Most grand moral theories assume a degree of conceptual stability that moral language has never possessed.
Aristotle’s aretê, Kant’s maxims, Mill’s utilities, Rawls’s ‘reasonable rejection’ – pick your passion/poison. Each one presupposes that a concept has a single, portable meaning that obligingly follows philosophers from ancient Greece to medieval Christendom to your local ethics seminar. It doesn’t. It never did. We’ve merely been pretending it does in order to keep the theoretical architecture standing.
Drawing on conceptual genealogy, philosophy of language, and cross-cultural moral psychology, I argue that the universalist ambitions of virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and contractualism collapse not because their logic is flawed, but because their vocabulary evaporates the moment you ask it to do heavy lifting. Our moral terms drift, fracture, mutate, and occasionally reinvent themselves altogether. Yet moral theorists continue to legislate universal principles as if the words were obedient little soldiers rather than unruly historical artefacts.
This isn’t a manifesto for relativism – quite the opposite. It is a call for modesty: an acknowledgement that moral frameworks function as context-bound heuristics, exquisitely useful within particular forms of life but laughably overextended when dressed up as timeless moral law.
If the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has taught me anything, it’s that once you stop bullying language into behaving like mathematics, you begin to see moral philosophy for what it is – a set of imaginative tools, not an ontology of obligation.
Read it, disagree with it, file it under ‘Why Bry insists on burning down the Enlightenment one paper at a time’ – your choice. But at least now the argument exists in the world, properly dressed and indexed, ready to irritate anyone still clinging to the dream of universal moral principles.
As I was preparing another essay – an essay on the rhetoric of evil – I had a thought about the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
If one takes subjectivity seriously – not the Hollywood version with self-made heroes, but the real creature stitched together from language, history, and whatever emotional debris it stepped in on the way to adulthood – then one ends up somewhere awkward: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
Video: Two red figures walking (no sound)
Which is to say, we’re all standing on conceptual scaffolding built by other people, insisting it’s solid marble. A charming fiction, until we apply it to anything with moral voltage. ‘Evil’, for instance, collapses the moment you remove the demonological life-support and notice it’s little more than a child’s intensifier strapped to a cultural power tool.
More on that later. For now, just sit with the discomfort that the ‘self’ making moral judgments is already a negotiated artefact – relational, compromised, and never as autonomous as it pretends.
The Frege–Geach problem was one of the impetuses for finishing my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. From the first encounter it felt off, as though someone were trying to conjure depth from a puddle. There was no paradox here; just another case of mistaking the map for the terrain, a habit analytic philosophy clings to with almost devotional zeal. The more time I spend on this project, the more often I find those cartographic illusions doing the heavy lifting.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
For the uninitiated, the Frege–Geach problem is supposed to be the knockout blow against AJ Ayer’s emotivism. Frege’s manoeuvre was simple enough: moral language must behave like descriptive language, so embed it in a conditional and watch the whole thing buckle. Neat on paper. Vacuous in practice. The entire construction only stands if one accepts Frege’s original fiat: that moral utterances and empirical propositions share the same logical metabolism. And why should they? Because he said so.
This is the core of the analytic mistake. It is grammar dressed up as ontology.
The LIH doesn’t ‘solve’ the Frege–Geach problem for the simple reason that there is nothing to solve. What it does instead is reclassify the habitat in which such pseudo-problems arise. It introduces categories the analytic tradition never suspected existed and drafts a grammar for language’s failure modes rather than politely ignoring them. It exposes the metaphysics analytic philosophy has been smuggling under its coat for decades.
The LIH does four things at once:
• It destabilises an alleged Invariant. • It exposes the Contestable foundations underneath it. • It shows that many analytic puzzles exist only because of the presuppositions baked into the analytic grammar. • And it asks the forbidden question: what if this cherished problem simply isn’t one?
Analytic philosophy proceeds as though it were operating on a single, pristine grammar of meaning, truth, and assertion. The LIH replies: charming idea, but no. Different conceptual regions obey different rules. Treating moral predicates as if they were factual predicates is not rigour; it’s wishful thinking.
As my manuscript lays out, instead of one flat linguistic plain, the LIH gives you an ecology:
• Invariants for the things that actually behave. • Contestables for the concepts that wobble under scrutiny. • Fluids for notions that change shape depending on who touches them. • Ineffables for everything language tries and fails to pin down.
The analytic tradition, bless its little heart, tries to stretch classical logic across the entire terrain like clingfilm. The clingfilm snaps because reality never agreed to be wrapped that way.
This taxonomy isn’t jargon for its own sake. It’s a meta-grammar: a way of describing how language breaks, where it breaks, and why it breaks in predictable places. It names the structures analytic philosophy has been tripping over for a century but studiously refused to acknowledge.
Their error is simple: they treat language as flat. The LIH treats language as topographical – scored with ridges, fault lines, and pressure fronts.
They think in one grammar. I wrote a grammar for grammars.
