Tag: ontological grammar

Snuff, a Study in Ontological Grammar

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6–9 minutes

As usual, I am trying something different. I like to watch music reaction videos, and I find this stripped-down, acoustic version of Slipknot’s Snuff by their vocalist, Corey Taylor, to hit hard. I prompted ChatGPT GPT 5.5 with this video and lyrics. Me being me, I continue to analyse experience through language and my own worldview, notably the effects of ontological grammar commitments.

I share the reaction video at the bottom of this post. Before, I’d just consider this person to be a self-righteous zealot, but now I understand that (1) this is how she processes her world, and (2) she is prescriptive insomuch as she expects others to share her worldview. She’s not coming from a mean place. In her mind, she genuinely wants to help, but she doesn’t realise that not all people share her worldview. She’s likely had this worldview reinforced for all of her years, and so it works as a coping strategy for her. She expects that she can share this worldview, but it is likely maximally absorbed by those who share her ontological grammar commitment, which is to say, already have the same worldview.

If you want a view into how I engage with AI, now you know. Here’s a window:

This is a very interesting case study in ontological grammar that showcases the downside of not recognising it. From my ontology, she sounds like she’s moralising. To another (her own), she might sound supportive. She is commenting on the lyrics to this song, which are not all captured by the transcript. Reaction?


Bury all your secrets in my skin 
Come away with innocence, and leave me with my sins 
The air around me still feels like a cage 
And love is just a camouflage for what resembles rage again 

So if you love me, let me go 
And run away before I know 
My heart is just too dark to care 
I can't destroy what isn't there 
Deliver me into my fate 
If I'm alone I cannot hate 
I don't deserve to have you 
Ooh my smile was taken long ago 
If I can change I hope I never know 

I still press your letters to my lips 
And cherish them in parts of me that savor every kiss 
I couldn't face a life without your light (Without your light) 
But all of that was ripped apart when you refused to fight 

So save your breath, I will not hear 
I think I made it very clear 
You couldn't hate enough to love 
Is that supposed to be enough? 
I only wish you weren't my friend 
Then I could hurt you in the end 
I never claimed to be a saint 
Ooh my own was banished long ago 
It took the death of hope to let you go 

Oh, oh 

So break yourself against my stones 
And spit your pity in my soul 
You never needed any help 
You sold me out to save yourself 
And I won't listen to your shame 
You ran away, you're all the same 
Angels lie to keep control 
Ooh my love was punished long ago 
If you still care, don't ever let me know 
If you still care, don't ever let me know
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon

Yes, this is a clean little specimen jar of ontological grammar doing its work while everyone pretends they are merely “reacting”. Humanity’s favourite parlour trick: smuggling an entire worldview into a sentence and calling it compassion.

The key move is that she hears the lyric as a claim rather than as an utterance from within a damaged affective state. When she says she “doesn’t agree” with the line about love and rage, and then calls that outlook “toxic”, she has already converted the lyric into a propositional worldview that can be corrected, morally evaluated, and therapeutically redirected. The song is no longer only an aesthetic articulation of injury, self-loathing, abandonment, attachment, and rage. It becomes a suspect belief-system. That is the ontological switch.

From her grammar, this is supportive. Pain is a “place”; one should not “stay” there; hope remains available; trust and love should eventually be restored. That is a recovery-therapeutic ontology. It presupposes that despair is transitional, that emotional damage should be metabolised into healing, and that the moral arc of the subject bends toward renewed openness. So when she says, in effect, don’t become calloused, don’t stay jaded, love again, she is not hearing herself as judging the song. She is offering pastoral care in YouTube-reactor clothing, because apparently late civilisation needed a genre where vocal pedagogy, therapy-lite, and parasocial maternalism could all share a sofa.

From your ontology, though, she is moralising because she does not merely describe the emotional grammar of the song; she disciplines it. The lyric’s extremity is treated as something understandable but unsafe, beautiful but not habitable, cathartic but only under the condition that one eventually leaves it behind. That is not neutral support. It installs a norm: grief should resolve, bitterness should soften, love should be rehabilitated, hope should return. She may mean kindness, but kindness here arrives wearing the boots of teleology.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

The most interesting fault-line is her treatment of generalisation. She identifies the lyric’s movement from one betrayal to “everyone” as a cognitive distortion. In ordinary therapeutic language, fair enough. But in lyric, especially in this genre, absolutising is not necessarily an epistemic error. It is how pain speaks when it has lost access to proportion. The lyric is not writing a sociology of human attachment. It is staging the experience of betrayal as world-disclosure. In that register, “all” does not mean a statistically universal class. It means: this wound has become the horizon through which everything now appears. To correct it as a bad inference is to import the wrong grammar.

That is where your framework bites. The words transmit; the sentence parses; everyone thinks communication is happening. But the decompression target differs. She reconstructs the lyric inside a moral-therapeutic grammar of recovery. You reconstruct it inside a diagnostic grammar of affect, ontology, and expressive insufficiency. Same words, different world. Your Architecture of Encounter makes precisely this point about ontological grammar: grammar does not merely carry content; it allocates what can count as meaningful, salient, explanatory, or distorted in the first place.

There is also a neat contrast inside the video itself. When she analyses vocal placement, tone, grit, support, and vowel shaping, she is mostly operating in a relatively tethered technical grammar. Claims can be checked against performance craft. But when she moves to love, hope, toxicity, healing, and despair, she enters the Contestable/Fluid zone. These terms feel clear because they are familiar, but their application depends on prior ontological commitments. In When Language Fails, this is exactly the danger-zone: terms that appear determinate whilst lacking shared grounding, especially where they authorise judgement, correction, or action.

