Tag: moral psychology

How to Instantly Lose Popularity on the Internet

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(A brief note on language, power, and moral certainty)

There is a particular kind of video that circulates online with tremendous force. A woman addresses the camera directly.

Video: Discussion Point (Full transcript at the end of this post)

She is clear, indignant, morally resolute:

  • It’s not an ‘inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old’. It’s rape.
  • It’s not ‘coerced sex with a minor’. It’s rape.
  • It’s not a ‘young woman’. It’s a child.
  • Call it what it is.

Before proceeding, let me state something unambiguously: sexual exploitation of minors is morally reprehensible within contemporary Western legal and moral frameworks. I am not contesting that. Nor am I defending euphemism for its own sake. This is where philosophers of language take a lot of heat.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

The question here is narrower and, perhaps, more uncomfortable: What work is being done by the demand to ‘call it what it is‘?

Euphemism and Softening

She is correct in one respect. Institutional language often softens. Inappropriate relationship is anaesthetic. It lowers emotional temperature. It blunts moral outrage. Institutions frequently prefer such language because it reduces volatility, legal exposure, and procedural risk.

Language can minimise. That is not controversial. But it’s only half the story.

Naming Is Not Neutral

When she insists on rape and child, she is not merely removing euphemism. She is installing thick, legally saturated categories.

Rape is not a raw moral atom floating in space. It is a juridical classification defined by statute, evidentiary thresholds, and evolving legal doctrine. Its scope has expanded significantly over time: marital rape was once unrecognised; coercion has broadened beyond physical force; statutory rape collapses questions of consent into questions of legal capacity.

Likewise, child is not a purely biological category. It is a modern legal identity with shifting age thresholds and historical elasticity. The concept has expanded across the last two centuries as education extended, labour laws tightened, and adolescence became socially constructed as a protected stage of dependency.

To say this is not to relativise harm. It is to recognise that categories are historically sedimented and institutionally stabilised.

When someone says ‘Call it what it is‘, they are treating these contemporary legal categories as metaphysically self-evident. But they are products of a specific ontological framework: one in which autonomy and consent are foundational, and in which minors are deemed categorically incapable of exercising full sexual agency.

That framework is dominant in the West. It is not universal globally or historically.

Elasticity and Instrumentality

There is another asymmetry worth noticing.

Child expands protectively when someone is victimised. But the same individual may be stripped of childhood if they commit a serious crime: ‘They acted like an adult. They should have known better.’

The boundary is not purely developmental. It is normative. The category flexes.

Similarly, rape operates differently in everyday speech, in moral condemnation, and in statutory law. In the case of statutory rape, the term does not necessarily describe force; it describes the legal impossibility of consent. It is a doctrinal move grounded in an ontology of agency.

None of this weakens moral condemnation. But it reveals that these terms are not merely descriptive. They are instruments of moral and legal allocation.

Power and Irony

There is also a certain irony in the video.

She accuses mainstream institutions of manipulating language to reduce severity. Yet her demand is to deploy one of the state’s most powerful juridical classifications immediately and universally.

Rape derives its force from the same legal apparatus she critiques. It is powerful precisely because it is institutional. She is not rejecting power; she is attempting to redirect it.

This is not hypocrisy. It is politics. But it is politics nonetheless.

Ontology and Universality

The deeper issue is not whether we should condemn sexual exploitation. We should.

The issue is whether contemporary Western legal categories are simply “what is,” or whether they are historically developed ontological commitments that feel self-evident because they have been normalised.

The woman in the video experiences her categories as universal moral Truth. Many viewers agree. That agreement does not make the categories metaphysically timeless; it makes them hegemonic.

Recognising semantic expansion and legal drift does not undermine moral seriousness. It clarifies where moral authority resides: not in eternal linguistic atoms, but in historically stabilised frameworks.

Why This Is Unpopular

Online discourse prefers moral clarity over semantic archaeology. When harm is salient, genealogical analysis sounds like minimisation. Distinguishing between descriptive, legal, and ontological levels is interpreted as evasion.

It is not.

It is possible to affirm moral condemnation while also acknowledging that:

  • Language frames perception.
  • Legal categories evolve.
  • Terms are deployed instrumentally.
  • Ontologies masquerade as nature once naturalised.

One can insist on moral seriousness without pretending that our current vocabulary fell from the sky fully formed.

But saying so will reliably lose popularity on the internet.

Apparently, clarity has thresholds.

Full Video Transcript

‘Hey. It’s not an “Inappropriate Relationship with a 17-year-old”, it’s rape.

‘It’s not “coerced sex with a minor”, it’s rape.

‘It’s not “non-consensual sex with a 13-year-old”, it’s rape.

‘Call it what it is! Call them what they are.

‘And while we’re at it, it’s not a “young woman”, it’s a child!

‘It’s not a preteen, it’s a child!

‘It’s not a “mature girl”, it’s a child!

‘This use of specific language by mainstream media is super intentional, and it’s a tool of the patriarchy to try to reduce the egregiousness of horribly egregious acts that men commit against women and girls!

‘And, I say this with full awareness of the irony of my needing to use show and tell to make my point because I am beholden to these stupid social media platforms, which commit violence against women and girls every day in their own right by automatically suppressing any content as soon as I say a particular word.

‘And you and I need to say that it’s absolutely unacceptable!’

