Socio-political philosophical musings
I’ve published a long Substack essay. These NotebookLM images support it.
The essay is another attempt to articulate and explore my notion of ontological grammar and attendant commitments. Essentially, I am stress testing the boundaries and applications. Comments and enquiries are welcome here or there – even on the podcast, especially Spotify.
The law has a charming habit of behaving as though language becomes precise the moment someone in a robe frowns at it. Words that drift cheerfully in ordinary life are summoned into court, sworn in, interrogated under oath, and expected to produce stable meaning under institutional pressure. When they fail, as they reliably do, the system does not conclude that language may be structurally insufficient for the task. It consults another authority. A dictionary. A drafting manual. A corpus database. A professor, if civilisation has really run out of excuses. Whatever. Any port in a storm. Then it calls the result interpretation, and everyone pretends the word was waiting there all along.
Watch the video below. It is an admirably clean illustration of exactly this.
What you just watched is not merely a curiosity about punctuation and gun laws. It is a diagnostic. And if you have read Chapter Five of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, you will recognise the pathology immediately.
The video gives you three cases, each one a new rung on the same ladder of failed repair.
tl;dr? They tend to make it up as they go to serve their power needs.
First, Muscarello v. United States (1998): A man transports a handgun in a locked glove compartment whilst conducting a drug transaction. The statute punishes anyone who ‘uses or carries a firearm’ during such a crime. The question is whether ‘carry’ includes a weapon stored in a vehicle. The Supreme Court reaches for the OED, finds that the earliest documented sense of carry includes conveyance by vehicle, and sends Muscarello to prison, where he eventually dies. Convenient etymology. Regrettable outcome.
The video notes – correctly, I might add (and so do) – that this is an instance of what linguists call the sense-ranking fallacy: assuming that the first definition listed is the primary one, rather than simply the earliest documented. The OED’s ordering is historical, not hierarchical. Why a US court chose the OED is a sign of refinement yet remarkably curious for an American institution.
Second, the Oakhurst Dairy case: Maine truck drivers sue for $10 million over a missing Oxford comma in a statutory overtime exemption. Both sides marshal gerunds, asyndeton, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Maine legislative drafting manual, which explicitly prohibits the Oxford comma – making the ambiguity, in a sense, officially mandated. The case settles without a definitive ruling. The language did not yield a winner; the lawyers did. The hole wasn’t filled, but their pockets were.
Third, and most instructive, corpus linguistics arrives as the shiny new repair tool. Rather than trusting dictionaries, courts can now search large databases of actual language use to establish ‘ordinary meaning’. Progress. Empiricism. Science, even. And then, almost immediately, the next failure mode surfaces: the frequency fallacy (common usage is not the only permissible usage), corpus skew (many databases over-represent news articles), and search-framing (the ‘sanitation’ / ‘sanitise’ mask mandate case, where including a related but non-synonymous word shaped the results before analysis had even begun). The supposedly empirical tool inherited the user’s prior interpretive frame. Extraordinary.
Follow the sad path of the sad panda: ordinary meaning fails → dictionaries → dictionaries fail → corpus linguistics → corpus linguistics fails → methodological dispute about whether judges should be conducting quasi-scientific research from the bench at all.
And so it goes…
In A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter Five argues that law is not a domain that occasionally encounters linguistic difficulty. It is a domain that is constitutively dependent on terms that live in the Contestables zone of the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient – words like reasonable, fair, cruel, due process – terms indispensable to legal order and perpetually unstable within it. The Gradient’s prediction is blunt: the further a term drifts from stable, concrete reference, the more its meaning must be imposed by authority rather than established by usage.
The video illustrates this at the level of what might seem to be relatively simple terms – carry, distribution, sanitation – words that appear to sit closer to the Invariants end of the scale than to the Contestables. And yet even here, the institutional machinery creaks. If ‘carry’ cannot carry the weight of a single statute without Supreme Court intervention and a man’s death, what prospect does ‘reasonable’ have? Or ‘fair’? Or ‘obscene’?
Potter Stewart, as Chapter Five recounts, admitted in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) that he could not define obscenity in the abstract. ‘I know it when I see it‘, he declared. The remark is famous for its candour. It is less often noted that it is also an admission that language had simply given up, and that institutional authority stepped in to do what definition could not. The Court didn’t clarify what obscenity means, but it asserted the power to punish it anyway as it might later decide.
