is a dark-skinned woman, not a pale ginger. I can only assume that some target science fiction readers have a propensity to prefer white, sapphic adjacent characters.

I won’t even comment further on the faux 3D title treatment, relic of 1980s marketing.

* Spoiler Alert: As this statement about mass suicide is a Chapter 2 event, I am not inclined to consider it a spoiler. False alarm.

★★★★★ Notes from the Undiagnosed

Posted in fiction, identity, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A Love Letter to Inertia, Spite, and Self-Sabotage

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is less a novel and more a spiritual colonoscopy — invasive, squirm-inducing, and uncomfortably revealing. The narrator? A prickly, obsessive proto-incel with a superiority complex and the emotional range of a trapped mole. But good god, he’s brilliant.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The first half is all grandiose spleen-venting — a scorched-earth takedown of reason, utopia, and the basic idea that people want what’s good for them. The second half, though, is where the magic happens: watch a man humiliate himself in real time and then monologue about it like it’s a TED Talk. By the time he’s insulting Liza while simultaneously begging her to save him, you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw the book across the room. I did all three.

If you’ve read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, you’ll see the contrast. Tolstoy’s man realises too late that his “good life” was a sham; Dostoevsky’s never even gets that far. He knows from the start, and that’s the tragedy. The one dies of repression; the other lives by gnawing on his own leg.

I’ve cross-posted a longer treatment on Ridley Park’s Blog.

Notes from the Underground

The Enlightenment Sleight of Hand

Posted in agency, free will, identity, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, power, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

How Reason Inherited God’s Metaphysics.

The Enlightenment, we are told, was the age of Reason. A radiant exorcism of superstition. Out went God. Out went angels, miracles, saints, indulgences. All that frothy medieval sentiment was swept aside by a brave new world of logic, science, and progress. Or so the story goes.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

But look closer, and you’ll find that Reason didn’t kill God—it absorbed Him. The Enlightenment didn’t abandon metaphysics. It merely privatised it.

From Confessional to Courtroom

We like to imagine that the Enlightenment was a clean break from theology. But really, it was a semantic shell game. The soul was rebranded as the self. Sin became crime. Divine judgement was outsourced to the state.

We stopped praying for salvation and started pleading not guilty.

The entire judicial apparatus—mens rea, culpability, desert, retribution—is built on theological scaffolding. The only thing missing is a sermon and a psalm.

Where theology had the guilty soul, Enlightenment law invented the guilty mind—mens rea—a notion so nebulous it requires clairvoyant jurors to divine intention from action. And where the Church offered Hell, the state offers prison. It’s the same moral ritual, just better lit.

Galen Strawson and the Death of Moral Responsibility

Enter Galen Strawson, that glowering spectre at the feast of moral philosophy. His Basic Argument is elegantly devastating:

  1. You do what you do because of the way you are.
  2. You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are.
  3. Therefore, you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

Unless you are causa sui—the cause of yourself, an unmoved mover in Calvin Klein—you cannot be held truly responsible. Free will collapses, moral responsibility evaporates, and retributive justice is exposed as epistemological theatre.

In this light, our whole legal structure is little more than rebranded divine vengeance. A vestigial organ from our theocratic past, now enforced by cops instead of clerics.

The Modern State: A Haunted House

What we have, then, is a society that has denied the gods but kept their moral logic. We tossed out theology, but we held onto metaphysical concepts like intent, desert, and blame—concepts that do not survive contact with determinism.

We are living in the afterglow of divine judgement, pretending it’s sunlight.

Nietzsche saw it coming, of course. He warned that killing God would plunge us into existential darkness unless we had the courage to also kill the values propped up by His corpse. We did the first bit. We’re still bottling it on the second.

If Not Retribution, Then What?

Let’s be clear: no one’s suggesting we stop responding to harm. But responses should be grounded in outcomes, not outrage.

Containment, not condemnation.

Prevention, not penance.

Recalibration, not revenge.

We don’t need “justice” in the retributive sense. We need functional ethics, rooted in compassion and consequence, not in Bronze Age morality clumsily duct-taped to Enlightenment reason.

The Risk of Letting Go

Of course, this is terrifying. The current system gives us moral closure. A verdict. A villain. A vanishing point for our collective discomfort.

