Socio-political philosophical musings
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
— Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
I posted another longer essay on Substack on the immorality of property ownership. This isn’t my first, but I wanted to go deeper in my critique. Actually, I wrote two, but I’ll advertise the second one tomorrow.
Alasdair MacIntyre is persuasive when he argues that moral discourse is never neutral, and that modern liberalism smuggles in substantive standards while pretending not to. But he dismisses emotivism too quickly as a cultural disaster rather than considering whether it might describe moral language more accurately than his own teleological alternative. If moral utterance is fundamentally prescriptive or expressive rather than descriptive, then the collapse of ‘view from nowhere’ morality doesn’t send us scurrying back to Aristotle. It simply shows that moral language was never doing the metaphysical work MacIntyre wants from it.
The Aristotelian remedy also depends on a nostalgic and anachronistic social model. The Athens he implicitly romanticises was a small polis whose demos consisted of citizens, meaning property-owning males, already bound by shared norms, proximity, and cultural inheritance. In other words, the sort of thick local world that made a certain kind of practical ethical life possible in the first place. MacIntyre’s causal arrow points the wrong way. In Athens, democratic practice emerged from that prior social texture. You do not reproduce the same conditions by philosophical edict.
To put it more bluntly: I don’t think moral realism is tenable, and I am not convinced MacIntyre really thinks so either. His project reads less like a discovery of moral facts than an attempt to promote an ought into an is by force of inheritance and rhetorical confidence. If he carved out a bounded cohort and imposed the right shared practices, perhaps something like his model could function. He may need to annex a reasonably sized car park for the purpose.
There’s a certain kind of cultural panic that tells you more about the panickers than about the thing they are panicking about. The current hysteria over AI-inflected prose is a good example.
The argument, insofar as it deserves the name, goes roughly like this: LLMs produce prose with identifiable features – a certain blandness, a fondness for the em dash, a tendency toward tidy three-part structure. Writers who use these tools risk absorbing those features. The authentic human voice is therefore under threat. Something precious is being diluted by contact with the machine.
This is sentimental rubbish, and it is worth saying so clearly before doing anything else – and a sort of virtue signalling.
I use LLMs daily. For research, for editorial pushback, for smoothing passages that have gone awry. This means I spend hours a day reading a particular kind of output. You’d have to be delusional not to admit it has effects. Certain phrasings start feeling natural that didn’t before. Certain rhythms begin to recur. Certain words might not have otherwise come into use. I notice this and note it without particular alarm, because I’ve read enough to know that this is just what environments do.
Read nothing but McCarthy for a month, and your sentences will start hunting for the spare declarative. Spend a year editing academic philosophy, and you will catch yourself reaching for ‘insofar as’ and ‘it’s worth noting’ in casual conversation. Live in a city long enough, and its cadences work their way into your syntax. This isn’t contamination, the negative moralist dispersion. It’s how language acquisition works for as long as one is alive and reading. Voice isn’t a spring. It’s a river, a moving accumulation of every tributary it has passed through.
The prestige game being played by the anti-LLM faction isn’t difficult to spot. When Dostoyevsky shapes a young writer’s cadence, we call it influence and treat it as evidence of a serious literary education. When a game world shapes a child’s imagination – I homeschooled my son in the manner of unschooling, and his primary corpus for years was World of Warcraft and its attendant lore before shifting to Dark Souls – and that child ends up reading Dante and Milton unprompted in year seven, the same mechanism has clearly operated. The source was not canonical, the outcome was. But the respectable hierarchy of influences cannot easily accommodate this, because the hierarchy was never really about the mechanism. It was about the cultural status of the inputs.
The more interesting observation isn’t about those of us who use these tools. It’s about those who conspicuously do not.
A minor genre has emerged – charitably, I’ll call it a genre because cult feels morally loaded – consisting of writers anxiously purging their prose of anything that might read as AI-generated. It’s worth noting that they have read the lists. Telltale signs of LLM authorship: excessive hedging, em dashes, transitional summaries, the phrase ‘it is worth noting’. And so they scrub, redact, replace, and perform a kind of stylistic hygiene that’s a creative decision made in direct response to LLM discourse.
These writers aren’t free of the machine’s influence. They’re among the most thoroughly shaped by it. They simply have the more theatrical relationship – the counter-imitator, the purity-performer, the one who reorganises their entire aesthetic in orbit around the thing they claim to reject.
Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, observes that a child raised by an alcoholic parent tends to become either an alcoholic or a committed teetotaller. He presents this as a dichotomy, which is too neat, but the underlying point holds. Reactions are still relata – see what happens when you read too much philosophy and logic? The teetotaller has organised their life around the bottle as surely as the alcoholic has. Both are defined by it.
Opposition is one of influence’s favourite disguises.
The fair objection is that LLM influence may differ from other influences in kind rather than just in kind. Dostoyevsky is strange. Bernhard is strange to the point of pathology. A canonical prose style is idiosyncratic by definition, which is why it’s worth absorbing. In contrast, LLM output aims for plausible fluency and statistical centrality. Its pull may be more homogenising than the pull of a singular authorial sensibility.
