Tag: justice

The Felt Beneath the Table

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Fairness, Commensurability, and the Quiet Violence of Comparison

Fairness and Commensurability as Preconditions of Retributive Justice

This is the final part of a 3-part series. Read parts 1 and 2 for a fuller context.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Before the Cards Are Dealt

Two people invoke fairness. They mean opposite things. Both are sincere. Neither can prove the other wrong. This is not a failure of argument. It is fairness working exactly as designed.

Before justice can weigh anything, it must first decide that the things being weighed belong on the same scale. That single move โ€“ the assertion that comparison is even possible โ€“ quietly does most of the work.

Most people think justice begins at sentencing, or evidence, or procedure. But the real work happens earlier, in a space so normalised it has become invisible. Before any evaluation occurs, the system must install the infrastructure that makes evaluation legible at all.

That infrastructure rests on two foundations:

  • fairness, which supplies the rhetoric, and
  • commensurability, which supplies the mathematics.

Together, they form the felt beneath the table โ€“ the surface on which the cards can be dealt at all.

1. Why Fairness Is Always Claimed, Never Found

Letโ€™s be precise about what fairness is not.

Fairness is not a metric. You cannot measure it, derive it, or point to it in the world.

Fairness is not a principle with determinate content. It generates no specific obligations, no falsifiable predictions, no uniquely correct outcomes.

Fairness is an effect. It appears after assessment, not before it. It is what you call an outcome when you want it to feel inevitable.

Competing Fairness Is Not a Problem

Consider how disputes actually unfold:

  • The prosecutor says a long sentence is fair because it is proportional to harm.
  • The defender says a shorter sentence is fair because it reflects culpability and circumstance.
  • The victim says any sentence is unfair because nothing restores what was taken.
  • The community says enforcement itself is unfair because it predictably targets certain groups.

Each claim is sincere. None can be resolved by fairness itself.

That is because fairness has no independent content. It does not decide between these positions. It names them once the system has already decided which will prevail. This is not a bug. It is the feature.

A Fluid Masquerading as an Invariant

In the language of the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, fairness is a Fluid โ€“ a concept whose boundaries shift with context and use โ€“ that masquerades as an Invariant, something stable and observer-independent.

The system treats fairness as perceptual, obvious, discoverable. But every attempt to anchor it collapses into:

  • Intuition (โ€˜It just feels rightโ€™)
  • Precedent (โ€˜This is how we do thingsโ€™)
  • Consensus (โ€˜Most people agreeโ€™)

None of these establishes fairness. They merely perform it.

And that performance matters. It converts contested metaphysical commitments into the appearance of shared values. It allows institutions to claim neutrality whilst enforcing specificity. Fairness is what the system says when it wants its outputs to feel unavoidable.

2. The Real Gatekeeper: Commensurability

Fairness does rhetorical work. But it cannot function without something deeper.

That something is commensurability: the assumption that different harms, injuries, and values can be placed on a shared scale and meaningfully compared.

Proportionality presupposes commensurability. Commensurability presupposes an ontology of value. And that ontology is neither neutral nor shared.

When Incommensurability Refuses to Cooperate

A parent loses a child to preventable negligence. A corporation cuts safety corners. A warning is ignored. The system moves. Liability is established. Damages are calculated. ยฃ250,000 is awarded.

The parent refuses the settlement. Not because the amount is insufficient. But because money and loss are not the same kind of thing. The judge grows impatient. Lawyers speak of closure. Observers mutter about grief clouding judgment. But this is not grief. It is incommensurability refusing to cooperate.

The parent is rejecting the comparison itself. Accepting payment would validate the idea that a childโ€™s life belongs on a scale with currency. The violence is not the number. It is the conversion. The system cannot process this refusal except as emotional excess or procedural obstruction. Not because it is cruel, but because without commensurability the engine cannot calculate.

Two Ontologies of Value

There are two incompatible ontologies at work here. Only one is playable.

Ontology A: The Scalar Model
  • Harm is quantifiable
  • Suffering is comparable
  • Trade-offs are morally coherent
  • Justice is a balancing operation

Under Ontology A, harms differ in degree, not kind. A broken arm, a stolen car, and a dead child all occupy points on the same continuum. This makes proportionality possible.

