Yes, I am still focusing on writing my ontology papers, but I still come up for air. Over lunch, I found this: Jonny Thomson showcasing Judge Coleridge: The Duty. Watch it.
Video: Philosophy Minis: Judge Coleridge: The Duty
This really got my hamster wheel cranking. In fact, it gave me another essay idea mired in formal logic. Yuck, I know.
My brief post here is to share this and ask why I don’t share ‘positive’ posts. Pretty much everything is critical. For one, it’s how my brain works. For two, I don’t really know.
When I see something, I instantly want to tear it apart, not for the sake of malice but because my mind registers it as WTAF?
In short, the judge says that one cannot privilege one’s own life over others. Of course, this got my hamster on steroids, considering the implication: does this invalidate self-defence? Wouldn’t it? 🧐
The answer is yes – but only if Law were tethered to Morality, which it isn’t. This will be my essay. Who knows when I’ll have time to write it? Please, stand by. Cheers.
What are your thoughts? Maybe I’ll share this as a video response on YouTube and TikTok. Time will tell – and it evidently heals all wounds.
I want to clarify my recent The Trouble with Facts post. I realise that I was speaking to one non-trivial form of facts, but there is more than one class of facts. We argue about facts as if the word named a single, stable thing. It doesn’t. It names a family of very different things, quietly grouped together by habit, convenience, and institutional need. Most disputes about facts go nowhere, not because one side is irrational, but because the word itself is doing covert work. We slide between meanings without noticing, then act surprised when disagreement follows. This piece is an attempt to slow that slide.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Polysemy We Notice, Polysemy We Don’t
We are comfortable with ambiguity when it is obvious. A bank can be a financial institution or the edge of a river. A bat can be an animal or a piece of sports equipment. Context resolves these instantly. No one feels existentially threatened by the ambiguity.
Fact is different. The word is polysemous in a way that is both subtle and consequential. Its meanings sit close enough to bleed into one another, allowing certainty from one sense to be smuggled into another without detection. Calling something a fact does not merely describe it. It confers authority. It signals that questioning should stop. That is why this ambiguity matters.
Different Kinds of Facts
Before critiquing facts, we need to sort them.
1. Event-facts (brute, world-facing) As mentioned previously, these concern what happens in the world, independent of observation.
A car collides with a tree.
Momentum changes.
Metal deforms.
These events occur whether or not anyone notices them. They are ontologically robust and epistemically inaccessible. No one ever encounters them directly. We only ever encounter traces.
2. Indexical or performative facts (trivial, self-reporting) “I am typing.”
I am doing this now – those now may not be relevant when you read this. This is a fact, but a very thin one. Its authority comes from the coincidence of saying and doing. It requires no reconstruction, no inference, no institutional validation. These facts are easy because they do almost no work.
3. Retrospective personal facts (memory-mediated) “I was typing.”
This may be relevant now, at least relative to the typing of this particular post. Still a fact, but weaker. Memory enters. Narrative compression enters. Selectivity enters. The same activity now carries a different epistemic status purely because time has passed.
4. Prospective statements (modal, not yet facts) “I will be typing.”
This is not yet a fact. It may never come to be one. It is an intention or prediction that may or may not be realised. Future-tense claims are often treated as incipient facts, but this is a category error with real consequences.
5. Institutional facts (designated, procedural) “The court finds…” “The report concludes…”
These are facts by designation. They are not discovered so much as selected, formalised, and stabilised so that systems can act. They are unlikely to rise to the level of facts, so the legal system tends to generate facts in name only – FINO, if I am being cute.
All of these are called ‘facts’. They are not interchangeable. The trouble begins when certainty migrates illicitly from trivial or institutional facts into brute event-facts, and we pretend nothing happened in the transfer.
One Motor Vehicle
Reconsider the deliberately simple case: A motor vehicle collides with a tree. Trees are immobile, so we can rule out the tree colliding with the car.
Ontologically, something happened. Reality did not hesitate. But even here, no one has direct access to the event itself.
The driver does not enjoy privileged access. They experience shock, adrenaline, attentional narrowing, selective memory, post hoc rationalisation, perhaps a concussion. Already several layers intervene before language even arrives.