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Legibility and Ontology

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

These two words qualify as my words of the month: legibility and ontology.

I’ve been using them as lenses.

I picked up legibility from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which is really a book about how well-intentioned schemes fail once reality is forced to become administrable. Ontology is an older philosophical workhorse, usually paired with epistemology, but I’m using it here in a looser, more pragmatic sense.

When I write, I write through lenses. Everyone does. Writing requires a point of view, even when we pretend otherwise.

In this post, I want to talk more informally about my recent essay, Grammatical Failure. I usually summarise my work elsewhere, but here I want to think out loud about it, particularly in relation to social ontology and epistemology. I won’t linger on definitions. They’re a search away. But a little framing helps.

Ontology, roughly: how reality is parsed.

Epistemology: how knowledge is justified within that parsing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this post.

Much of my recent work sits downstream of thinkers like Thomas Sowell, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. Despite their differences, they converge on a shared insight: human cognition is largely motivated preverbally. As a philosopher of language, that pre-language layer is where my interest sharpens.

I explored this in earlier work, including a diptych titled The Grammar of Impasse – Conceptual Exhaustion and Causal Mislocation. Writing is how I gel these ideas. There are several related pieces still in the pipeline.

When I talk about grammar, I don’t mean Saussure or Chomsky. I mean something deeper: the ontological substrate beneath belief. Grammar, in this sense, is how reality gets parsed before beliefs ever form. It filters what can count as real, salient, or intelligible.

Let’s use a deliberately simplified example.

Imagine two ontological orientations. Call them Ont-C and Ont-L. This isn’t to say there are only two, but much of Western political discourse collapses into a binary anyway.

Ont-C tends to experience people as inherently bad, dangerous, or morally suspect. Ont-L tends to experience people as inherently good or at least corrigible. These aren’t opinions in the usual sense. They sit beneath belief, closer to affect and moral orientation.

Now consider retributive justice, setting aside the fact that justice itself is a thick concept.

From Ont-C, punishment teaches a lesson. It deters. It disciplines. From Ont-L, punishment without rehabilitation looks cruel or counterproductive, and the transgression itself may be read as downstream of systemic injustice.

Each position can acknowledge exceptions. Ont-L knows there are genuinely broken people. Ont-C knows there are saints. But those are edge cases, not defaults.

Now ask Ont-C and Ont-L to design a criminal justice system together. The result will feel intolerable to both. Too lenient. Too harsh. The disagreement isn’t over policy details. It’s over how reality is carved up in the first place.

And this is only one dimension.

Add others. Bring in Ont-V and Ont-M if you like, for vegan and meat-based ontologies. Suddenly, you have Ont-CV, Ont-CM, Ont-LV, and Ont-LM. Then add class, religion, gender, authority, harm, and whatever. Intersectionality stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a combinatorial explosion.

The Ont-Vs can share a meal, so long as they don’t talk politics.

The structure isn’t just unstable. It was never stable to begin with. We imagine foundations because legibility demands them.

Grammatical Failure is an attempt to explain why this instability isn’t a bug in liberal epistemology but a structural feature. The grammar does the sorting long before deliberation begins.

More on that soon.

In any case, once you start applying this ontological lens to other supposedly intractable disputes, you quickly realise that their intractability is not accidental.

Take abortion.

If we view the issue through the lenses of Ont-A (anti-abortion) and Ont-C (maternal choice), we might as well be peering through Ont-Oil and Ont-Water. The disagreement does not occur at the level of policy preferences or competing values. It occurs at the level of what counts as morally salient in the first place.

There is no middle ground here. No middle path. No synthesis waiting to be negotiated into existence.

That is not because the participants lack goodwill, intelligence, or empathy. It is because the ontological primitives are incommensurate. Each side experiences the other not as mistaken but as unintelligible.

We can will compromise all we like. The grammar does not comply.

Contemporary discourse often insists otherwise. It tells us that better arguments, clearer framing, or more dialogue will eventually converge. From this perspective, that insistence is not hopeful. It is confused. It mistakes a grammatical fracture for a deliberative failure.

You might try to consider other polemic topics and notice the same interplay.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Fish Are Not Arboreal by Nature

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–5 minutes

This is a continued reflection of the ramifications of yesterday’s post.

There is a growing tendency to describe certain moral conflicts as educational failures: If only people were shown the right perspective. If only they listened. If only they learned to see differently.

This language is most visible in discussions of objectification. Some men are told that what they perceive, feel, or notice is something that can be unlearned through dialogue. That with sufficient moral instruction, a perceptual orientation can be rewired into a different one. The problem is not that this ambition is moral. The problem is that it is architecturally incoherent.

The category mistake at the centre

Objectification is routinely treated as if it were a belief. A proposition. A theory about women that can be corrected with better arguments.

But much of what is being targeted is not propositional at all. It is precognitive salience. Attentional bias. Pattern recognition that operates before language, before justification, before conscious choice. You cannot reason someone out of a perception any more than you can lecture the vestibular system into ignoring gravity.

This is not a defence of behaviour. It is a refusal to confuse perception with endorsement. When we mistake a precognitive state for a belief, we end up conducting moral seminars aimed at the wrong organ.

Image: NotebookLM infographic

What education quietly becomes

Once this mistake is made, the rest follows with grim reliability.

If the orientation persists after instruction, it is no longer treated as structural. It is treated as obstinacy. The individual is said not merely to have a problematic perception but to be refusing growth.