Ontology B: The Qualitative Model
  • Harms are categorical
  • Some losses are incommensurable
  • Comparison itself distorts
  • Justice is interpretive, not calculative

Under Ontology B, harms are different kinds of things. Comparison flattens what matters. To weigh them is to misunderstand them.

Why Only One Ontology Can Play

Retributive justice, as presently constituted, cannot function under Ontology B.

Without scalar values, proportionality collapses. Without comparison, equivalence disappears. Without trade-offs, punishment has no exchange rate.

Ontology B is not defeated. It is disqualified. Structurally, procedurally, rhetorically. The house needs a shared scale. Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.

3. Why Incommensurability Is Treated as Bad Faith

Here is where power enters without announcing itself. Incommensurability does not merely complicate disputes. It stalls the engine. And stalled engines threaten institutional legitimacy.

Systems designed to produce closure must ensure that disputes remain within solvable bounds. Incommensurability violates those bounds. It suggests that resolution may be impossible โ€“ or that the attempt to resolve does further harm. So the system reframes the problem.

Not as an alternative ontology, but as:

  • Unreasonableness
  • Extremism
  • Emotional volatility
  • Refusal to engage in good faith

Reasonableness as Border Control

This is why reasonableness belongs where it does in the model. Not as an evaluative principle, but as a gatekeeping mechanism.

Reasonableness does not assess claims. It determines which claims count as claims at all. This is how commensurability enforces itself without admitting it is doing so. When someone refuses comparison, they are not told their ontology is incompatible with retributive justice. They are told to be realistic.

Ontological disagreement is converted into:

  • A tone problem
  • A personality defect
  • A failure to cooperate

The disagreement is not answered. It is pathologised.

4. Why These Debates Never Resolve

This returns us to the Ontologyโ€“Encounterโ€“Evaluation model.

People argue fairness as if adjusting weights would fix the scale. They debate severity, leniency, proportionality.

But when two sides inhabit incompatible ontologies of value, no amount of evidence or dialogue bridges the gap. The real disagreement is upstream.

A prosecutor operating under scalar harm and an advocate operating under incommensurable injury are not disagreeing about facts. They are disagreeing about what kind of thing harm is.

Fairness cannot resolve this, because fairness presupposes the very comparison under dispute. This is why reform debates feel sincere and go nowhere. Outcomes are argued whilst ontological commitments remain invisible.

Remediation Requires Switching Teams

As argued elsewhere, remediation increasingly requires switching teams.

But these are not political teams. They are ontological commitments.

Ontologies are not held like opinions. They are held like grammar. You do not argue someone out of them. At best, you expose their costs. At worst, you force others to operate within yours by disqualifying alternatives.

Retributive justice does the latter.

5. What This Means (Without Offering a Fix)

Justice systems are not broken. They are optimised. They are optimised for closure, manageability, and the appearance of neutrality. Fairness supplies the rhetoric. Commensurability supplies the mathematics. Together, they convert contestable metaphysical wagers into procedural common sense.

That optimisation has costs:

  • Disagreements about value become illegible
  • Alternative ontologies become unplayable
  • Dissent becomes pathology
  • Foundations disappear from view

If justice feels fair, it is because the comparisons required to question it were never permitted.

Ontology as Pre-emptive Gatekeeping

None of this requires conspiracy.

Institutions do not consciously enforce ontologies. They do not need to.

They educate them. Normalise them. Proceduralise them. Then treat their rejection as irrationality.

By the time justice is invoked, the following have already been installed as reality:

  • That persons persist over time in morally relevant ways
  • That agents meaningfully choose under conditions that count
  • That harms can be compared and offset
  • That responsibility can be localised
  • That disagreement beyond a point is unreasonable

None of these are discovered. All are rehearsed.

A law student learns that โ€˜the reasonable personโ€™ is a construct. By year three, they use it fluently. It no longer feels constructed.

This is not indoctrination. It is fluency.

And fluency is how ontologies hide.

By the time an alternative appears โ€“ episodic selfhood, incommensurable harm, distributed agency โ€“ it does not look like metaphysics. It looks like confusion.

Rationality as Border Control

The system does not say: we reject your ontology.