That’s a real point. The environment in question has a centripetal force toward the mean that most literary influences lack.
But conceding the point doesn’t really rescue the panic. It just specifies the kind of influence involved. The mechanism remains identical to every other case of environmental absorption. And ‘this influence tends toward the generic’ is an ironically generic critique of a particular environment’s character rather than a claim that the environment is doing something ontologically unprecedented to the notion of authorship.
The question that actually matters aesthetically is not was this touched by AI? It is what did the writer do with the environment they inhabited? That’s always been the question. It remains the question. The machinery has changed; the problem of influence has not.
What the current schism actually reveals is not that AI is doing something new to writing. It’s that we’ve been operating with a fairy tale about what writing is. The fairy tale holds that voice is self-originating, that somewhere beneath the reading AND the editing AND the genre conventions AND the institutional pressures AND the decade of a particular editor’s feedback, there is a pristine you, unconditioned and pure, expressing itself directly onto the page.
This was always false. Writers have always been patchworks of absorbed environments. The only difference now is that one of the environments is a machine, and the machine is new enough that people haven’t yet learned to be comfortable with what it reveals about the rest.
The environment always wins. The only interesting question is which environments you choose, and what you make of them.
I am considering a new essay. That’s nothing new, but this was born from personal experience. Whilst reading Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, I reached the chapters on moral arithmetic and imperceptible harms and effects, and it caught my attention. Not in the ‘Aha!’ way, but because I felt excluded given my own experience. My mind wandered off the reservation, but I wondered if my anecdote might be generalised. After a discussion with ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Claude, I concluded that it can. As is my practice for academic writing, I formulate a thesis and then an abstract at the start. Then comes the real work.
Derek Parfit’s moral mathematics relies on an undefended identification between physiological relief and suffering-reduction. Liminal experience exposes the instability of that identification at its source: what is addressed may be a bodily deficit while the suffering that matters lies elsewhere, in suspended indeterminacy itself. Because the preservationist grammar Parfit inherits treats continued life as presumptively good and bodily modulation as prima facie benefit, it cannot distinguish cases in which relief tracks morally salient suffering from cases in which it merely maintains the middle.
This essay argues that Derek Parfit’s discussions of ‘moral mathematics’ in Reasons and Persons are not neutral exercises in moral reasoning but operations conducted within a prior ontological grammar that predetermines what can count as a benefit, a harm, and a morally salient outcome. While Parfit explicitly addresses aggregation, commensurability, and imperceptible effects, his examples presuppose an unexamined identification: that physiological relief tracks suffering-reduction, and that such reduction, however marginal, constitutes benefit within a life treated as presumptively worth preserving. This preservationist orientation is not argued for but built into the structure of the cases themselves.
The essay develops this critique through Parfit’s micro-allocation cases, particularly those involving the distribution of small amounts of water to relieve thirst. These examples appear to demonstrate that imperceptible reductions in suffering can aggregate into morally significant goods. But the argument depends on a prior identification that may fail at the point of origin. Slaking thirst addresses a physiological deficit; it does not necessarily diminish the suffering that is morally salient to the subject. The essay does not claim that physiological modulation never tracks suffering-reduction – in many cases it plainly does – but that Parfit’s grammar lacks the resources to distinguish the cases in which it does from those in which it does not. It treats all bodily modulation as benefit by default, and this default is what the essay sets out to make visible.
Drawing on a first-person account of critical illness – respiratory failure, not pain; a demand not for comfort but for determination in either direction – the essay argues that such cases function not as marginal exceptions but as diagnostics that reveal the grammar operating on the wrong dimension of the moral object. The experience of wanting not relief but resolution (‘pick a side’) is both possible and intelligible, yet the framework has no notation for it. What the intervention addressed was a physiological deficit; what it left untouched was suspended indeterminacy – the condition of being maintained in the middle, neither recovering nor ending. That the trajectory eventually resolved toward survival cannot retroactively validate the intervention on the axis that mattered during the interval itself; to argue otherwise would be to confuse post hoc survivorship with moral justification.
The essay argues further that this limitation belongs not to Parfit alone but to a broader preservationist syntax operative across Western medical ethics, legal frameworks governing end-of-life care, and liberal moral philosophy more generally. Within this grammar, life functions as the unmarked container of value; sustaining it is treated as prior to any calculation about its contents; and cessation requires special licence. The cultural entrenchment of this grammar explains why Parfit’s examples feel intuitively compelling: they inherit commitments so deeply embedded that they register as neutral premises rather than contestable positions. The point is not that preservationism is indefensible but that it remains undefended – operative yet unexamined.
Finally, the essay notes that Singer’s universalisation of moral responsibility intensifies rather than resolves the underlying difficulty, since it collapses the bounded cases on which Parfit’s arithmetic depends. What emerges is not a disagreement about consequentialism but about the grammar through which suffering, benefit, and moral salience are first made legible – and about whether that grammar can survive contact with the full range of conditions it purports to govern.