No wonder there’s disquiet. Their tools have been optimised for the wrong terrain. I’m not challenging their competence; I’m pointing out that the conceptual map they’ve been so proudly updating was drawn as if the continent were uniformly paved.
This is why Frege–Geach, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, another irritant, paradoxes, semantic embeddings – so many of their grand intellectual fixtures – appear dramatic inside their grammar yet quietly evaporate once you switch grammars. The LIH isn’t a theory about language; it is a theory of the boundary conditions where language stops being able to masquerade as a theory of anything at all.
And the Frege–Geach problem? In the end, perhaps it isn’t.
Note that the cover image is of the rhinocerosin the animated movie, James and the Giant Peach. The rhino was meant to remind James of the importance of perspective. I feel it’s fitting here.
I’ve just published Objectivity Is Illusion: An Operating Model of Social and Moral Reasoning, an essay that began as this blog post. I’m sharing the ‘official’ link and this first draft. As the essay matured, I added additional support, but I focused primarily on refuting the anticipated opposing arguments. Rather than regurgitate the final version here, I felt showing the genesis would be more instructive. Of course, the essay didn’t spring fully formed; I’ve pruned and expanded from earlier notes still sitting on my hard drive.
Every so often, I’m told I’m too slippery with words, that I treat truth as if it were just another game of persuasion, that I reduce morality to chalk lines on a playing field. The objection usually comes with force: ‘But surely you believe some things are objectively true?‘
I don’t. Or more precisely, I don’t see how ‘objectivity’ in the metaphysical sense can be defended without lapsing into stagecraft. Granite foundations have always turned out to be scaffolding with the paint touched up. Priests once told us their gods guaranteed truth; scientists later promised the lab would serve as granite; politicians assure us democracy is the stone pillar. But in each case the creaks remain.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This essay is written with an academic readership in mind. It assumes familiarity with figures like Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Ayer, and with the long quarrel over subjectivity, relativity, and objectivity. My aim is not to retell those arguments from the ground up, but to position my own framework within that ongoing dispute.
Scope
Before proceeding, some guardrails. When I say ‘objectivity is illusion,’ I mean in the social and moral domain. I’m not denying quarks or mathematics. My claim is narrower: in human discourse, no truth escapes subjectivity or contingency.
This dovetails with my broader Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that even our words are leaky vessels, prone to misfire and misunderstanding. If language itself is unstable ground, then objectivity built upon it can hardly be granite. My claim here is not that nothing exists outside us, but that in the social world we inhabit together, every ‘truth’ rests on creaking boards.
One more note: just because social administration requires appeals to objectivity doesn’t mean objectivity exists. Courts, laboratories, and parliaments invoke it to secure trust, and it works well enough as theater. But necessity is not proof. And it is not my responsibility to conjure a granite replacement. What follows is an operating model, not a new altar.
Thesis
Objectivity is an illusion. Truth is rhetorical. Morality is prescriptive, not propositional. Our ethic is not granite but care: tending the planks we walk on, knowing they creak.
Operating Model: Five Premises
This framework is not a foundation. It is an operating model – contingent, provisional, subject to revision as circumstances change. Like any model, it can (and should) be updated to fit the culture and times.
Premise 1: Subjectivity is the baseline. Every claim originates in a perspective. No statement is free of the lens through which it is made. Even to deny subjectivity is to speak from a subject.
Premise 2: Relativity is emergent. What we call ‘relative truth’ is not a separate category but the convergence of individual subjectivities into provisional consensus. Consensus is never neutral: it is formed rhetorically – through persuasion, cultural resonance, and power [1]. MacIntyre made a similar point in After Virtue. The moral consensus of the Ancients was not grounded in objectivity but in a shared tradition – a thick account of human flourishing that gave coherence to their claims. When that scaffolding collapsed, consensus fractured, leaving modern moral discourse in fragments. Critics accused MacIntyre of relativism, since different traditions yield different ‘truths’, but his point reinforces mine: what looks like objectivity is in fact the temporary overlap of subjectivities sustained by tradition [2].
Premise 3: Objectivity is illusion. Claims presented as objective are relative norms hardened by repetition and forgotten as contingent scaffolding. ‘Objectivity’ is consensus disguised as granite. Its invocation in courts or parliaments may be useful, but usefulness is not existence. The burden of proof belongs to anyone insisting on an independent, metaphysical anchor for moral or social truths (Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’ [3], Kuhn’s paradigms [4], Latour’s laboratories [5]).
Even if one concedes, with Weber (as MacIntyre reminds us), that objective moral truths might exist in principle, they remain inaccessible in practice. What cannot be accessed cannot guide us; reconciliation of values and virtues must therefore take place within traditions and rhetoric, not in appeal to unreachable granite [13].
Premise 4: Rhetoric establishes truth. What counts as ‘true’ in the social and moral domain is established rhetorically – through coherence, resonance, utility, or force. This does not mean truth is ‘mere spin’. It means truth is never metaphysical; it is enacted and enforced through persuasion. If a metaphysical claim convinces, it does so rhetorically. If a scientific claim holds, it does so because it persuades peers, fits the evidence, and survives testing. In short: rhetoric is the medium through which truths endure [6].