It says: thatโ€™s not how the world works.

Or worse: youโ€™re being unreasonable.

Ontological disagreement is reframed as a defect in the person. And defects do not need answers. They need management.

This is why some arguments feel impossible to have. One ontology has been naturalised into common sense. The other has been reclassified as error.

The Final Irony

The more fragile the foundations, the more aggressively they must be defended as self-evident.

  • Free will is taught as obvious.
  • Fairness is invoked as perceptual.
  • Responsibility is treated as observable.
  • Incommensurability is treated as sabotage.

Not because the system is confident.

Because it cannot afford not to be.

The Point

Justice does not merely rely on asserted ontologies. It expends enormous effort ensuring they never appear asserted at all.

By the time the cards are dealt, the rules have already been mistaken for reality. That is the felt beneath the table. Invisible. Essential. Doing all the work. And if you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you do not start with outcomes. You start by asking:

What comparisons are we being asked to accept as natural? And what happens to those who refuse?

Most people never make that move. Not because it is wrong. But because by the time you notice the game is rigged, you are already fluent in its rules. And fluency feels like truth.

Final Word

Why write these assessments? Why care?

With casinos, like cricket, we understand something fundamental: these are games. We can learn the rules. We can decide whether to play. We can walk away.

Justice is different. Justice is not opt-in. It is imposed. You do not get to negotiate the rules, the scoring system, or the house assumptions about what counts as a move. Once you are inside, even dissent must be expressed in the systemโ€™s own grammar. Appeals do not question the game; they replay it under slightly altered conditions.

You may contest the outcome. You may plead for leniency. You may argue fairness. You may not ask why chips are interchangeable with lives, why losses must be comparable, or why refusing comparison itself counts as misconduct.

Imagine being forced into a casino. Forced to play. Forced to stake things you do not believe are wagerable. Then told, when you object, that the problem is not the game, but your attitude toward it.

That is why these assessments matter. Not to declare justice illegitimate. Not to offer a fix. But to make visible the rules that pretend not to be rules at all. Because once you mistake fluency for truth, the house no longer needs to rig the game.

You will do it for them.

Footnotes from the House: Justice as a Casino Game

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
4โ€“6 minutes

This is part 2 of a structural critique of Justiceโ„ข. Read Part 1, The Ontologyโ€“Encounterโ€“Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation.

If you want a useful metaphor for how justice actually operates, donโ€™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 donโ€™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
โ€“ 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 โ€“ 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 โ€“ Parfitโ€™s reductionism, trauma-fractured identity, or situational selfhood โ€“ 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 โ€“ 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 โ€“ upbringing, coercion, impairment โ€“ 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 โ€“ poverty gradients, addiction loops, survival trade-offs โ€“ 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 โ€“ economic pressure, cultural narratives, institutional design โ€“ 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 theyโ€™re false, but because they disrupt cadence.

This ontology stabilises the game by disciplining tone. It doesnโ€™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 โ€“ 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. Thatโ€™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 donโ€™t start with sentencing guidelines or evidentiary thresholds. You start by asking which ontologies are being asserted โ€“ and why alternatives are unplayable.

Most people wonโ€™t make that move. Not because itโ€™s wrong. Because it requires leaving the table.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Ontologyโ€“Encounterโ€“Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
7โ€“10 minutes

Now that A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has been put to bed โ€” not euthanised, just sedated โ€” 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. Itโ€™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 โ€œconstructedโ€. That concession is easy. What is less comfortable is seeing how it is constructed โ€” 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 โ€” once you see how much is doing quiet, exogenous work โ€” 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 youโ€™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.

โ€œJusticeโ€ 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 โ€” cases where a word has multiple, well-understood meanings that can be disambiguated with minimal friction. That kind of ambiguity is boring. Itโ€™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.

โ€œJusticeโ€ 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 โ€” 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 โ€” typically an action involving alleged harm โ€” 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 โ€” episodic selves, radically distributed agency, non-volitional action โ€” are not debated. They are excluded.

This is the first โ€œhappy pathโ€.

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 โ€œfactsโ€ 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 โ€” justice, fairness, responsibility, intent โ€” are being used across incompatible ontological commitments. The vocabulary overlaps; the worlds do not.