The trolley problem’s borrowed ontology was already philosophically dubious in the seminar room. It becomes materially dangerous when compiled into autonomous systems, because assumptions that once guided thought experiments now govern conduct without appeal.
The first essay argued that the trolley problem is not a neutral moral test but a borrowed ontological grammar. It preformats the scene before reasoning begins, then invites us to mistake compliance with its terms for moral insight. All of that was bad enough when confined to philosophy seminars and undergraduate anguish.
It’s even worse now. Grammar has escaped the classroom. It’s been formalised, compiled, and deployed in systems that make decisions about who lives and who dies. And it wasn’t adopted because it is morally sound. It was adopted because it’s formally legible. Legibility rears its ugly head.
Autonomous systems don’t inherit trolley logic because no one’s examined it and found it adequate to the moral world. They inherit it because it’s the sort of ontology a machine can process: discretised, scalar, optimisable. Computational tractability is not a neutral filter. It selects for ontologies that can be ranked and calculated, and discards what can’t. Trolley grammar survives not on but on formatability. The philosophical problems didn’t get solved. They got encoded.
The autonomous vehicle ethics literature is, for the most part, the trolley problem with a chassis bolted on.
Public debate still poses the same stale questions in a shinier casing: one pedestrian or five, passenger or crowd, young or old, many or few. These dominate media headlines and a remarkable number of engineering white papers. They are also, without exception, trolley questions – which means they carry every presupposition the first essay indicted.
They assume:
And they assume all of this so completely that the engineering literature rarely pauses to ask whether any of it’s true. It simply proceeds as though the ontology were settled, because – and let’s be honest here – for computational purposes, it has to be.
This is the quiet scandal. The trolley grammar wasn’t scrutinised and then selected. It was convenient and so inherited. Engineers needed inputs that could be discretised, outputs that could be ranked, and an objective function that could be minimised. The trolley ontology arrived pre-packaged for exactly that specification. The fit was not philosophical. It was architectural. Funny, that.
In the trolley problem, the chooser was at least a fiction of agency – a staged human making a staged decision in real time. That fiction was already problematic. In the autonomous vehicle, even that residual theatre is over.
The ‘decision’ about who to hit, who to spare, and what to optimise isn’t made at the moment of impact. It’s made months or years before – in a design meeting, a spec document, a policy gradient, a loss function. The human chooser doesn’t disappear so much as retreat upstream, where moral judgement is converted into a spec and then forgotten as a latent judgment.
The engineer who writes the objective function is, in a meaningful sense, the person pulling the lever – though not likely culpable or legally liable. In my accounting, they should be, but they don’t experience themselves that way. They experience themselves as solving a technical problem, which it is… among other things. The moral content of their decisions is dissolved into parameters, weights, and optimisation targets, at which point it becomes invisible as moral content. The judgment is still there – baked into code, where it executes without renewed deliberation, without situational awareness, without the capacity to recognise an exception. The trolley problem’s fictional chooser has found their ideal form – not a person at all, but a function call.
This is where the original essay’s diagnosis turns actively dangerous. In the seminar room, commensurability was a presupposition one could interrogate; could refuse; could argue that lives are not the sort of thing that submit to arithmetic, and the worst that happened was a lively tutorial. In engineering, commensurability isn’t a presupposition. It’s a precondition. See James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State.
You can’t write a decision algorithm without assigning comparable values to outcomes. To optimise, you need a scalar or a ranking. To rank, you need commensurable outputs. The system can’t tolerate genuine incommensurability – not because incommensurability is philosophically wrong, but because it is computationally intractable. So what was once a dubious metaphysical assumption becomes an architectural necessity.
The same structure appears in algorithmic triage. A hospital system designed to allocate ventilators during a crisis must score patients on factors like age, comorbidities, projected survival, and so on. Each patient becomes a datum. Each datum enters a ranking, which produces an allocation, which determines who breathes. In some political circles, these might have been cast as death panels. Every step in that chain requires the commensurability that the trolley grammar simply assumed and that the first essay argued was never justified. The machine demands the ontology that the philosopher merely entertained.
And here is the cruelty of it all. In the seminar, you could resist the grammar. You could say: ‘These lives are not commensurable’, ‘this comparison is malformed’, or ‘I refuse the maths’. The system can’t refuse the ontology it was built to execute. It’ll compute within the borrowed grammar until it’s switched off or until someone it couldn’t see is killed by an assumption nobody thought to question.
Everything the first essay identified as absent from the trolley grammar – context, relationship, role, history, the embeddedness of actual moral life – is not merely missing from the autonomous system. It’s structurally excluded by the requirements of the platform.
Role and obligation. Narrative history. Situated responsibility. Relational asymmetry. Tacit social meaning. Unquantified vulnerability. The possibility that not all harms belong in one metric space at all, ad infinitum… None of these can be rendered as a tractable variable, and what can’t be rendered as a tractable variable isn’t weighed lightly…or at all. Humans bask in their hubris, the purported ability to tame complexity, but their track record tells a different story.