A rough schema looks like this:
event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation
Ontology concerns what happens. Epistemology concerns how anything becomes assertable.
Modern thinking collapses the second into the first and calls the result the facts.
People speak of “hard facts” as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by proximity. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is an artefact assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement.
And so it goes…
Why the Confusion Persists
When someone responds, “But isn’t it a fact that I read this?”, the answer is yes. A different kind of fact.
The error lies not in affirming facts, but in failing to distinguish them. The word fact allows certainty to migrate across categories unnoticed, from trivial self-reports to brute world-events, and from institutional verdicts to metaphysical claims. That migration is doing the work.
Conclusion
Clarifying types of facts does not weaken truth. It prevents us from laundering certainty where it does not belong.
Facts exist. Events occur. But they do not arrive unmediated, innocent, or singular.
Reality happens once. Facts happen many times.
The mistake was never that facts are unreal. It was believing they were all the same kind of thing.
The quickest way to derail any discussion of morality is to accuse someone of believing that ‘everything is relative’, so let’s start there. It’s a comforting accusation. It allows the accuser to stop thinking whilst feeling victorious. Unfortunately, it also misses the point almost entirely.
I am not claiming that everything is relative. I am claiming that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are. More precisely, this particular binary pair does not track mind-independent properties of actions, but rather expresses subjective, relational, and power-inflected evaluations that arise within specific social contexts. That claim is not radical. It is merely inconvenient.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Good and Bad as Signals, Not Properties
When someone calls an action ‘bad’, they are not reporting a fact about the world in the way one might report temperature or velocity. They are signalling disapproval. Sometimes that disapproval is personal (subjective: ‘this sits badly with me’), sometimes social (relative: ‘people like us don’t do this’), and sometimes delegated (relative: ‘this violates the norms I’ve inherited and enforce’. The word does not describe. It acts.
The same applies to ‘good’. Approval, alignment, reassurance, permission. These terms function less like measurements and more like traffic signals. They coördinate behaviour. They reduce uncertainty. They warn, reward, and deter.
None of this requires moral scepticism, nihilism, or adolescent contrarianism. It requires only that we notice what the words are actually doing.
The Binary That Isn’t
Defenders of moral realism often retreat to a spectrum when pressed. Very well, they say, perhaps good and bad are not binary, but scalar. Degrees of goodness. Shades of wrongness. A neutral zone somewhere in the middle.
This is an improvement only in the most cosmetic sense. A single axis still assumes commensurability: that diverse considerations can be weighed on one ruler. Intuitively, this fails almost immediately. Good in what sense? Harm reduction? Loyalty? Legality? Survival? Compassion? Social order?
These dimensions do not line up. They cross-cut. They conflict. Which brings us to the example that refuses to die, for good reason.
Stealing Bread
“I don’t mind stealing bread From the mouths of decadence But I can’t feed on the powerless When my cup’s already overfilled”
— Hunger Strike, Temple of the Dog
Consider the theft of bread by a starving person. The act is simultaneously:
bad relative to property norms
good relative to survival
bad relative to legal order
good relative to care or compassion
and neutral relative to anyone not implicated at all, even if they were to form an opinion through exposure
There is no contradiction here. The act is multi-valent. What collapses this plurality into a single verdict is not moral discovery but authority. Law, religion, and institutional power do not resolve moral complexity. They override it.
What about ‘Mercy’?
When the law says, ‘Given the circumstances, you are free to go’, what it is not saying is: this act was not wrong. What it is saying is closer to:
We are exercising discretion this time. Do not mistake that for permission. The rule still stands.
The warning survives the mercy.
That’s why even leniency functions as discipline. You leave not cleansed, but marked. Grateful, cautious, newly calibrated. The system hasn’t revised its judgment; it has merely suspended its teeth for the moment. The shadow of punishment remains, doing quiet work in advance.
This is how power maintains itself without constant enforcement. Punishment teaches. Mercy trains.
You’re released, but you’ve learned the real lesson: the act is still classified as bad from the only perspective that ultimately matters. The next time, mitigation may not be forthcoming. The next time, the collapse will be final. So yes. Even when you ‘win’, the moral arithmetic hasn’t changed. Only the immediate invoice was waived.