The engine runs smoothly. It just doesnโ€™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 โ€œreasonablenessโ€ and โ€œfairnessโ€ 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 Iโ€™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 youโ€™ve just walked through carries a set of suppressed footnotes. They donโ€™t sit at the margins because theyโ€™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, Iโ€™ll unpack those footnotes one by one: where the forks are, which branch the system selects, and why the alternativesโ€”while often coherentโ€”are rendered unintelligible, irresponsible, or simply โ€œunreasonableโ€ once the engine is in motion.

Thatโ€™s where justice stops looking inevitable and starts looking parochial.

And thatโ€™s also where persuasion quietly gives up.

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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
4โ€“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) isnโ€™t especially interested in whether people disagree. Itโ€™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 youโ€™re accused of moral relativism. Pull a third and someone mentions cavemen.

Letโ€™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 โ€“ Enchantment

The argument begins innocently enough:

They chose to do it.

But โ€œchoiceโ€ here is not an empirical description. Itโ€™s a stipulation. It doesnโ€™t mean โ€œa decision occurred in a nervous system under constraints.โ€ 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 isnโ€™t clean, then something else must do the moral work.

Enter the next card.

Card Two: Agency

Image: MTG: Agency โ€“ Creature โ€“ Illusion

Agency is wheeled in to stabilise choice. We are reassured that humans are agents in a morally relevant sense, and therefore choice โ€œcountsโ€.

Counts for what, exactly, is rarely specified.

Under scrutiny, โ€œagencyโ€ 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. Itโ€™s semantic laundering.

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

Card Three: Responsibility

Image: MTG: Responsibility โ€“ Enchantment โ€“ Curse

Responsibility is where the emotional payload arrives.

To say someone is โ€œresponsibleโ€ sounds administrative, even boring. In practice, itโ€™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, โ€œresponsibilityโ€ 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 โ€“ Instant

Desert is the most mystical card in the deck.

Nothing observable changes when someone โ€œdeservesโ€ 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 โ€“ Enchantment

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

It isnโ€™t.

โ€œJusticeโ€ 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 โ€œfocus on the factsโ€ 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.
โ€œFrom each according to his ability, to each according to his needโ€ isnโ€™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 doesnโ€™t tell you which ontology to adopt.

It tells you why the argument never ends.

And why, if someone insists the issue is โ€œjust semanticโ€, theyโ€™re either confusedโ€”or holding the deck.

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Written by Bry Willis with ChatGPT 5.2

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PhilSurvey: What is the aim of philosophy?

Posted in language, modernism, nature, ontology, perception, philosophy, reality, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2โ€“3 minutes

I commenced a series where I discuss the responses to the 2020 PhilPapers survey of almost 1,800 professional philosophers. This continues that conversation with questions 2 through 4 โ€“ in reverse order, not that it matters. Each is under 5 minutes; some are under 3.

For the main choices, you are given 4 options regarding the proposal:

  • Accept
  • Lean towards
  • Reject
  • Lean against

Besides the available choices, accepted answers for any of the questions were items, such as:

  • Combinations (specify which.)
    For the combos, you might Accept A and Reject B, so you can capture that here.
  • Alternate view (not entirely useful unless the view has already been catalogued)
  • The question is too unclear to answer
  • There is no fact of the matter (the question is fundamentally bollocks)
  • Agnostic/undecided
  • Other

Q4: The first one asks, ‘What is the aim of philosophy?’ Among the responses were:

  • Truth/Knowledge
  • Understanding
  • Wisdom
  • Happiness
  • Goodness/Justice

Before you watch the video, how might you respond?

Video: What is the aim of philosophy?

Q3: What’s your position on aesthetic value?

  • Objective
  • Subjective
Video: What is aesthetic value?

Q2: What’s your position on abstract objects?

  • Platonism (these objects exist “out there” in or beyond the world)
  • Nominalism (the objects are human constructs)
Video: Where do abstract objects reside?

Q1: What’s your position on ร  priori knowledge?

This video response was an earlier post, so find it there. This is asking if you believe one can have any knowledge apart from experience.