Abandoning retribution means giving that up. It means accepting that there are no true villains—only configurations of causes. That punishment is often revenge in drag. That morality itself might be a control mechanism, not a universal truth.

But if we’re serious about living in a post-theological age, we must stop playing dress-up with divine concepts. The Enlightenment didn’t finish the job. It changed the costumes, kept the plot, and called it civilisation.

It’s time we staged a rewrite.

Speculative Philosophy on Screen: Identity, Agency, and the Fiction of Reality

Posted in agency, fiction, free will, identity, language, philosophy, postmodernism, psychology, reality, science, society, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Close-up of a human eye with digital glitch effects and overlaid text reading 'What if reality is wrong?'—a visual metaphor for distorted perception and unreliable truth.

Regular readers know I often write about identity, free will, and the narrative constraints of language. But I also explore these ideas through fiction, under the name Ridley Park.

In this short video, I unpack the philosophical motivations behind my stories, including:

  • Why reality is never as it seems
  • Why the self is a narrative convenience
  • What Heidegger’s Geworfenheit and Galen Strawson’s Causa Sui argument reveal about agency
  • And why language fails us – even when we think it serves

This isn’t promotional fluff. It’s epistemological dissent in a new format. Fictional, yes, but only in the sense that most of reality is, too.

▶️ Watch the video: Why I Write the Way I Do

Unwilling Steelman, Part V

Posted in agency, free will, identity, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, scienceTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

You Cannot Originate Yourself

The causa sui argument, and the final collapse of moral responsibility

“If you cannot cause yourself, you cannot cause your choices.
And if you cannot cause your choices, you cannot own them.”

Audio: NotenookLM podcast on this topic.

Everything until now has pointed to erosion:

  • Your choices are state-dependent.
  • Your identity is cumulative, not authored.
  • Your evaluations are judged by compromised observers.

But here, finally, we strike at the bedrock.

It isn’t merely that you are manipulated.
It isn’t merely that you are misperceived.
It’s that you never could have been free, even in theory.

Because you did not make yourself.

The Causa Sui Problem

To be ultimately morally responsible, you must be the origin of who you are.

  • You must have chosen your disposition.
  • You must have selected your values.
  • You must have designed your will.

But you didn’t.

You emerged:

  • With a particular genetic cocktail.
  • Into a particular historical moment.
  • Through particular developmental experiences.
  • With particular neurological quirks and vulnerabilities.

And at no point did you step outside yourself to say:

“I would like to be this kind of agent, with this kind of character.”

You were thrown — as Heidegger might say — into a situation not of your choosing, with equipment you didn’t request, subject to pressures you couldn’t anticipate.

And everything you think of as “yours” — your courage, your laziness, your generosity, your rage — is the unfolding of that original unchosen situation.

No Escape via Reflexivity

Some will protest:

“But I can reflect! I can change myself!”

But this, too, is a mirage.

Because:

  • The desire to reflect is conditioned.
  • The capacity to reflect is conditioned.
  • The courage to act on reflection is conditioned.

You didn’t author your ability to self-correct.
You simply inherited it — like a river inheriting a particular gradient.

Even your rebellion is written in your blueprint.

Freedom by Degrees Is Not Freedom

The compatibilist fallback — that freedom is just “acting according to oneself” — collapses under causa sui.

Because the self that acts was never authored. It was configured by prior causes.

If you cannot be the cause of yourself,
then you cannot be the cause of your actions in any ultimate sense.

Thus:

  • No ultimate credit for your virtues.
  • No ultimate blame for your vices.
  • Only causal flow, chemical procession, narrative stitching after the fact.

The criminal and the saint are both unlucky configurations of biology and circumstance.

TL;DR: No Self, No Sovereignty

  • To be responsible, you must be causa sui — the cause of yourself.
  • You are not.
  • Therefore, you are not ultimately responsible for your actions.
  • Therefore, free will — as traditionally imagined — does not exist.

There is choice.
But there is no chooser behind the choice.
Only the momentum of prior conditions, impersonating agency.

Series Summary: Unwilling Steelmen

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy

What remains, if not free will?
Something perhaps stranger — and possibly, more humane:

A universe of actors who deserve understanding, but not blame.
Compassion, but not judgment.
Help, but not hagiography.