Which is why legality is never a reliable guide to goodness, and acquittal is never absolution. It’s conditional tolerance, extended by an authority that never stopped believing it was right.
Power as the Collapse Mechanism
When the law says, ‘There may have been mitigating circumstances, but the act was wrong and must be punished’, it is not uncovering a deeper truth. It is announcing which perspective counts.
Mitigation is a courtesy, not a concession. Complexity is acknowledged, then flattened. The final judgment is scalar because enforcement demands it. A decision must be made. A sanction must follow. The plural is reduced to the singular by necessity, not insight.
Once this happens, the direction of explanation reverses. Punishment becomes evidence of wrongness rather than evidence of power. The verdict acquires moral weight retroactively.
From Ethics to Enforcement
At the local level, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ function as ethical shorthand. They help maintain relationships, minimise friction, and manage expectations. This is not morality in any grand sense. It is coordination under conditions of attachment and risk.
Problems arise when these local prescriptions harden into universal claims. When they are codified into rules, backed by sanctions, and insulated from challenge. At that point, the costs become real. Not morally real, but materially real. Fines. Exclusion. Imprisonment. Reputational death. Nothing metaphysical has changed. Only the consequences.
The God Upgrade
Religion intensifies this process by anchoring evaluative judgments to the structure of reality itself. What was once ‘bad here, among us’ becomes ‘bad everywhere, always’ is no longer a difference in perspective but a rebellion against the order of being. This is not ethical refinement. It is power laundering through eternity.
Not Everything Is Relative
To be clear, this is not an argument that facts do not exist, or that all distinctions dissolve into mush. It is an argument that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not behave like factual predicates, and that pretending otherwise obscures how judgments are actually made and enforced.
What is not relative is the existence of power, the reality of sanctions, or the psychological mechanisms through which norms are internalised and reproduced. What is relative is the evaluative overlay we mistake for moral truth once power has done its work.
Why This Is Ignored
None of this is new. It has been said, in various forms, for centuries. It is ignored because it offers no programme, no optimisation strategy, no moral high ground. It explains without redeeming. It clarifies without consoling.
And because it is difficult to govern people who understand that moral certainty usually arrives after authority, not before.
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 – the assertion that comparison is even possible – 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 – the surface on which the cards can be dealt at all.
1. Why Fairness Is Always Claimed, Never Found
Let’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 – a concept whose boundaries shift with context and use – 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 (‘It just feels right’)
Precedent (‘This is how we do things’)
Consensus (‘Most people agree’)
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. £250,000 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 child’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 – 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 Ontology–Encounter–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 ‘the reasonable person’ 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 – episodic selfhood, incommensurable harm, distributed agency – 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: that’s not how the world works.
Or worse: you’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 system’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.
More precisely, I need less sleep and longer days – preferably twice as long. I’ve been writing almost non-stop for the better part of a week: fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, fuelled by irritation and the stubborn belief that if I just keep reading, something will finally click into place.
I’m not complaining. This is a virtuous cycle. Reading leads to writing. Writing demands more reading. Eventually, the loop closes into something that looks suspiciously like progress.
Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Still, there’s a bottleneck.
Because some of this work – the work I’m most excited about – I’m deliberately not publishing yet. Journals, bless their glacial hearts, don’t much care for prior publication. So ideas sit in limbo for six to eighteen months, locked in a room like argumentative houseplants, slowly growing sideways.
From the perspective of someone who thinks in public, this is maddening.
Now add AI to the mix.
This is where things get dangerous.
I’ll feed ChatGPT a thesis, a skeletal structure, notes, and references. I ask what I’m missing. It obliges – often helpfully – by pointing me toward adjacent thinkers and relevant literature, complete with page numbers. From there, I verify, hunt down the sources, skim, read, discard, or integrate.
And every so often, I stumble across something that makes me swear out loud.
This week, it was Bernard Williams.
I’ve cited Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before. But this time, I actually sat down and read it properly. Which immediately prompted the thought:
Why didn’t I read this sooner?