At this point, moral education slides into something else entirely. Compliance is redescribed as transformation. Suppression is redescribed as insight. Silence is redescribed as progress.

The person learns to inhibit expression, to monitor language, to filter behaviour. None of this touches the underlying salience structure. But the culture congratulates itself anyway, because the surface has been tidied. This is how behavioural containment comes to masquerade as moral reform.

The fish and the trees

The fish analogy is not flippant. It is diagnostic. Telling a fish it must climb trees is not an invitation to growth. It is a refusal to acknowledge habitat. When the fish fails, the failure is moralised.

  • ‘You could do this if you tried.’
  • ‘Others have managed.’
  • ‘Your resistance is the problem.’

The water is never named. Only the inadequacy of the swimmer.

Likewise, telling someone that a precognitive orientation can be dialogically dismantled assumes a plasticity that does not exist. When it fails, the failure is framed as an ethical defect rather than an architectural limit.

A topical case study

Rather than think in abstractions, let’s use a culturally-relevant example – at least through a relatively recent US frame – objectifying women. This has been a topic since at least the 1970s, and it remains in the cultural consciousness.

Some men have been accused of objectifying women. They are told this is wrong and asked to change their perspectives. But what’s really happening here?

These people are being asked to suppress the expression of a precognitive state. In Haidt’s parlance, they are being chastised for not controlling their elephant.

No amount of dialogue will rewire this faculty. This is akin to judging the fish for not climbing a tree and adopting an arboreal lifestyle.

I am not saying that all men are wired like this, nor am I saying that some men cannot control their baser impulses, but I am saying that asking a person not to express something does not thwart the impulse. In fact, it may make them also feel guilty for this instinct.

Why this becomes culturally unstable

A culture can regulate behaviour without demanding internal conversion. That is the old liberal bargain. You may think what you think; you will act within bounds.

What it cannot do indefinitely is promise inner transformation it cannot deliver, while punishing those who fail to achieve it. That produces exhaustion. It produces resentment. It produces a constant background hum of self-surveillance.

Worse, it moralises involuntary cognition. Not what you do, but what you notice. Not action, but salience. Not harm, but perception. Once that line is crossed, the scope of moral suspicion expands without limit.

The choice we avoid naming

The dilemma is not whether objectifying behaviour should be constrained. It should.

The dilemma is whether we will admit the difference between:

  • regulating expression, and
  • re-engineering perception

One is possible. The other is a comforting fiction. Pretending otherwise allows us to speak the language of enlightenment while practising the mechanics of discipline. It lets us call suppression ‘growth’ and exhaustion ‘progress’. The honest position is less flattering.

Some orientations cannot be taught away. They can be managed, constrained, and socially bounded. Demanding more than that is not moral ambition. It is ontological impatience.

You can’t teach a fish to stop being wet. You can decide which waters it is allowed to swim in.

In the end, the point is that it isn’t a matter of knowing; it’s a matter of feeling – something much deeper.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Perish the Thought: You Didn’t Override Anything

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
4–6 minutes

Je m’accuse. I find myself bickering on social media again. Zut, alors! Unfortunately, I struck a nerve with otherwise unidentified Adam. He may believe that I need to be right; rather, I’d like to help him not be wrong – presuming there are such states. In a post, Adam makes an assertion that one can override one’s, let’s call it, intuition. He ends with:

👉 Just don’t silence the most experienced pattern-reader in the room and call it maturity.

💭 What decision are you defending right now that your body already vetoed?

I feel that we are on the same page, or I wouldn’t bother to engage. The point I want to make with this blog article is that one does not override or veto one’s body. You rationalise what your body tells you to do. Just be careful with your language and how you frame it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this topic.

On why “reason defeating intuition” is a comforting fiction

There is a familiar story we tell about decision-making: First, the body speaks. A tightening. A lurch. A sense of foreboding or pull.

Then, reason arrives late, clipboard in hand, issuing corrective instructions:

  • ‘Be rational’
  • ‘Sleep on it’
  • ‘Run the numbers’

When things go badly, we narrate the failure like this: I knew. But I overruled it. This story feels true. It is also almost certainly wrong. Not morally wrong. Not introspectively dishonest. Conceptually wrong.

Image: NotebookLM infographics on this topic.

The experiential mistake

Let’s grant the phenomenology immediately. People routinely report that:

  • A decision felt wrong before it was articulated.
  • The articulation came later.
  • The eventual outcome carried an unmistakable sense of fatigue or dissonance.
  • Retrospectively, they say: I ignored the signal.

That experience is real. The inference drawn from it is not.

What the experience shows is temporal asymmetry, not architectural hierarchy. One process surfaces earlier than another. That does not mean a later process overruled it.

It means you are narrating a system whose operations are largely opaque to itself.

What the science actually killed decades ago

The idea that ‘reason’ steps in as a distinct, supervisory faculty that overrides intuition is not merely unproven. It is historically obsolete.

It belongs to the same conceptual family as:

  • The rational actor
  • The detached chooser
  • The inner executive standing above cognition

That family did not survive the twentieth century.

There is no independent referee.

Start with Herbert Simon, who dismantled the fantasy of global optimisation with bounded rationality. Human decision-making does not survey option-spaces and then choose. It satisficies under constraint. There is no god’s-eye view from which “reason” could intervene.