My first essay noted that the trolley problem’s chooser was stripped of everything that makes moral life recognisably human. The autonomous system completes that stripping and makes it permanent. The philosophy student might resist the grammar inarticulately – might feel, without quite being able to say why, that something has been left out. The machine has no such unease. It has no friction, no nagging sense that the map has omitted something important about the territory. It just acts within the ontology it’s given; and the ontology was given by people who inherited it from a thought experiment that was never adequate from the start. Compilation doesn’t merely omit moral texture; it excludes whatever can’t survive formalisation – another procrustean bed. And unlike a bad philosophical argument, which can be refuted, published against, or simply ignored, a bad ontology compiled into infrastructure governs silently. It doesn’t announce its assumptions or invite dissent. It just administers – mini Eichmanns in waiting.
The trolley problem asked what you’d do at the lever. It at least had the decency to pretend you were present for the decision. The autonomous vehicle has already been told what counts – by engineers who mistake ontology for specification, by a machine that can’t question the grammar it executes. In the trolley problem, the borrowed ontology framed the question. In the autonomous vehicle, it drives the car.
Beep, beep.
The trolley problem is not a neutral test of moral judgment. It’s a borrowed ontology, transmogrified into a moral test. Before anyone reasons about anything, the scene has already decided what sort of things there are to reason about: discrete persons, countable lives, comparable harms, and a chooser licensed to survey them from nowhere in particular.
What follows from it isn’t a clarification of moral principle but a rehearsal within terms already set.
The standard trolley case presents itself as raw moral data – a clean dilemma, stripped of the mess of the real world, offered up for principled adjudication. It is nothing of the sort.
Before you are invited to reason, the scenario has already done substantial philosophical work on your behalf. It’s individuated persons into discrete units. It has rendered their lives countable. It’s made their deaths commensurable – one loss weighed against five, as though the comparison were as natural as subtraction. And it’s structured the whole affair as a problem of adjudication: here are the facts, now judge.
None of this is neutral. Every one of those moves is a substantive ontological commitment dressed up as stage direction.
Take commensurability alone. The question ‘should you divert the trolley to kill one instead of five?’ only functions as a dilemma if those deaths belong to the same evaluative currency. If they don’t – if, say, the value of a life isn’t the sort of thing that submits to arithmetic – then the problem is not difficult. It is malformed. The anguish it is supposed to provoke is an artefact of its own framing, not a discovery about ethics.
The maths is real enough. What’s dubious is the ontology that made the arithmetic possible.
The scene isn’t the only thing preformatted. What about the agent?
The trolley chooser stands outside the situation, surveys the options, and selects. They are not embedded in a community, encumbered by role, constrained by relationship, or shaped by history. They’re a pure point of detached rational adjudication – the moral equivalent of a view from nowhere.
The point isn’t that no one ever chooses under pressure. Of course, they do. The point is that the trolley problem presents detached adjudication as though it were the natural form of moral intelligence. As though stripping away context, relationship, role, and history were a way of clarifying moral reasoning rather than of impoverishing it beyond recognition.
The solitary lever-puller, surveying outcomes from above, isn’t morality stripped to its essentials. It’s modern administrative fantasy.
They’re the civil servants of ethical theory: contextless, disembodied, tasked only with optimising a ledger they didn’t write and can’t question. The scenario doesn’t merely place them in a difficult position. It constructs them as the kind of agent for who(m) moral life consists of exactly this: tallying comparable losses under time pressure and choosing the smaller number.
That isn’t the human condition. It’s a job description.
It gets worse.
It’s one thing to say that trolley problems are structured rather than neutral. Most thought experiments are structured. Simplification is the point. The real indictment isn’t that the trolley case has assumptions, but that it has these assumptions – and that they are not universal features of moral reasoning but the inherited furniture of a very particular intellectual tradition.
Consider what the scenario requires you to accept before you even begin deliberating:
This is not the skeleton of rationality itself. It is a picture – modern, liberal, administrative – of what rationality looks like when it has been formatted for a particular kind of governance. The trolley problem does not merely presuppose an ontology. It presupposes this one.
And the trick – the real laundering – is that it presupposes it so thoroughly that the presupposition becomes invisible. Respondents argue furiously about whether to pull the lever, push the fat man, or stand paralysed by principle, without ever noticing that the terms of the argument were installed before they arrived. The metaphysics entered the room disguised as a trolley schedule.
If all of this is right, then the usual interpretation of trolley responses has the direction of explanation backwards. The standard reading goes something like: present a moral dilemma, observe the response, infer a moral principle. Consequentialists pull the lever. Virtue ethicists pose. Stoics watch. Deontologists don’t pull the level on principle alone. The disagreement reveals something about the structure of moral thought.