The video’s repair cascade is the same mechanism operating at a more mundane level. Legal interpretation doesn’t overcome linguistic insufficiency. It proceduralises it. Each interpretive tool displaces the instability onto a new surface. Dictionaries relocate the problem from statutory language to lexical authority. Corpus linguistics relocates it from lexical authority to sampling, frequency, and search design. The crack isn’t closed. It’s moved, with considerable administrative ceremony, and the ceremony is called clarity – clear as mud.
The law, in short, functions less as a dictionary than as a sovereign Humpty Dumpty: it decides what words mean when it matters, and enforces those meanings until it decides otherwise. The gavel is doing the work the lexicon cannot.
The lesson here isn’t that dictionaries are useless, corpus linguistics fraudulent, or judges uniquely obtuse. The lesson is structurally worse than that. Each repair works locally and fails architecturally. The law can stabilise meaning long enough to act, and acting is not nothing – Muscarello’s conviction required a determinate reading of ‘carry’, and the system produced one. But it can’t transmute contested language into invariant reference. It can only decide, punish, and maintain the fiction that the word was always waiting there, meaning exactly that.
Textualism – the interpretive philosophy that instructs judges to attend only to the words on the page, nothing more – is, viewed through an LIH lens, an institutionalised form of the Presumption of Effectiveness. It treats language as though it has a singular, determinate meaning recoverable by sufficiently rigorous attention, rather than as a system whose instability is structural rather than incidental. The words on the page are not a fixed source. They are the site of the problem.
If this framing resonates, Chapter Five of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis develops the full argument – from the Gradient’s account of why legal language is structurally dependent on Contestables, through Potter Stewart’s famous abdication, to the Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence that inevitably follows. Available in paperback and hardcover from Philosophics Press.
The LLM Witch-Hunt and the Enemy Within
I recently read a piece arguing, with considerable sophistication, that LLMs represent an unprecedented psychological threat – that conversational systems operating at a planetary scale change the geometry of human susceptibility in ways that demand serious governance responses. The author wasn’t wrong about the effects. This isn’t the debate, but she was wrong about the story. The effects are real, and the narrative erected around them is the oldest displacement manoeuvre in the repertoire
After Tony Self liked one of my blog posts – Hi, Tony Self – I visited his site and poked around, clicking on several articles. This was one. I liked it and noticed the Reblog button. I clicked it, and it spawned this page with this article embedded. So, here we are.
Would I choose to live forever? Undoubtedly, no. For those who’ve been around and have kept up with my posts, know that I already died. I would have been fine remaining dead, as my girlfriend did. Although I won’t rejoin her in the spiritual sense, I will join her in death in the metaphorical sense of Lakoff and Johnson.
Longevity is a luxury of the affluent. I don’t want it. Tony mentions vampires. In fiction (where else would they be?), these beings are routinely unemployed – at the very least, having no day jobs – but with vast riches or connected to one with said same. Their torment is to have outlived past loves and the need to feed on the living, mostly the fear of getting caught, as this is illegal and more generally immoral in this world as we know it – not a good look.
In any case, this live forever thought experiment forgets much, or at least imposes much. If I could just be, like a stone, is that forever? As I discuss in The Architecture of Encounter, even stones aren’t forever, regardless of their state of living; not even mountains, planets, suns, or universes. So, what’s forever anyway?
Spoiler alert: Forever is a myth.
Rather than answer generally or hypothetically, would I choose to live forever? No. Take me now if you must?
I’ve got no problems with living. It’s the conditions that bother me: the eating, the sleeping, the maintenance; entropy.
So, the ones who have this wish ignore these and presume that this version of forever comes with good health and abundance.
I recall a Greek myth in which forever is granted, and he lives on as a disembodied wisp that can’t die.
In this myth, Tithonus – a Trojan prince whom Eos, goddess of the dawn, loved and asked Zeus to grant immortality – got this wish, and it wasn’t even his; immortality without consent. Eos forgot to ask for eternal youth alongside it, so he aged indefinitely, eventually shrinking into a desiccated, babbling husk – a wisp.
Imagine: you live forever, outliving all humans, all life. The sun extinguishes, and yet you remain – all the while sentient.
Thanks, but no thanks. You can keep your forever. I’ll keep my timeline.
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.
Philosophics 