Move to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who made it painfully clear that what we call reasoning is deeply entangled with heuristics, framing effects, and affective weighting. System 2 does not rule System 1. It just writes better prose.

Add Thomas Sowell, whose critique of unconstrained rationalism was never about feelings versus facts, but about the fantasy of an overseeing mind unbound by trade-offs.

Or George Lakoff, who quietly erased the idea that political or moral reasoning could ever be disembodied in the first place.

Or Jonathan Haidt, who showed that moral reasoning overwhelmingly functions as post-hoc justification. The elephant moves. The rider explains.

Or Joshua Greene, whose dual-process models still do not resurrect a sovereign rational self. They show competition, not command.

Or Kurt Gray, whose work on moral perception demonstrates that what we experience as “judgment” is already structured before conscious deliberation enters the scene.

Across these literatures, one conclusion recurs with tedious consistency: There is no independent referee.

Why the “override” story feels so compelling

If reason does not overrule intuition, why does it feel like it does?

Because what you experience as “override” is competition between pre-reflective evaluations, not a coup staged by rationality.

Different subsystems evaluate:

  • social risk
  • loss exposure
  • identity coherence
  • narrative defensibility
  • anticipated regret

Whichever configuration wins becomes the decision. The explanation comes later. Calling that explanation “reason” flatters us. It also confuses sequence with sovereignty. When someone says, ‘I ignored my intuition’, what they usually mean is:

A later-arriving evaluation carried more weight than an earlier one, and I disliked the downstream cost.

That is not an override. That is the outcome.

Exhaustion is not evidence of rational domination

There is a popular add-on to the override story:

We override intuition, and that’s why we’re exhausted.

Again, the fatigue is real. The diagnosis is not. Cognitive fatigue does not indicate that reason heroically suppressed instinct. It indicates conflict resolution under uncertainty without stable convergence.

When multiple evaluative systems fail to cohere cleanly, the result is:

  • prolonged rumination
  • narrative patching
  • justificatory rehearsal
  • defensive rationalisation

That is tiring. Not because reason triumphed, but because coherence never fully arrived.

The real mistake

The mistake is not ‘trusting the body’ or ‘listening to reason’. The mistake is re-importing a discredited architecture because the introspection sounds nice.

You do not have:

  • intuition vs reason
  • signal vs override
  • body vs mind
  • elephant vs rider with veto power

You have distributed pattern-recognition systems, operating at different speeds, with different representational affordances, producing outputs that consciousness stitches into a story after the fact. The story is useful. It is not causal.

What is worth noticing

There is something worth salvaging from the original intuition-first narrative, once it’s stripped of myth.

Early signals matter not because they are purer or wiser, but because they encode long-trained pattern sensitivity that may never become fully articulate.

Ignoring them does not mean you “chose reason.”
It means another pattern won.

And sometimes that pattern is worse.

Not because it was rational.
Because it was legible, defensible, or socially safer.

No resurrection required

None of this requires reviving the rational chooser, the sovereign self, or Homo economicus with a new haircut. The work is already done. The literature is settled. The corpse stays buried. What remains is learning to live without the comforting fiction that someone, somewhere inside you, was supposed to be in charge. That absence is not immaturity. It is the condition under which decisions actually occur. And pretending otherwise only gives the clipboard another imaginary promotion.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Two Valleys Diverged in a Mountain Range

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

(Or: What I Learned When I Learned Nothing)

NB: This is the first of a parable triptych. Read part 2, The Tunnel.

Two valleys diverged in a mountain range, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth of reeds and optimism;

Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was sandy and wanted wear— Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In fog no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

—Except I did come back. And I met someone coming the other way. And we stood there in the clouds like a pair of idiots trying to explain our respective valleys using the same words for completely different things.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this topic.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about Frost’s poem: the two paths were “really about the same.” He says it right there in the text. The divergence happens retroactively, in the telling, when he sighs and claims “that has made all the difference.”

But he doesn’t know that yet. He can’t know that. The paths only diverge in memory, once he’s committed to one and cannot check the other.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about political disagreement: it works the same way.

Video essay of this topic. Another NotebookLM experience.

The Actual Story (Minus the Versification)

Once upon a time—and I’m going to need you to suspend your allergy to fairy tales for about eight minutes—there was one settlement. One people. One language. One lake with drinkable water and fish that cooperated by swimming in schools.

Then mountains happened. Slowly. No dramatic rupture, no war, no evil king. Just tectonics doing what tectonics does, which is ruin everyone’s commute.

The people on one side kept the lake. The people on the other side got a rain shadow and a lot of bloody sand.

Both sides adapted. Rationally. Reasonably. Like competent humans responding to actual material conditions.

Lake people: “There’s enough water. Let’s experiment. Let’s move around. Let’s try things.”

Desert people: “There is definitely not enough water. Let’s ration. Let’s stay put. Let’s not waste things.”

Neither wrong. Neither irrational. Just oriented differently because the ground beneath them had literal different moisture content.

The Bit Where It Gets Interesting

Centuries later, two people—one from each side—decide to climb the mountains and meet at the top.

Why? I don’t know. Curiosity. Stupidity. The desire to write a tedious blog post about epistemology.

They meet in the fog. They speak the same language. Grammar intact. Vocabulary functional. Syntax cooperative.

And then one tries to explain “reeds.”