But if the scene is already ontologically loaded, and the chooser already formatted for a particular style of deliberation, then what the response reveals isn’t an independently accessed moral truth. It’s the respondent’s prior comfort with the ontological grammar that the case has already installed. Those who pull the lever are not discovering that consequences matter. They are confirming that the grammar of aggregable, commensurable lives is one they already inhabit. Those who refuse aren’t discovering that persons are inviolable. They are resisting, perhaps inarticulately, a grammar that does not match the one they brought into the room.
The disagreement is real. But it’s not a disagreement about what’s right. It is a disagreement about what there is – about what a person is, what a life is, whether value aggregates, whether agency is the sort of thing that can be exercised from nowhere. It’s an ontological dispute conducting itself in moral attire.
Trolley problems don’t tell us what’s right. They tell us what we already think there is to count. This matters beyond moral philosophy. The moment trolley logic is recruited for autonomous vehicles, military robotics, or triage systems, its hidden ontology ceases to be a parlour-game inconvenience and becomes a design mandate. Engineers do not escape the metaphysics of the scene. They inherit it, formalise it, and call the result safety. That may be the more urgent article.
The next question is not whether a self-driving car should kill one pedestrian rather than five. It is how such a machine came to inherit a world in which persons appear as countable units, harms as optimisable variables, and moral action as a problem of detached calculation in the first place.
<soapbox>
I’ve never been comfortable with the term ‘peers’, not since I first encountered it as a grade schooler in a civics or social studies course. It felt like nonsense at first utterance, but much energy is expended indoctrinating children and adolescents.
Thinking about the Frege–Geach problem has trebled my interest in ontological grammars. It’s also got me thinking about the ontology of peer groups. I’ve always been an eccentric, so I never felt I had any peers. Sure, I’ve had friends, colleagues, bandmates, and acquaintances I’ve genuinely liked and respected, but none were peers. Our connexions might best be described as ‘thin’. We connected through shared work, music, interests, and so on, but peer would have been stretching it.
So, what do I feel qualifies as a peer? And what is a standard definition? I suppose we should start with the latter.
OED: A person who is associated or matched with another; a companion, a fellow, a mate.
Fair enough. This definition works fine. The devil remains in the details. What does it mean to be associated or a match?
As a moral noncognitivist, I don’t think the concept arrives trailing clouds of metaphysical glory. But it doesn’t need to. The interesting question is grammatical: what ontological conditions would have to be shared for ‘peer’ to mean something thick rather than merely administrative?
The legal system answers in the thinnest way possible. If you are recognisably human, that’s enough. Close enough for the government. Peer means person. Case closed.
When the system invokes ‘a jury of one’s peers’, it doesn’t care whether they are one’s peers in any thick or serious sense. It needs performative placeholders – tokens. Rather, it needs them to be peers of the court: those sufficiently aligned with its assumptions, procedures, and admissibility rules to reproduce its worldview in the form of judgement.
The court decides what counts as legible, what counts as relevant, what counts as rational, and what counts as legitimate. It does not discover peers. It manufactures a category of acceptable judges and then calls the result fairness. The deck is stacked before the first card is turned.
I like two examples, one historical and one fictional, to make my point.
This case should be obvious. The peers here are precisely not their peers, but adversaries. The defendants were not tried by those who shared their grammar of legitimacy, history, necessity, authority, or even the relevant category boundaries. They were tried by agents operating within a rival grammar – one that had already classified the defendants’ framework not as a competing ontology, but as criminal pathology.
The Nazi grammar was effectively annulled. Not refuted, not outargued – annulled. And as with more typical civil and criminal courts, symmetry was never the goal. The institution ruled by fiat. I call this ontological imperialism in a yet unpublished manuscript. The dominant system merely declares the adversarial grammar invalid and inadmissible.
The standard legitimation story for Nuremberg is natural law: there exist moral facts so fundamental that they transcend positive law and sovereign authority. ‘Crimes against humanity’ was coined precisely to name offences no ontological framework could render legitimate. The phrase does the work – against humanity, not against a particular legal code or polity, but against the species as such. It presupposes exactly the universal semantic accessibility that the philosophy of language has shown to be unavailable.
Now switch venues to a fictional universe. Philip K. Dick asks what would have happened had the Axis won the Second World War. The answer, structurally speaking, is: practically nothing — except that a different ontological grammar would now be dominant.
That is the value of the thought experiment. It doesn’t change the species, the cognitive architecture, or the capacity for deliberation. It changes the constitutive act – the moment at which a grammar gets installed as the world’s grammar. And everything downstream shifts with it. In Dick’s world, the inhabitants don’t experience their moral order as imposed or artificial. They navigate it as the background of intelligibility, the way things simply are. The I Ching functions for Tagomi the way human rights discourse functions for a postwar liberal – not as a choice, but as the grammar within which choices become possible.
The counterfactual is devastating because it is structurally symmetric. Had the Axis won, there would have been trials. Those trials would have applied retroactive categories – perhaps ‘crimes against racial destiny’ or ‘crimes against civilisational hygiene’. Allied leaders would have been the defendants. And the verdicts would have felt, to the inhabitants of that world, exactly as self-evidently correct as Nuremberg’s feel to us.