Williams dismantles moral objectivity with the calm precision of someone who knows the Enlightenment project has already lost – he just hasn’t told everyone yet. Thick and thin moral concepts, locality, non-extensibility, the collapse of universal moral reason at scale – yes, yes, yes. He published this in 1985. Fine. I’ll survive.
But then I went further.
Williams shows that morality fails between people at scale. I argue that it fails within a single person over time.
That became my second paper.
And this is where things went off the rails.
Because in the course of writing that paper, I dipped into Hart’s The Concept of Law and Endicott’s Vagueness in Law. These are not fringe polemics. These are law textbooks. For law students. People allegedly trained to parse language for a living.
And what I found was… astonishing.
Let me paraphrase the admissions:
First:
Image: When the law is vague, judicial decisions may be unconstrained by the law.
Endicott: “By upsetting the standard view of adjudication, the book reaches conclusions that some people find horrible: when the law is vague, judicial decision- making will in some cases be unconstrained by the law. It is impossible in principle for judges always to treat like cases alike. Predictability in the law is to some extent unattainable. Moreover, I argue in Chapter 9,2 that vagueness cannot be eliminated from law. These conclusions might seem to imply that the rule of law is, at least to some extent, conceptually impossible.”
Then:
Image: Vagueness is inevitable. Deal with it.
Endicott: “Secondly, I do not claim that vagueness is a purely linguistic feature of law. And the book relies on no claim about the relation between law and language. These points must be stressed, because vagueness is commonly thought of as a linguistic phenomenon. And. indeed, most of the discussion in the book concerns the vagueness of linguistic expressions. But the indeterminacy claim is not just a claim about language (so I argue in Chapter 3.12). So. for example, the claim in Chapter 6 that general evaluative and normative expressions are necessarily vague is not just a claim about the word ‘good’ and the word ‘right1: it is a claim about any linguistic expression in which we could conceivably express general evaluative and normative judgments. It therefore includes a claim about what is good and what is right.”
Then, almost casually:
Image: Whether law is morally valuable to a community is not my concern. Justice and the rule of law may be political virtues — or not. I don’t defend them here.
Endicott: “Disputes between legal positivists and natural law theorists have concerned not only the relation between law and adjudication, but also the relation between law and morality. Here I take no general position on the intrinsic moral value of law. I do rely on the claims that law can be valuable to a community, and that justice and the rule of law are two ideals which a com- munity can intelligibly pursue as political virtues. Even those claims are controversial (Kelsen and some of the theorists discussed in Chapter 2 have controverted them ). But I do not defend them here. This work aims to show that the indeterminacy claim does nothing to threaten the pursuit of justice and the rule of law. Those ideals cannot be well understood if we try to make them depend on determinacy in the requirements of the law.”
Say what?
Read together – not even uncharitably – the message is clear:
Law is indeterminate. Indeterminacy is unavoidable. And whether law is good, just, or valuable is… optional.
The subtext isn’t even hiding.
Law is a power structure first. If it happens to align with justice, fairness, or communal value, well, lovely. A bonus. Champagne all round.
This does not sit well with a sceptical cynic.
What really broke me, though, wasn’t the argument itself. Philosophers make grim claims all the time. What broke me was the silence around it.
How does this pass under the radar?
How do cohorts of law students – drilled in textual analysis, trained to read footnotes like tea leaves – not trip over this elephant stampede? How do they graduate believing they’re upholding inalienable rights, rather than participating in a managed system of coercion that occasionally behaves itself?
Self-preservation, I suppose. Wilful ignorance. Professional cosplay.
I’ve seen this before.
As an economist, ask the wrong foundational question, and you’re instantly radioactive. Persona non grata. Careers don’t end with explosions — they end with polite silence and no invitations.
I probably should have committed to heterodox philosophy from the start. Or stayed a musician.
I remember leaving graduate school, putting on a suit, and feeling like I was wearing a costume. Cosplay, before we had the word. “Business professional” as a role, not an identity.
I’ve always felt intellectually capable of doing whatever I set out to do. My temperament, however, has never agreed to play along.
Which is perhaps why diagnosing ontologies comes so naturally. Once you see the scaffolding, you can’t unsee it – whether it’s metaphysics, jurisprudence, or a corporate department pretending it has a mission.