  • Yes
  • No

NB: I’ve recorded ten of these segments already, but they require editing. So I’ll release them as I wrap them up. Not that I’ve completed them, I realise I should have explained what the concepts mean more generally instead of talking around the topics in my preferred response. There are so many philosophy content sites, I feel this general information is already available, or by search, or even via an LLM.

What do you think โ€“ should I?

In the other hand, many of these sites โ€“ and I visit and enjoy them โ€“ support very conservative, orthodox views that, as I say, don’t seem to have progressed much beyond 1840 โ€“ Kant and a dash of Hegel, but all founded on Aristotelian ideas, some 2,500 years ago.

Spoiler alert, I think knowledge has advanced and disproved a lot of this. It turns out my brothers in arms don’t necessarily agree. Always the rebel, I suppose.

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Written by Bry Willis

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MEOW GPT FeedbackOn Testing MEOW GPT (And the Delicate Souls It Might Upset)

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3โ€“4 minutes

A surprising number of people have been using the MEOW GPT I released into the wild. Naturally, I canโ€™t see how anyone is actually using it, which is probably for the best. If you hand someone a relational ontology and they treat it like a BuzzFeed quiz, thatโ€™s on them. Still, I havenโ€™t received any direct feedback, positive or catastrophic, which leaves me wondering whether users understand the results or are simply nodding like priests reciting Latin they donโ€™t believe.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The truth is uncomfortable: if you havenโ€™t grasped the Mediated Encounter Ontology (of the World), the outputs may feel like a philosophical brick to the face. Theyโ€™re meant to; mediation has consequences. Iโ€™m even considering adding a warning label:

If you hold an unwavering commitment to a concept with any philosophical weight, perhaps donโ€™t input it. There is a non-zero chance the illusion will shatter.

Below is a sampling of the concepts I tested while inspecting the systemโ€™s behaviour. Iโ€™m withholding the outputs, partly to avoid influencing new users and partly to preserve your dignity, such as it is.

  • authenticity
  • anattฤ (Buddhist)
  • character (in Aristotleโ€™s virtue-ethical sense)
  • consciousness
  • dignity
  • freedom
  • hรณzhรณ (Navajo)
  • justice
  • karma
  • love
  • progress
  • ren ( ไป )
  • table
  • tree
  • truth

I may have tried others, depending on how irritated I was with the world at the time.

(Now that I think of it, I entered my full name and witnessed it nearly have an aneurysm.)

My purpose in trying these is (obviously) to test the GPT. As part of the test, I wanted to test terms I already considered to be weasel words. I also wanted to test common terms (table) and terms outside of Western modalities. I learned something about the engine in each case.

Tables & Trees

One of the first surprises was the humble ‘table’ which, according to the engine, apparently moonlights across half of civilisationโ€™s conceptual landscape. If you input ‘table’, you get everything from dinner tables to data tables to parliamentary procedure. The model does exactly what it should: it presents the full encounter-space and waits for you to specify which world you meant to inhabit.

The lesson: if you mean a table you eat dinner on, say so. Donโ€™t assume the universe is built around your implied furniture.

‘Tree’ behaves similarly. Does the user mean a birch in a forest? A branching data structure? A phylogenetic diagram? MEOW GPT wonโ€™t decide that for you; nor should it. Precision is your job.

This is precisely why I tested ‘character (in Aristotleโ€™s virtue-ethical sense)’ rather than tossing ‘character’ in like a confused undergraduate hoping for luck.

Non-Western Concepts

I also tested concepts well outside the Western philosophical sandbox. This is where the model revealed its real strength.

Enter ‘karma’: it promptly explained that the Western reduction is a cultural oversimplification and โ€“ quite rightly โ€“ flagged that different Eastern traditions use the term differently. Translation: specify your flavour.

Enter ‘anattฤ’: the model demonstrated that Western interpretations often reduce the concept to a caricature. Which, frankly, they do.

Enter ‘hรณzhรณ’: the Navajo term survives mostly in the anthropological imagination, and the model openly described it as nearly ineffable โ€“ especially to those raised in cultures that specialise in bulldozing subtlety. On that score, no notes.

Across the board, I was trying to see whether MEOW GPT would implode when confronted with concepts that resist neat Western categorisation. It didnโ€™t. It was annoyingly robust.