I don’t secretly wish the Axis had won. But the dialectic is worth consideration, and the discomfort it produces is itself the datum. Not evidence that the examination is wrong – evidence that the grammar is working.
So when modern institutions speak reverently of ‘a jury of one’s peers’, I hear not a triumph of fairness but a legitimating fiction. The phrase conceals the fact that institutions do not seek the defendant’s peers. They seek their own. They seek judges formed within the same order, obedient to the same grammar, and willing to mistake its categories for universal reason.
A peer, in any meaningful sense, would have to share enough ontological grammar with me that the same things register as real, salient, and intelligible in roughly the same way. By that standard, peers are rare. Institutions know this perfectly well. Which is why they do not look for them.
They appoint their own and call the matter settled.
</soapbox>
I published an essay on the Frege–Geach problem in February. I published an update yesterday. I still wasn’t satisfied, so I engaged with several LLMs. This was my approach.
The involved LLMs were:
First, I fed them some documents in no particular order, my goal being to share my own knowledge and position on the purported problem.
I started with Gemini. This was my prompt:
I am interested in resolving the Frege–Geach problem, but it seems I can only dissolve it. This doesn’t appear to be adequate for some analytical philosophers. How might I get closer to resolving it? My main argument is that they are assuming that language is stronger than it is, and they don’t agree with my argument.
As the prompt notes and by design, many analytical philosophers are reluctant to grant the degree of insufficiency I take to be constitutive of natural language, especially where logical embedding is concerned. Evidently, that counts as my not wanting to play their game. From my perspective, they are committed to a different ontological grammar. What this means practically is that I need to present my solution proposal in their terms. This doesn’t mean their terms are right; problems are only relevant in their dialect, even though my argument is that all dialects are lossy – mine included.
Part of the challenge is that formal logic was invented precisely because ordinary language is imprecise, yet its standards are often retrofitted back onto natural language as though they revealed what language must have been doing all along.
Without sharing the entire play-by-play of the transcripts, I established my course of action. I’d dissolved the problem, but I hadn’t yet resolved it.
My initial intuition of several years ago was to argue that they were expecting too much from grammar. I’ll use a well-worn example. Follow these statements:
According to them, the embedded ‘murder is wrong‘ doesn’t make sense. Here’s their logic:
According to Ayer, moral statements are simply emotive. When one utters, ‘murder is wrong‘, they are really saying ‘Boo, murder‘ – ‘I don’t like murder‘.
If ‘murder‘ is defined as ‘killing disallowed by the state‘, then murder is wrong might be translated into ‘killing disallowed by the state is wrong’ or ‘what the state declares is wrong is wrong’, but we also know that the state makes many pronouncements, many of which carry no moral weight and others which are counter to expected moral positions – law does not equal moral, and vice versa. Let’s move on and revisit our statements:
My intuition was that the embedded clause does not perform the same linguistic act as the standalone assertion, even if the lexical material is repeated. We’re committing a category error. More crucially, the category it belongs to doesn’t exist, so it’s unspecified. It needs to be invented.
Although I struggled to find apt nomenclature, I settled on performance-sensitive expressions.
A parallel challenge is that the solution can’t be a simple carve-out for moral language. Whilst I feel that moral language does use its own grammar and semantics, I don’t expect analytical philosophers to accept this assertion, so the solution should be more generalisable. I’d need to demonstrate where else this conditional logic fails in the same manner.
ChatGPT had this to say in response to a draft:
The comparative-cost section is good, but one sentence should be added to pre-empt the “your account also uses theory-laden notions” objection.
A critic may reply: your own terms, like “coherence zone” and “synchronisation protocol,” are also theoretical machinery. True enough. The difference is that your machinery is independently motivated and not introduced solely to patch Frege-Geach. You imply this already, but it would help to say so directly.
It offers clearer language:
Embedded moral predicates are not semantically identical to their unembedded counterparts, but neither are they inert; they are performance-sensitive expressions whose full evaluative load is attenuated under embedding while a thinner inferential profile remains available for reasoning.
In any case, I am still polishing the essay, dotting Is and crossing Ts. I think I’ve got the main argument and some examples. One of my weaknesses may be that I rely heavily on my own theories, but these are published and debatable on their own merits.
A real challenge of some problems and paradoxes is that they are self-inflicted. Faith that language is truth apt and lossless leads down many blind alleys.
This is the last of a 13-part series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.
Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel
Like Locke, I don’t believe that humans are, on average, inherently ‘bad’, but they (as are all life forms) are opportunistic, and there is much room for ‘badness’ to cultivate.
Synthesized opportunism framework bridging evolutionary biology and structural power dynamics
Not “humans are good” (Rousseau’s error).
Not “humans are bad” (Hobbes’ cynicism).
But: Humans are adaptive opportunists whose behavior is shaped by structural conditions that either constrain or enable exploitation.