Then David Graeber came along with Bullshit Jobs, and I remember thinking: Thank God. It’s not just me.
So yes. I need a break.
I need sleep. I need silence. I need to stop reading law books that accidentally admit they’re about power and then act surprised when someone notices.
Medical doctors, lawyers, and judges have been the undisputed titans of professional authority for centuries. Their expertise, we are told, is sacrosanct, earned through gruelling education, prodigious memory, and painstaking application of established knowledge. But peel back the robes and white coats, and you’ll find something unsettling: a deep reliance on rote learning—an intellectual treadmill prioritising recall over reasoning. In an age where artificial intelligence can memorise and synthesise at scale, this dependence on predictable, replicable processes makes these professions ripe for automation.
Rote Professions in AI’s Crosshairs
AI thrives in environments that value pattern recognition, procedural consistency, and brute-force memory—the hallmarks of medical and legal practice.
Medicine: The Diagnosis Factory Despite its life-saving veneer, medicine is largely a game of matching symptoms to diagnoses, dosing regimens, and protocols. Enter an AI with access to the sum of human medical knowledge: not only does it diagnose faster, but it also skips the inefficiencies of human memory, emotional bias, and fatigue. Sure, we still need trauma surgeons and such, but diagnosticians are so yesterday’s news. Why pay a six-figure salary to someone recalling pharmacology tables when AI can recall them perfectly every time? Future healthcare models are likely to see Medical Technicians replacing high-cost doctors. These techs, trained to gather patient data and operate alongside AI diagnostic systems, will be cheaper, faster, and—ironically—more consistent.
Law: The Precedent Machine Lawyers, too, sit precariously on the rote-learning precipice. Case law is a glorified memory game: citing the right precedent, drafting contracts based on templates, and arguing within frameworks so well-trodden that they resemble legal Mad Libs. AI, with its infinite recall and ability to synthesise case law across jurisdictions, makes human attorneys seem quaintly inefficient. The future isn’t lawyers furiously flipping through books—it’s Legal Technicians trained to upload case facts, cross-check statutes, and act as intermediaries between clients and the system. The $500-per-hour billable rate? A relic of a pre-algorithmic era.
Judges: Justice, Blind and Algorithmic The bench isn’t safe, either. Judicial reasoning, at its core, is rule-based logic applied with varying degrees of bias. Once AI can reliably parse case law, evidence, and statutes while factoring in safeguards for fairness, why retain expensive and potentially biased judges? An AI judge, governed by a logic verification layer and monitored for compliance with established legal frameworks, could render verdicts untainted by ego or prejudice. Wouldn’t justice be more blind without a human in the equation?
The Techs Will Rise
Replacing professionals with AI doesn’t mean removing the human element entirely. Instead, it redefines roles, creating new, lower-cost positions such as Medical and Legal Technicians. These workers will:
Collect and input data into AI systems.
Act as liaisons between AI outputs and human clients or patients.
Provide emotional support—something AI still struggles to deliver effectively.
The shift also democratises expertise. Why restrict life-saving diagnostics or legal advice to those who can afford traditional professionals when AI-driven systems make these services cheaper and more accessible?
But Can AI Handle This? A Call for Logic Layers
AI critics often point to hallucinations and errors as proof of its limitations, but this objection is shortsighted. What’s needed is a logic layer: a system that verifies whether the AI’s conclusions follow rationally from its inputs.
In law, this could ensure AI judgments align with precedent and statute.
In medicine, it could cross-check diagnoses against the DSM, treatment protocols, and patient data.
A second fact-verification layer could further bolster reliability, scanning conclusions for factual inconsistencies. Together, these layers would mitigate the risks of automation while enabling AI to confidently replace rote professionals.
Resistance and the Real Battle Ahead
Predictably, the entrenched elites of medicine, law, and the judiciary will resist these changes. After all, their prestige and salaries are predicated on the illusion that their roles are irreplaceable. But history isn’t on their side. Industries driven by memorisation and routine application—think bank tellers, travel agents, and factory workers—have already been disrupted by technology. Why should these professions be exempt?
The real challenge lies not in whether AI can replace these roles but in public trust and regulatory inertia. The transformation will be swift and irreversible once safeguards are implemented and AI earns confidence.