Premise 5: Non-Cognitivism, Stated Plainly. I take moral utterances to be prescriptions, not propositions. When someone says ‘X is wrong’, they are not reporting an objective fact but prescribing a stance, a rule, a line in chalk. This is my operating position: non-cognitivism (Ayer [7], Stevenson [8]).
That said, I know the term feels alien. Many prefer the dialect of subjectivism – ‘X is true-for-me but not-for-you’ – or the quasi-realist stance that moral language behaves like truth-talk without cosmic backing (Blackburn [9]). I have no quarrel with these translations. They name the same scaffolding in different accents. I am not defending any school as such; I am simply stating my plank: morality prescribes rather than describes.
Ethic: Care. Since scaffolding is all we have, the obligation is not to pretend it is stone but to keep it usable. By ‘care’, I do not mean politeness or quietism. I mean maintenance – deliberation, repair, mutual aid, even revolt – so long as they acknowledge the scaffolding we share. Care is not optional: stomp hard enough and the floor collapses beneath us all.
Examples clarify: peer review in science is care in action, patching leaky vessels rather than proving granite. Civil rights movements practiced care by repairing rotten planks of law, sometimes with revolt. Communities rebuilding after disaster embody care by reconstructing scaffolding, not pretending it was indestructible. Care is maintenance, reciprocity, and survival.
Bridge: These five premises do not add up to a system or a foundation. They form an operating model: subjectivity as baseline, relativity as emergent, objectivity as illusion, rhetoric as truth, morality as prescription. Together they outline a practice: walk the planks with care, admit the creaks, patch where needed, and stop pretending we live in marble halls.
Rationale
Why prefer scaffolding to granite? Because granite has always been a mirage. The history of philosophy and politics is a history of crumbling temples and collapsing empires. The promises of permanence never survive the weather.
Think of Nietzsche, who called truths ‘a mobile army of metaphors’ [3]. Think of Foucault, who showed that what counts as ‘truth’ is always bound up with power [1]. Think of Rorty, who reduced truth to what our peers let us get away with saying [6]. These are not nihilists but diagnosticians: they exposed the creaks in the floorboards and the wizard behind the curtain.
Metaphors drive the point home:
Scaffolding and granite: What holds is temporary, not eternal. Granite is an illusion painted on timber.
Chalk lines: Rules of play – binding, real, but contingent. They can be redrawn.
Shoreline houses: Rome, the USSR, the British Empire – each built like beachfront villas with a fine view and bad footing. Storms came, sand eroded, and down they went.
Bias as framing: Kahneman himself admitted ‘bias’ is not a thing in the world [10], only a deviation from a chosen model. Gigerenzer [11] and Jared Peterson [12] remind us heuristics are adaptive. To call them ‘biases’ is not neutral – it’s allegiance to a standard of rationality.
The point is simple: what holds today is scaffolding, and pretending otherwise is self-deception.
Counterarguments and Refutations
Objection: Moral Paralysis. Without objective morality, why abolish slavery or defend rights?
Refutation: Chalk lines still bind. Speed limits aren’t cosmic, but they regulate conduct. Abolition endured not because it tapped a cosmic truth but because it persuaded, resonated, and took root. Slavery was once ‘in bounds’. Now it is ‘offsides’. That shift was rhetorical, emotional, political – but no less binding.
Objection: Problem of Dissent. If all is subjective, the lone dissenter is ‘just another voice’.
Refutation: Dissent gains traction through coherence, predictive success, or resonance. Galileo, abolitionists, suffragists – none relied on metaphysical granite. They persuaded, they resonated, they moved chalk lines. Truth was made through rhetoric, not uncovered in stone.
Objection: Performative Dependency. Even to say ‘subjective’ assumes the subject/object split. Aren’t you still inside the house?
Refutation: Of course. But I’m the one pointing at the slippery boards: ‘Mind the dust’. Yes, I’m in the house. But I refuse to pretend it’s marble. And even the category ‘subject’ is not eternal – it’s porous, dynamic, and leaky, just like language itself.
Objection: Infinite Regress. Why stop at subjectivity? Why not de-integrate further?
Refutation: Subjectivity is not granite, but it is the last plank before void. Peel it back and you erase the possibility of claims altogether. If tomorrow we discover that the ‘subject’ is a swarm of quarks or circuits, fine – but the claim still emerges from some locus. Regression refines; it doesn’t disprove.
Conclusion: The Ethic of Care
This is not reintegration. It is dis-integration: naming the creaks, stripping polyvinyl from rotten boards, refusing granite illusions.
If you wish to build here, build. But know the ground shifts, the storms come, the shoreline erodes. The ethic is not certainty but care: to tend the scaffolding we share, to patch without pretending it is stone, and to let dissent itself become part of the maintenance.
Philosophics 