All organisms, including humans:
This isn’t moral or immoral. It’s ecological.
A plant will spread roots toward water. Not because it’s “greedy.” Because that’s how plants work.
A human will exploit advantages when available. Not because they’re “evil.” Because that’s how adaptive organisms work.
The key phrase: “there is much room for ‘badness’ to cultivate.”
Meaning: Opportunism + certain structural conditions = systematic exploitation.
What conditions cultivate “badness”?
Under these conditions, ordinary human opportunism becomes systematic domination.
The lake-dwellers aren’t evil.
They’re opportunistic organisms responding to conditions:
Of course they exploit. The structure rewards it.
The desert-dwellers aren’t noble victims.
They’re also opportunistic organisms:
Of course they submit. The structure demands it.
Neither side is “good” or “bad.”
Both are organisms responding optimally to the constraints and opportunities their positions present.
Most moral philosophy assumes humans have fixed natures:
Hobbes: Humans are selfish, need State to constrain them
Rousseau: Humans are cooperative, civilization corrupts them
Locke: Humans are rational, will respect property naturally
Your position: Humans are opportunistic, and structures determine what kind of opportunism emerges.
A lion killing a zebra isn’t evil. It’s opportunism within ecological constraints.
A capitalist exploiting workers isn’t (necessarily) evil. It’s opportunism within economic constraints.
We don’t moralize the lion because we accept ecological constraints as given.
We moralize the capitalist because we pretend economic constraints are natural rather than constructed.
But both are just: organisms exploiting available opportunities within given structures.
Here’s the crucial part: Opportunism + power asymmetry + weak constraints = systematic exploitation.
Small band, everyone knows everyone, resources relatively shared, power relatively equal.
Opportunism exists, but:
Opportunism constrained = relatively egalitarian.
Large population, anonymity, property enclosed, power concentrated.
Opportunism exists, and:
Opportunism unconstrained = systematic domination.
Same opportunistic humans. Different structures. Different outcomes.
“Badness” isn’t in human nature.
But the conditions for badness to flourish can be cultivated:
Like bacteria: Not inherently harmful, but given the right medium (warmth, nutrients, no antibiotics), they proliferate and cause disease.
Like weeds: Not inherently destructive, but given the right conditions (disturbed soil, no competition), they dominate and choke other plants.
Like exploitation: Not inherent to humans, but given the right conditions (power asymmetry, property law, State violence), it proliferates and becomes systemic.
The mountains created asymmetry:
Temporal priority created advantage:
The tunnel created opportunity for extraction:
Lake-dwellers, being opportunistic, exploit their positional advantage.
Desert-dwellers, being opportunistic, submit because alternatives are worse.
State, being opportunistic, sides with those who fund it.
None of this requires anyone being “bad.”
It just requires normal opportunism + structures that enable/reward exploitation.
If capitalists were evil, we could:
But if capitalists are just opportunists responding to structures:
The problem isn’t bad individuals. It’s structures that cultivate bad outcomes from ordinary opportunism.
Foucault showed: Power produces subjects.
Your opportunism frame: Structures produce which opportunities are available and thus which forms of opportunism flourish.
In a structure that rewards:
Not because they’re inherently these things.
Because structures make these behaviors optimal.
Graeber showed: Humans have created diverse political arrangements.
Your opportunism frame explains why:
Structures that constrain opportunism → egalitarian outcomes
Structures that enable opportunism → hierarchical outcomes
Same opportunistic humans. Different structural constraints. Different societies.
Why does capitalism require constant energy to maintain?
Because human opportunism would naturally exploit the system’s contradictions:
Workers would organize (opportunistically seeking better conditions)
Poor would redistribute (opportunistically accessing abundance)
Dominated would resist (opportunistically challenging power)
So the system must expend energy to:
This energy expenditure fights human opportunism that would otherwise destabilize hierarchy.
If humans were inherently bad, domination would be inevitable and universal.
But historical evidence shows:
What changed wasn’t human nature.
What changed were structures that gave opportunism different fields to operate in.
Current structures cultivate exploitation by:
Not because humans are evil.
Because structures reward these outcomes.
This is why your position is stronger than traditional left moralism:
Traditional left: Capitalists are greedy/evil, we need better people
Your position: Capitalists are opportunistic, we need different structures
Traditional left requires moral transformation.
Your position requires structural transformation.
Guess which is more realistic?
The lake-dwellers aren’t villains. They’re organisms exploiting positional advantage because:
They’re doing what opportunistic organisms do under these conditions.
The desert-dwellers aren’t saints. They’re organisms accepting subordination because:
They’re doing what opportunistic organisms do under these conditions.
No one is morally culpable. Everyone is structurally produced.
If the problem were evil people, we could:
But if the problem is structures cultivating exploitation from normal opportunism:
Change requires transforming the structures themselves.
Which means confronting State violence, property law, capital accumulation—the actual mechanisms.
You’re right that Locke was onto something: Humans aren’t inherently bad.