Closing Notes

If you do try the MEOW GPT and find its results surprising, illuminating, or mildly offensive to your metaphysical sensibilities, let me know โ€“ and tell me why. It helps me understand what the engine does well and what illusions it quietly pops along the way. Your feedback may even keep me from adding further warning labels, though I wouldnโ€™t count on it.

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Written by Bry Willis

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A Critique of Reason (Not to Be Confused with Kantโ€™s)

Posted in identity, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2โ€“3 minutes

Kant, bless him, thought he was staging the trial of Reason itself, putting the judge in the dock and asking whether the court had jurisdiction. It was a noble spectacle, high theatre of self-scrutiny. But the trick was always rigged. The presiding judge, the prosecution, the jury, the accused, all wore the same powdered wig. Unsurprisingly, Reason acquitted itself.

The Enlightenmentโ€™s central syllogism was never more than a parlour trick:

  • P1: The best path is Reason.
  • P2: I practice Reason.
  • C: Therefore, Reason is best.

Itโ€™s the self-licking ice-cream cone of intellectual history. And if you dare to object, the trap springs shut: what, you hate Reason? Then you must be irrational. Inquisitors once demanded heretics prove they werenโ€™t in league with Satan; the modern equivalent is being told youโ€™re โ€œanti-science.โ€ The categories defend themselves by anathematising doubt.

The problem is twofold:

First, Reason never guaranteed agreement. Two thinkers can pore over the same โ€œfactsโ€ and emerge with opposite verdicts, each sincerely convinced that Reason has anointed their side. In a power-laden society, it is always the stronger voice that gets to declare its reasoning the reasoning. As Dan Hind acidly observed, Reason is often nothing more than a marketing label the powerful slap on their interests.

Second, and this is the darker point, Reason itself is metaphysical, a ghost in a powdered wig. To call something โ€œrationalโ€ is already to invoke an invisible authority, as if Truth had a clerical seal. Alasdair MacIntyre was right: strip away the old rituals and youโ€™re left with fragments, not foundations.

Other witnesses have tried to say as much. Horkheimer and Adorno reminded us that Enlightenment rationality curdles into myth the moment it tries to dominate the world. Nietzsche laughed until his throat bled at the pretence of universal reason, then promptly built his own metaphysics of will. Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, dared to expose Science as what it actually is โ€“ a messy network of institutions, instruments, and politics masquerading as purity. The backlash was so swift and sanctimonious that he later called it his โ€œworstโ€ book, a public recantation that reads more like forced penance than revelation. Even those who glimpsed the scaffolding had to return to the pews.

So when we talk about โ€œReasonโ€ as the bedrock of Modernity, letโ€™s admit the joke. The bedrock was always mist. The house we built upon it is held up by ritual, inertia, and vested interest, not granite clarity. Enlightenment sold us the fantasy of a universal judge, when what we got was a self-justifying oracle. Reason is not the judge in the courtroom. Reason is the courtroom itself, and the courtroom is a carnival tent โ€“ all mirrors, no floor.

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Welcome to the Casino of Justice

Posted in equality, fiction, identity, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, science, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Welcome to the Grand Casino of Justice, where the chips are your civil liberties, the roulette wheel spins your fate, and the houseโ€”ever-smug in its powdered wig of procedural decorumโ€”always wins.

Step right up, citizens! Marvel at the dazzling illusions of “science” as performed by your local constabulary: the sacred polygraph, that magnificent artefact of 1920s snake oil, still trotted out in back rooms like a sรฉance at a nursing home. Never mind that it measures stress, not deception. Never mind that it’s been dismissed by any scientist with a functioning prefrontal cortex. It’s not there to detect truthโ€”it’s there to extract confession. Like a slot machine that only pays out when you agree you’re guilty.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

And oh, the forensic pageantry! The blacklight! The dramatic swabs! The breathless invocations of โ€œtrace evidence,โ€ โ€œblood spatter patterns,โ€ andโ€”ooh! ahh!โ€”fingerprints, those curly little whorls of manufactured certainty. Youโ€™ve been told since childhood that no two are alike, that your prints are your identity. Rubbish. Human fingerprint examiners disagree with themselves when presented with the same print twice. In blind tests. And yesโ€”this bears repeating with appropriate incredulityโ€”koalas have fingerprints so uncannily similar to ours theyโ€™ve confused human forensic analysts. Somewhere, a marsupial walks free while a teenager rots in remand.