Critical Thinking: The Human Stronghold
Professions that thrive on unstructured problem-solving, creativity, and emotional intelligence—artists, philosophers, innovators—will remain AI-resistant, at least for now. But the rote professions, with their dependency on standardisation and precedent, have no such immunity. And that is precisely why they are AI’s lowest-hanging fruit.
It’s time to stop pretending that memorisation is intelligence, that precedent is innovation, or that authority lies in a gown or white coat. AI isn’t here to make humans obsolete; it’s here to liberate us from the tyranny of rote. For those willing to adapt, the future looks bright. For the rest? The machines are coming—and they’re cheaper, faster, and better at your job.
As I make progress on my Democracy: The Great Illusion book, I am working on a chapter considering juries as a microcosm of a democratic process. I am debating whether to include this information in the chapter, Like the justice system in the United States, perhaps I should just flip a coin.
Having been seated on three juries in my lifetime, it was just as I had expected. Thankfully, I’ve never been on the other side of this Russian Roulette revolver. We really need to limit human-based decision systems. I have as much faith in juries as I have with democracies, but I thought I might take a peek into deliberation at a smaller scale, perhaps 12 jurors.
I read Kahneman’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment when it was published in 2021, and I was not at all surprised how trial outcomes, quite often led to markedly different outcomes depending on the judge and the defendant. Although discrepancies based on sex and race have been well documented, this book showcased how much the judge’s mood affected sentencing—particularly if s/he was hungry. But this was not my interest.
My interest was to assess how the same case might fare given different judges and juries, so I asked ChatGPT. I want to share what it had to say—edited slightly for readability and flow.
ChatGPT Transcript
There have been several studies and controlled experiments assessing the variability in trial outcomes when the same case is tried separately by different judges and juries. These studies aim to evaluate the consistency and reliability of judicial decision-making, shedding light on the fallibility and variability of trial outcomes. Here are some key findings from such research:
Studies on Judicial and Jury Variability
The American Jury Study
One of the most notable studies is “The American Jury” by Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel. This extensive study compared the decisions of juries and judges in actual cases. It found that juries and judges often agree on verdicts, but there are significant instances where they disagree. This disagreement highlights the subjective nature of decision-making and the potential for variability in trial outcomes.
Judge-Jury Agreement
Research by Valerie Hans and Neil Vidmar in “Judging the Jury” indicates that judges and juries reach the same verdict about 75-80% of the time. However, in the remaining 20-25% of cases, the disagreement can lead to different outcomes for the same case. These findings suggest that personal interpretations and biases can influence verdicts.
judges and juries reach the same verdict about 75-80% of the time
The Civil Jury Project
The Civil Jury Project at NYU School of Law has conducted several studies examining jury decision-making. Their research has highlighted how factors like juror demographics, pre-existing biases, and the presentation of evidence can lead to different outcomes in similar cases.
Controlled Experiments
Controlled experiments, such as those conducted by Shari Seidman Diamond and her colleagues, have involved mock trials where participants (acting as jurors) are presented with the same case. These experiments have shown significant variability in verdicts and sentences, demonstrating the influence of group dynamics, individual biases, and the presentation of evidence on jury decisions.
Key Findings
Cognitive Bias and Heuristics
Studies indicate that cognitive biases and heuristics significantly impact both judges and juries. Biases such as the anchoring effect, where the initial piece of evidence presented influences subsequent judgments, can lead to different outcomes for the same case.
Case Complexity and Juror Understanding
Research has shown that the complexity of legal cases can lead to variability in outcomes. Jurors often struggle with understanding complex legal and technical issues, leading to decisions based on incomplete or misunderstood information.
Influence of Legal Instructions
The clarity and comprehensibility of legal instructions given to juries play a crucial role in decision-making. Studies have found that poorly understood instructions can result in inconsistent application of the law, leading to variable outcomes.
Implications
The variability in trial outcomes highlights the fallibility of judicial processes and underscores the importance of reforms to enhance consistency and fairness. Potential reforms could include:
Improving Juror Education: Providing better education and resources for jurors to understand legal principles and case-specific details.