“Right, so we have these plants that grow really fast near the water, and we have to cut them back because otherwise they take over—”

“Sorry, cut them back? You have too much plant?”

“Well, yes, they grow quite quickly—”

“Why would a plant grow quickly? That sounds unsustainable.”

Meanwhile, the other one tries to explain “cactus.”

“We have these plants with spines that store water inside for months—”

“Store water for months? Why doesn’t the plant just… drink when it’s thirsty?”

“Because there’s no water to drink.”

“But you just said the plant is full of water.”

“Yes. Which it stored. Previously. When there was water. Which there no longer is.”

“Right. So… hoarding?”

You see the problem.

Not stupidity. Not bad faith. Not even—and this is the part that will annoy people—framing.

They can both see perfectly well. The fog prevents them from seeing each other’s valleys, but that’s almost beside the point. Even if the fog lifted, even if they could point and gesture and show each other their respective biomes, the fundamental issue remains:

A cactus is a good solution to a problem the lake-dweller doesn’t have.

A reed is a good solution to a problem the desert-dweller doesn’t have.

Both are correct. Both are adaptive. Both would be lethal if transplanted.

The Retreat (Wherein Nothing Is Learned)

They part amicably. No shouting. No recriminations. Both feel they explained themselves rather well, actually.

As they descend back into their respective valleys, each carries the same thought:

“The other person seemed reasonable. Articulate, even. But their world is completely unworkable and if we adopted their practices here, people would die.”

Not hyperbole. Actual environmental prediction.

If the lake people adopted desert-logic—ration everything, control movement, assume scarcity—they would strangle their own adaptability in a context where adaptability is the whole point.

If the desert people adopted lake-logic—explore freely, trust abundance, move without restraint—they would exhaust their resources in a context where resources are the whole point.

The Bit Where I Connect This to Politics (Because Subtlety Is Dead)

So when someone tells you that political disagreement is just a matter of perspective, just a failure of empathy, just a problem of framing—

Ask them this:

Do the two valleys become the same valley if both sides squint really hard?

Does the desert get wetter if you reframe scarcity as “efficiency”?

Does the lake dry up if you reframe abundance as “waste”?

No?

Then perhaps the problem is not that people are choosing the wrong lens.

Perhaps the problem is that they are standing in different material conditions, have adapted rational survival strategies to those conditions, and are now shouting advice at each other that would be lethal if followed.

The lake-dweller says: “Take risks! Explore! There’s enough!”

True. In a lake biome. Suicidal in a desert.

The desert-dweller says: “Conserve! Protect! Ration!”

True. In a desert biome. Suffocating near a lake.

Same words. Different worlds. No amount of dialogue makes water appear in sand.

The Frostian Coda (With Apologies to New England)

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two valleys diverged on a mountainside, and I— I stood in the fog and tried to explain reeds to someone who only knew cactus, And that has made… well, no difference at all, actually.

We’re still shouting across the mountains.

We still think the other side would be fine if only they’d listen.

We still use the same words for utterly different referents.

And we still confuse “I explained it clearly” with “explanation bridges material conditions.”

Frost was right about one thing: way leads on to way.

The valleys keep diverging.

The fog doesn’t lift.

And knowing how mountains work, I doubt we’ll meet again.

Moral: If your political metaphor doesn’t account for actual rivers, actual deserts, and actual fog, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a fairy tale. And unlike fairy tales, this one doesn’t end with reunion.

It ends with two people walking home, each convinced the other is perfectly reasonable and completely unsurvivable.

Which, if you think about it, is far more terrifying than simple disagreement.

Read part 2 of 3, The Tunnel.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis

microglyphics

Ontological Blindness in Modern Moral Science

Posted in philosophy, podcast, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–6 minutes

Announcement: I’ll be taking a break from posting long-form articles for a while to focus on a project I’m developing. Instead, I’ll share progress summary updates.

Ontological Blindness in Modern Moral Science is a working title with a working subtitle as The Why Semantic Thickness, Measurement, and Reconciliation Go Wrong. No spoilers.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

INSERT: I’ve only outlined and stubbed this Ontological blindness project, and I’ve already got another idea. I need to stop reading and engaging with the world.

I was listening to the Audible version of A.J. Ayer’s classic, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)– not because I had time but because I listen to audiobooks when I work out. Ayer is a Logical Positivist, but I forgive him. He’s a victim of his time. In any case, I noticed several holes in his logic.

Sure, the book was published in 1936, and it is infamous for defending or creating Emotivism, a favourite philosophical whipping boy. I’m an Emotivist, so I disagree with the opposition. In fact, I feel their arguments are either strawmen or already defended by Ayer. I also agree with Ayer that confusing the map of language with the terrain of reality is a problem in philosophy (among other contexts), but it’s less excusable for a language philosopher.

In any case, I have begun a file to consider a new working title, Phenomenal Constraint and the Limits of Ontological Language. I might as well stay in the ontological space for a while. We’ll see where it leads, but first, I need to put the original project to bed.

Every time I commence a project, I create a thesis statement and an abstract to orient me. These may change over the course of a project, especially larger ones – more of an abstract than a thesis. This thesis has already changed a couple of times, but I feel it’s settled now.

Image: NotebookLM infographic on this topic.