Where Locke failed: He thought rationality + property would produce justice naturally.
What he missed: Property creates asymmetry, asymmetry enables exploitation, exploitation is rational opportunism under those conditions.
Humans being “not bad” doesn’t prevent systematic domination.
It just means domination emerges from structure, not nature.
Humans are opportunistic (like all organisms).
Structures determine what opportunities exist.
Current structures offer opportunities for:
So ordinary human opportunism produces systematic inequality.
Not because humans are bad.
Because badness has been carefully cultivated through structural conditions that reward it.
The lake-dwellers aren’t evil for owning the lake.
The desert-dwellers aren’t good for being exploited.
Both are organisms responding to structural constraints.
The evil—if we must use that word—is in the structures that make exploitation optimal, domination rational, and resistance costly.
And those structures are:
They’re cultivated. Maintained. Enforced.
Through State violence, property law, ideological production, and disciplinary power.
Which means they could, theoretically, be transformed.
But only by changing the structures, not by improving the humans.
Because the humans are fine.
It’s the garden they’re planted in that cultivates thorns.
I like this bloke. Here, he clarifies Rorty’s perspective on Truth. I am quite in sync with Rorty’s position, perhaps 90-odd per cent.
Allow me to explain.
I have written about truth several times over the years, 1, 2, 3, and more. In earlier posts, I put the point rather bluntly: truth is largely rhetorical. I still think that captured something important, but it now feels incomplete. With the development of my Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), the picture needs tightening.
The first step is to stop pretending that ‘truth’ names a single thing.
Philosopher Bernard Williams helpfully distinguished between thin and thick senses of truth in Truth and Truthfulness. The distinction is simple but instructive.
In its thin sense, truth is almost trivial. Saying ‘it is true that p’ typically adds nothing beyond asserting p. The word ‘true’ functions as a logical convenience: it allows endorsement, disquotation, and generalisation. Philosophically speaking, this version of truth carries very little metaphysical weight. Most arguments about truth, however, are not about this thin sense.
In practice, truth usually appears in a thicker social sense. Here, truth is embedded in practices of inquiry and communication. Communities develop norms around sincerity, accuracy, testimony, and credibility. These norms help stabilise claims so that people can coordinate action and share information.
At this level, truth becomes something like a social achievement. A statement counts as ‘true’ when it can be defended, circulated, reinforced, and relied upon within a shared framework of interpretation. Evidence matters, but so do rhetoric, persuasion, institutional authority, and the distribution of power. This is the sense in which truth is rhetorical, but rhetoric is not sovereign.
Human beings can imagine almost anything about the world, yet the world has a stubborn habit of refusing certain descriptions. Gravity does not yield to persuasion. A bridge designed according to fashionable rhetoric rather than sound engineering will collapse regardless of how compelling its advocates may have been.
This constraint does not disappear in socially constructed domains. Institutions, identities, norms, and laws are historically contingent and rhetorically stabilised, but they remain embedded within material, biological, and ecological conditions. A social fiction can persist for decades or centuries, but eventually it encounters pressures that force revision.
Subjectivity, therefore, doesn’t imply that ‘anything goes’. It simply means that all human knowledge is mediated.
We encounter the world through perception, language, culture, and conceptual frameworks. Every description is produced from a particular standpoint, using particular tools, within particular historical circumstances. Language compresses experience and inevitably loses information along the way. No statement captures reality without distortion. This is the basic insight behind the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
At the same time, our descriptions remain answerable to the constraints of the world we inhabit. Some descriptions survive repeated encounters better than others.
In domains where empirical constraint is strong – engineering, physics, medicine – bad descriptions fail quickly. In domains where constraint is indirect – ethics, politics, identity, aesthetics – multiple interpretations may remain viable for long periods. In such cases, rhetoric, institutional authority, and power often function as tie-breakers, stabilising one interpretation over others so that societies can coordinate their activities. These settlements are rarely permanent.
What appears to be truth in one era may dissolve in another. Concepts drift. Institutions evolve. Technologies reshape the landscape of possibility. Claims that once seemed self-evident may later appear parochial or incoherent.
In this sense, many truths in human affairs are best understood as temporally successful settlements under constraint.
Even the most stable arrangements remain vulnerable to change because the conditions that sustain them are constantly shifting. Agents change. Environments change. Expectations change. The very success of a social order often generates the tensions that undermine it. Change, in other words, is the only persistence.
The mistake of traditional realism is to imagine truth as a mirror of reality – an unmediated correspondence between statement and world. The mistake of crude relativism is to imagine that language and power can shape reality without limit. Both positions misunderstand the situation.
We do not possess a final language that captures reality exactly as it is. But neither are we free to describe the world however we please. Truth is not revelation, and it is not mere invention.
It is the provisional stabilisation of claims within mediated encounter, negotiated through language, rhetoric, and institutions, and continually tested against a world that never fully yields to our descriptions. We don’t discover Truth with a capital T. We negotiate survivable descriptions under pressure.
Philosophics 