Reducing Cognitive Bias: Implementing measures to mitigate cognitive biases, such as standardized jury instructions and blind procedures.
Enhancing Legal Instructions: Ensuring that legal instructions are clear, concise, and comprehensible to prevent misinterpretation.
Utilizing Expert Testimony: Increasing the use of expert testimony to clarify complex issues for jurors.
Conclusion
The variability in trial outcomes, when the same case is tried by different judges and juries, underscores the need for ongoing research and reform in judicial processes. By understanding the factors that contribute to inconsistent verdicts, we can develop strategies to enhance the fairness and reliability of the justice system.
References
Kalven, H., & Zeisel, H. (1966). The American Jury. Little, Brown and Company.
Hans, V., & Vidmar, N. (1986). Judging the Jury. Plenum Press.
Diamond, S. S., & Rose, M. R. (2005). Real Juries: The Power of Watching. Basic Books.
The Civil Jury Project at NYU School of Law. (n.d.). Research on Jury Decision Making. Retrieved from [website].
Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Little, Brown Spark.
Section 4: Legal and Jurisprudence Systems as Fictions
The Nature of Legal Systems
Legal and jurisprudence systems are among the most complex and entrenched fictions in society. Laws are human-made rules that govern behaviour, established by governments and enforced by judicial institutions. While laws aim to create order and justice, they are ultimately constructs, products of human agreement and cultural evolution.
The concept of law varies significantly across cultures and historical periods. Ancient legal codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi or Roman law, illustrate the long-standing tradition of codifying rules to govern society. However, these codes, like modern laws, are not natural phenomena but rather inventions designed to regulate human interactions and maintain social cohesion.
The Evolution of Legal Fictions
Legal systems have evolved alongside societies, adapting to changes in cultural norms, technological advancements, and political landscapes. The development of common law, for example, is a testament to the adaptive nature of legal systems. Common law, which originated in medieval England, is based on judicial precedents and case law rather than written statutes. This system relies heavily on the interpretation and application of past decisions, demonstrating how legal principles are constructed and reconstructed over time.
Moreover, legal fictions are often used within these systems to achieve practical outcomes. For instance, the concept of corporate personhood, where a corporation is treated as a legal person with rights and responsibilities, is a legal fiction designed to facilitate business operations and protect individual shareholders from certain liabilities. This illustrates how legal constructs can shape economic activities and social relations.
Implications of Legal Fictions
The recognition that legal systems are fictions has profound implications for how we understand and engage with the law. It highlights the role of human agency in creating and modifying legal norms, suggesting that laws are not immutable truths but rather adaptable tools for governance.
Legal systems are often seen as impartial and objective, but they are deeply influenced by the values, beliefs, and power dynamics of the societies that create them. This can lead to biases and inequalities being embedded within legal frameworks. For example, historical laws that discriminated based on race, gender, or class demonstrate how legal fictions can perpetuate social injustices.
Understanding the fictional nature of legal systems also opens the door to questioning and reforming these systems. It encourages us to consider alternative approaches to justice and governance that may better reflect contemporary values and address the needs of diverse populations.
The Role of Legal Narratives
Legal narratives, the stories told through laws and legal decisions, play a crucial role in shaping public perceptions and societal norms. These narratives construct realities that influence how individuals and communities understand their rights, responsibilities, and relationships with the state.
The work of scholars like Robert Cover, who in “Nomos and Narrative” (1983) argued that law is a system of meaning-making through narratives, underscores the importance of storytelling in the legal realm. By examining these narratives critically, we can uncover the underlying assumptions and power structures that they reinforce.
Future of Legal Systems
As societies continue to evolve, so too will their legal systems. The rise of international law, human rights conventions, and transnational legal frameworks reflects the growing interconnectedness of the world. These developments challenge traditional notions of state sovereignty and domestic legal autonomy, suggesting a future where legal systems may become even more complex and intertwined.
By recognizing legal systems as fictions, we are better equipped to navigate and influence these changes. This awareness can lead to more inclusive and equitable legal frameworks that serve the broader goals of justice and human flourishing.
References
Cover, Robert. “Nomos and Narrative” (1983).
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011).
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity (1990).
Philosophics 