Thesis Statement

Modern moral psychology repeatedly commits a multi-layered category error by treating semantically and ontologically heterogeneous moral terms as commensurate units within a single comparative framework, while simultaneously treating parochial moral metaphysics as natural substrate.

This dual conflation—of semantic density with moral plurality, and of ontological commitment with empirical discovery—produces the false appearance that some moral systems are more comprehensive than others, when it in fact reflects an inability to register ontological incommensurability.

Moral Foundations Theory provides a clear and influential case of this broader mistake: a framework whose reconciliation-oriented conclusions depend not on empirical discovery alone, but on an unacknowledged liberal-naturalist sub-ontology functioning as conceptual ‘firmware’ mistaken for moral cognition itself.

Abstract

Modern moral psychology seeks to explain moral diversity through empirically tractable frameworks that assume cross-cultural comparability of moral concepts. This book argues that many such frameworks – including but not limited to Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) – rest on a persistent category error: the treatment of semantically and ontologically heterogeneous moral terms as commensurate units within a single evaluative space.

The argument proceeds in four stages. First, it establishes that moral vocabularies differ not merely in emphasis but in semantic thickness: some terms (e.g. harm, fairness) are comparatively thin, portable, and practice-independent, while others (e.g. loyalty, authority, sanctity) are culturally saturated, institution-dependent, and ontologically loaded. Treating these as equivalent ‘foundations’ mistakes density for plurality.

Second, the book shows that claims of moral ‘breadth’ or ‘completeness’ smuggle normativity into ostensibly descriptive research, crossing the Humean is/ought divide without acknowledgement. Third, it argues that this slippage is not accidental but functional, serving modern culture’s demand for optimistic, reconcilable accounts of moral disagreement.

Finally, through sustained analysis of MFT as a worked example, the book demonstrates how liberal naturalist individualism operates as an unacknowledged sub-ontology – conceptual firmware that determines what counts as moral, measurable, and comparable. The result is not moral pluralism, but ontological imperialism disguised as empirical neutrality.

The book concludes by arguing that acknowledging ontological incommensurability does not entail nihilism or relativistic indifference, but intellectual honesty about the limits of moral science and the false comfort of reconciliation narratives.

Ideation

I’ve been pondering ontologies a lot these past few weeks, especially how social ontologies undermine communication. More recently, I’ve been considering how sub-ontologies come into play. A key catalyst for my thinking has been Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, but I’ve also been influenced by George Lakoff, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene, as I’ve shared recently. I want to be clear: This book is not about politics or political science. It intends to about the philosophy of psychology and adjacent topics.

At the highest levels, I see fundamental category errors undermining MFT, but as I inspected, it goes deeper still, so much so that it’s too much to fit into an essay or even a monograph, so I will be targeting a book so I have room to expand and articulate my argumentation. Essays are constraining, and the narrative flow – so to speak – is interrupted by footnotes and tangents.

In a book, I can spend time framing and articulating – educating the reader without presuming an in-depth knowledge. This isn’t to say that this isn’t a deep topic, and I’ll try not to patronise readers, but this topic is not only counterintuitive, it is also largely unorthodox and may ruffle a few feathers.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to share, but I’d like to be transparent in the process and perhaps gather some inputs along the way.

Methodology

Sort of… I’ve used Scrivener in the past for organising and writing fiction. This is the first time I’ am organising nonfiction. We’ll see how it goes.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Moral Psychology and the Art of Not Believing Your Own Results

Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Over the past few decades, moral psychology has staged a quiet coup against one of our most cherished fantasies: that human beings are, at bottom, rational moral agents. This is not a fringe claim. It is not a Twitter take. It is the mainstream finding of an entire research programme spanning psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience.

We do not reason our way to moral conclusions. We feel our way there. Instantly. Automatically. And only afterwards do we construct reasons that make the judgment sound respectable.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

This is not controversial anymore. It is replicated, taught, and celebrated. And yet, if you read the most influential books in this literature, something strange happens. The diagnosis is devastating. The prescription is reassuring.

I’ve just published a long-form video walking through five canonical books in moral psychology that all uncover the same structural problem, and then quietly refuse to live with the implications.

What follows is a brief guide to the argument.

The shared discovery

Across the literature, the same conclusions keep reappearing:

  • Moral judgement is intuitive, not deliberative
  • Reasoning is largely post-hoc
  • Emotion is not noise but signal
  • Framing and metaphor shape what even counts as a moral fact
  • Group identity and tribal affiliation dominate moral perception

In other words: the Enlightenment picture of moral reasoning is wrong. Or at least badly incomplete.

The rider does not steer the elephant. The rider explains where the elephant has already gone.

Audio: NotebookLM infographic

Where the books go wrong

The video focuses on five widely read, field-defining works:

  • The Righteous Mind (reviewed here and here… even here)
  • Moral Politics (mentioned here – with Don’t Think of an Elephant treated as its popular sequel)
  • Outraged! (reviewed here)
  • Moral Tribes (reviewed here)

Each of these books is sharp, serious, and worth reading. This is not a hit piece.

But each follows the same arc:

  1. Identify a non-rational, affective, automatic mechanism at the heart of moral judgement
  2. Show why moral disagreement is persistent and resistant to argument
  3. Propose solutions that rely on reflection, dialogue, reframing, calibration, or rational override

In short: they discover that reason is weak, and then assign it a leadership role anyway.