You see, itโ€™s not about justice. Itโ€™s about control. Control through performance. The legal system, like a casino, isnโ€™t interested in fairnessโ€”itโ€™s interested in outcome. It needs to appear impartial, all robes and solemnity, while tipping the odds ever so slightly, perpetually, in its own favour. This is jurisprudence as stagecraft, science as set-dressing, and truth as a collateral casualty.

And who are the croupiers of this great charade? Not scientists, no. Scientists are too cautious, too mired in uncertainty, too concerned with falsifiability and statistical error margins. No, your case will be handled by forensic technicians with just enough training to speak jargon, and just enough institutional loyalty to believe theyโ€™re doing the Lordโ€™s work. Never mind that many forensic methodsโ€”bite mark analysis, tool mark โ€œmatching,โ€ even some blood spatter interpretationsโ€”are about as scientifically robust as a horoscope printed on a cereal box.

TV crime dramas, of course, have done their bit to embalm these myths in the cultural subconscious. โ€œCSIโ€ isnโ€™t a genreโ€”itโ€™s a sedative, reassuring the public that experts can see the truth in a hair follicle or the angle of a sneeze. In reality, most convictions hinge on shoddy analysis, flawed assumptions, and a little prosecutorial sleight of hand. But the juries are dazzled by the sciencey buzzwords, and the judgesโ€”God bless their robesโ€”rarely know a confidence interval from a cornflake.

So, what do you do when accused in the great Casino of Justice? Well, if you’re lucky, you lawyer up. If youโ€™re not, you take a plea deal, because 90% of cases never reach trial. Why? Because the system is designed not to resolve guilt, but to process bodies. It is a meat grinder that must keep grinding, and your innocence is but a small bone to be crushed underfoot.

This isn’t justice. It’s a theatre of probability management, where the goal is not truth but resolution. Efficiency. Throughput. The house keeps the lights on by feeding the machine, and forensic scienceโ€”real or imaginedโ€”is merely the window dressing. The roulette wheel spins, the dice tumble, and your future hangs on the angle of a smudge or the misreading of a galvanic skin response.

Just donโ€™t expect the koalas to testify. They’re wise enough to stay in the trees.

A Buddhist Critique of Modern Livelihoods

Posted in healthcare, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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 actโ€”shocking though it isโ€”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: Buddhismโ€™s Path to Ethical Livelihood

Buddhismโ€™s Eightfold Path provides a blueprint for ethical living, with Right Livelihood and Right Action serving as its ethical cornerstones. These principles demand that oneโ€™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 industryโ€™s business modelโ€”which often prioritises profits over the preservation of lifeโ€”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 othersโ€”both legal and illegalโ€”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 tradeโ€”arguably the most egregious exampleโ€”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 itโ€™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 gangโ€™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 livingโ€”a vision that demands courage, compassion, and unwavering commitment to the common good.

Conclusion: Choosing a Better Path

The case of Brian Thompsonโ€™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 of For-Profit Healthcare:

Posted in economics, healthcare, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Loops of Death and Denial

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. Letโ€™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 hereโ€™s the twist: the trolley doesnโ€™t just pass once in this versionโ€”itโ€™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 isnโ€™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. Itโ€™s not a single moral quandary; itโ€™s a recurring decision, a relentless calculus of death versus dollars.

This isnโ€™t just a metaphor; itโ€™s a business model. For-profit healthcare doesnโ€™t merely tolerate deathโ€”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 cycleโ€”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 Thompsonโ€™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 shooterโ€™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 billsโ€”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 theyโ€™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 shooterโ€™s act is direct and visceral, while the systemโ€™s violence is passive and bureaucratic, rendered almost invisible by its banality.

A System Built on Death

Letโ€™s not mince words: the current healthcare system is a death loop. Itโ€™s not an accident; itโ€™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 doโ€”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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Hold the System Accountable: Itโ€™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 systemโ€”and by extension, capitalism itselfโ€”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 isnโ€™t whoโ€™s at the lever; itโ€™s why the trolley is running at all.