Haidt dismantles moral rationalism and then asks us to talk it out.
Lakoff shows that framing is constitutive, then offers better framing.
Gray models outrage as a perceptual feedback loop, then suggests we check our perceptions.
Greene diagnoses tribal morality, then bets on utilitarian reasoning to save us.

None of this is incoherent. But it is uncomfortable. Because the findings themselves suggest that these prescriptions are, at best, limited.

Diagnosis without prognosis

The uncomfortable possibility raised by this literature is not that we are ignorant or misinformed.

It is that moral disagreement may be structural rather than solvable.

That political conflict may not be cured by better arguments.
That persuasion may resemble contagion more than deliberation.
That reason often functions as a press secretary, not a judge.

The books sense this. And then step back from it. Which is human. But it matters.

Why this matters now

We are living in systems that have internalised these findings far more ruthlessly than public discourse has.

Social media platforms optimise for outrage, not understanding.
Political messaging is frame-first, not fact-first.
AI systems are increasingly capable of activating moral intuitions at scale, without fatigue or conscience.

Meanwhile, our institutions still behave as if one more conversation, one more fact-check, one more appeal to reason will close the gap. The research says otherwise.

And that gap between what we know and what we pretend may be the most important moral problem of the moment.

No solution offered

The video does not end with a fix. That’s deliberate.

Offering a neat solution here would simply repeat the same move I’m criticising: diagnosis followed by false comfort. Sometimes orientation matters more than optimism. The elephant is real. The elephant is moving.And most of us are passengers arguing about the map while it walks.

That isn’t despair. It’s clarity.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

When Language Fails – Abstract

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I set aside some time to design the front cover of my next book. I’m excited to share this – but that’s always the case. It’s substantially complete. In fact, it sidelined another book, also substantially complete, but the content in this might force me to change the other one. It should be ready for February. I share the current state of the Abstract

This book is meant to be an academic monograph, whilst the other, working title: The Competency Paradox, is more of a polemic.

As I mentioned in another post, it builds upon and reorients the works of George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. I’ve already revised and extended Gallie’s essentially contested concepts in A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis in the form of Contestables, but I lean on them again here.

Abstract

Contemporary moral and political discourse is marked by a peculiar frustration: disputes persist even after factual clarification, legal process, and good-faith argumentation have been exhausted. Competing parties frequently agree on what happened, acknowledge that harm occurred, and yet remain irreconcilably divided over whether justice has been served. This persistence is routinely attributed to misinformation, bad faith, or affective polarisation. Such diagnoses are comforting. They are also often wrong.

This paper advances a different claim. Certain conflicts are not primarily epistemic or semantic in nature, but ontological. They arise from incompatible orientations that structure how agents register salience, threat, authority, autonomy, and legitimacy. These orientations are genealogically shaped through enculturation, institutions, and languaged traditions, yet operationally they function prior to linguistic articulation: salience fires before reasons are narrated. Moral vocabulary enters downstream, tasked with reconciling commitments that were never shared.

From this perspective, the instability of concepts such as justice is not the primary problem but a symptom. Justice belongs to a class of Contestables (in Gallie’s sense, PDF): action-authorising terms that appear determinate while remaining untethered from shared reference under ontological plurality. Appeals to clearer definitions, better process, or shared values therefore misfire. They presume a common ontological ground that does not, in fact, exist.

When institutions are nevertheless required to act, they cannot adjudicate between ontologies. They can only select. Courts, juries, regulatory bodies, and enforcement agencies collapse plural interpretations into a single outcome. That outcome is necessarily experienced as legitimate by those whose orientation it instantiates, and as injustice by those whose orientation it negates. No procedural refinement can eliminate this asymmetry. At best, procedure dampens variance, distributes loss, and increases tolerability.
Crucially, the selection itself is constrained but underdetermined. Even within formal structures, human judgment, discretion, mood, confidence, fear, and narrative framing play a decisive role. Following Keynes, this irreducible contingency may be described as animal spirits. In formal terms, institutional outcomes are sampled from a constrained space of possibilities, but the reaction topology remains structurally predictable regardless of which branch is taken.

The consequence is stark but clarifying: outrage is not evidence that a system has failed to deliver justice; it is evidence that plural ontological orientations have been forced through a single decision point. Where semantic reconciliation is structurally unavailable, exogenous power is the dominant near-term mediator. Power does not resolve the conflict; it pauses it and stabilises meaning sufficiently for coordination to continue.

This analysis does not deny the reality of harm, the importance of law, or the necessity of institutions. Nor does it lapse into nihilism or indifference. Rather, it reframes the problem. In ontologically plural environments, the task is not moral convergence but maintenance: containing collision, resisting premature coherence, and designing institutions that minimise catastrophic failure rather than promising final resolution.

The argument developed here predates any particular event. Its value lies precisely in its predictive capacity. Given plural ontologies, untethered contestables, and institutions that must act, the pattern of reaction is invariant. The surface details change; the structure does not.
What follows is not a proposal for reconciliation. It is a diagnosis of why reconciliation is so often a category error, and why pretending otherwise is making things worse.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

James Talks Truth

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve read about 85 per cent of James by Percival Everett. I recommend it. On the surface, it is simply a very good story set in the narrative universe of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I will avoid spoilers as best I can.

The novel is set in the antebellum American South. James and the others move through Missouri, a state that openly supported slavery, and at one point into Illinois, a state that officially opposed it but quietly failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Illinois, it turns out, is no safe haven. Ideology and practice, as ever, are on speaking terms only when it suits them.

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

This is not a book review. I may write one later for my Ridley Park site once I’ve finished the book. What interests me here are two philosophical tensions Everett stages with remarkable economy.

There are two characters who are Black but able to pass as white. One of them feels profound guilt about this. He was raised as a slave, escaped, and knows exactly what it means to be treated as Black because he has lived it. Passing feels like theft. Survival, perhaps, but theft all the same.

The other is more unsettled. He was raised as a white man and only later discovers that he is not, as the language goes, “pure-bred”. This revelation leaves him suspended between identities. Should he now accept a Black identity he has never inhabited, or continue to pass quietly, benefitting from a system that would destroy him if it knew?

James offers him advice that is as brutal as it is lucid:

“Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.”

This is the philosophical nerve of the book.

Truth, Everett suggests, is indifferent to belief. Belief does not mediate justice. It does not reorganise power. It does not rewire how the world responds to your body. What matters is not what is true, nor even what is believed to be true, but how one is seen.

The world does not respond to essences. It responds to appearances.

Identity here is not an inner fact waiting to be acknowledged; it is a surface phenomenon enforced by institutions, habits, and violence. The truth can be known, spoken, even proven, and still change nothing. The social machine runs on perception, not ontology.

In James, Everett is not offering moral comfort. He is stripping away a modernist fantasy: that truth, once revealed, obliges the world to behave differently. It doesn’t. The world only cares what you look like while moving through it.

Truth, it turns out, is perfectly compatible with injustice.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

παρθένος

Posted in Culture & Society, language, morality, perception, philosophy, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A Christian bloke was arguing morality with me in regard to a recent post. I am considering a fuller response, but let’s focus on this one aspect for the time being.

Being a Christian, I wanted to argue on his own terms. The topic was statutory rape and the ages of consent more generally. I’m no Christian, but I have read the Bible. I’ve done much coursework in comparative religion, so I’m no stranger to their philosophies. A major criticism I’ve heard from Christians of Islam’s Muhammad is that he had a 9-year-old bride. Reading the account of the God and Mary encounter reminds me of another Bible verse:

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?

Audio: Unrelated to this article, I was looking for cover art by Bouguereau. I chose another of his work, but I happened upon La Vague that shares namespace with this painting. This is an aolean piece over a drum loop I wrote several decades ago on some evening. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but I still like it.
Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) – La vague (1896)

In any case – moving on…

I asked my sidekick, ChatGPT, this question:

Given Biblical accounts, how old must Mary have been at the conception of ‘Jesus’?

It provided a verbose response after a terse:

Short answer: uncomfortably young by modern standards, entirely unremarkable by ancient ones. Yes, civilisation is fun like that.

Again, I believe this account is a contradictory ahistorical account, but he believes it, so I’ll charitably treat it as truth.

It continues:

Based on historical scholarship on Second Temple Judaism:

  • Girls were typically betrothed shortly after puberty.
  • Puberty for girls in antiquity is generally estimated around 12–14.
  • Marriage and consummation often followed soon after betrothal.

Mary is described as:

  • a παρθένος (virgin)
  • betrothed to Joseph, not yet living with him
  • living under her father’s authority

All of that places her very squarely in the category of an early adolescent.

Ok, but not good enough. I clarify: I thought that translating παρθένος as virgin is disputed in hermeneutics. [NB: Be careful to specify and contradict to ensure your answer is solid and not hallucinated.]

Yes. You’re right. The translation of παρθένος as “virgin” is absolutely disputed in hermeneutics, and the fact that this still gets presented as settled is… revealing.

What παρθένος actually means

In Koine Greek, παρθένος primarily means:

  • a young woman
  • of marriageable age
  • socially defined by unmarried status

Sexual inexperience is not intrinsic to the term. It can imply virginity in some contexts, but it does not denote it by default.

If Greek wanted to be anatomically explicit, it had other tools. This word is social, not gynaecological.

The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is ʿalmāh, which means “young woman”, not “virgin”. The unambiguous Hebrew term for virginity would be bətûlāh, and Isaiah does not use it.

When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, ʿalmāh became παρθένος. That choice is defensible linguistically, but disastrous theologically. Once Matthew reads Isaiah through the Septuagint, the mess is locked in.

So the prophecy pipeline looks like this:

Hebrew ambiguity → Greek ambiguity → Latin certainty → English dogma

A masterclass in semantic drift hardening into doctrine.

Luke doesn’t fix this. He inherits it.

Luke uses παρθένος for Mary because:

  • she is unmarried
  • she is betrothed
  • she is under paternal authority

All perfectly ordinary descriptors for a teenage girl in Second Temple Judaism. None of this requires sexual inexperience as a metaphysical state.

The later insistence that παρθένος = virgin in the modern, anatomical sense is not exegesis. It’s doctrinal backfilling.

Why this keeps getting defended

Because once you admit that:

  • παρθένος ≠ virgin by necessity
  • Isaiah wasn’t predicting a miraculous conception
  • Luke may be narrating status, not biology

…a great deal of theology loses its keystone. So the translation is defended not because it’s airtight, but because it’s load-bearing.

Images: Bry circa 2014. Song circa 2004.
microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis in a dialogue with ChatGPT 5.2

microglyphics