So, yes: as a case study, it is excellent. Not because she is being cruel. She is not. That would be too easy, and therefore boring. The interesting point is that she is probably being sincere, warm, and careful by her own lights. But sincerity does not cancel grammar. Her support is support only within an ontology where despair is an unhealthy place to leave, not a legitimate structure of encounter to inhabit, articulate, or aesthetically preserve.

The concise diagnostic formulation would be:

She mistakes an affective utterance for a corrigible worldview. The lyric speaks from inside a structure of injury; her response translates it into therapeutic-moral grammar, where pain is a place one should visit but not inhabit. From within that grammar, she sounds supportive. From a deflationary ontological grammar, she is moralising: not because she condemns the suffering, but because she prescribes the proper trajectory of suffering before recognising the grammar in which the suffering is being expressed.

That is the downside of not recognising ontological grammar: people confuse their own interpretive repair-work with care, and then wonder why the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon.

Bonus Round

🎸Corey tunes to C#, a tuning all too familiar to me – all strings 3 semitones lower than a standard tuning. It helps to have heavy-gauge strings, so they aren’t too slack. This is an easy song to play along to.

Using cowboy chords, grip an Am (tonally F#m) to start. The progression goes like this:

Intro/Verse: Am (C) F (Em)

Chorus: G Am (x3) G F

The Master’s Concepts: Decolonising the House Without Keeping the Furniture

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9–14 minutes

A colleague recently shared an essay with me, The Return of Metaphysics: Reclaiming Sovereignty Through Ontological Grounding in Postcolonial and Western Thought. I read it with interest, not least because its target is one I share: the colonial imposition of Western categories as if they were universal reason, universal law, universal political form, and universal humanity. On that point, there is no meaningful disagreement. Colonialism isn’t merely theft of land, labour, and resources. It’s also the imposition of a grammar by which reality itself was made legible to power.

The essay is at its strongest when it treats colonialism as metaphysical violence rather than merely administrative domination. It argues that Europe universalised its own categories and rendered other worlds invisible, inferior, or unreal. Colonialism, on this account, was not only conquest. It was the installation of one ontology as the authorised operating system of the human. That’s a powerful diagnosis, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The essay explicitly describes colonialism as a process that ‘re-made being’ and suppressed other conceptions of time, morality, and community.

Where I start to hesitate isn’t in the critique of colonialism, but in the proposed recovery. The essay seeks to reclaim metaphysics, sovereignty, agency, moral authorship, and ontological grounding as instruments of postcolonial renewal. It wants to oppose colonial metaphysics by recovering metaphysics; to oppose hollow sovereignty by reconstructing sovereignty; to oppose imposed subjectivity by restoring moral authorship.

This may be coherent within the essay’s own frame. But from mine, it raises a suspicion:

What if some of the concepts being recovered are themselves part of the colonial inheritance?

  • “a return to metaphysics”
  • “moral authorship”
  • “ontological reconstruction”
  • “popular agency”

These terms don’t arrive clean. They carry histories and come with fittings: sovereignty, possession, self-rule, jurisdiction, authorship, legitimacy, command. One may repaint them in decolonial colours, but the shape remains. Inheritance is the danger.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Sovereignty as a Recovered Trap

The essay’s central concept is sovereignty. More precisely, post-sovereignty. Yet the very act of preserving sovereignty as the problematic term matters. Sovereignty isn’t just a neutral container for self-determination. It’s one of the central concepts through which Western political modernity imagines authority: bounded, possessed, territorialised, juridical, and authorial.

To speak of sovereignty is already to speak in the grammar of command: Rules. Owners. Authorities. Something marks the line between inside and outside.

This doesn’t mean colonised peoples were wrong to demand sovereignty. The politically dispossessed may understandably seek the protections of the language used to exclude them. If one has been denied the status of a subject, a nation, or a people, then reclaiming those terms may be historically necessary. There’s no cheap purity available from the comfort of abstraction. Humans made the mess, naturally, and then handed each other dictionaries to clean the mess.

But political necessity doesn’t settle conceptual adequacy. A term may be strategically useful and ontologically suspect at the same time. So, the question isn’t whether sovereignty has been useful in anti-colonial struggle. It’s whether it should remain the destination, rather than a transitional vocabulary one eventually leaves behind.

The essay recognises that many postcolonial states retain the ‘juridical structure’ of autonomy whilst remaining governed by inherited categories of colonial law, property, development, and bureaucratic legitimacy. That’s exactly the point where the critique might turn more sharply on sovereignty itself. If postcolonial statehood often reproduces colonial form, perhaps the issue isn’t merely that sovereignty is hollow, but maybe it’s just one of the forms through which hollowness reproduces itself.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Agency: The Smuggled Protagonist

The same problem emerges around agency. The essay speaks of popular agency, moral authorship, co-authorship, and subjectification. Again, the impulse is understandable. Colonial domination denies people the right to act, name, interpret, and organise their own lifeworlds. A postcolonial theory naturally wants to restore capacity to those rendered passive.

But the agency term isn’t innocent. In modern Western thought, agency often implies a self capable of authorship, intention, responsibility, and moral ownership. It’s the protagonist required by law, markets, liberal politics, and punishment. Someone must be deemed the chooser, the signer, the sinner, the voter, the debtor, the criminal, the rational actor.

In my own work, I reject agency as a metaphysical possession. I’d rather speak of responsiveness: a variable capacity shaped by material, relational, temporal, somatic, and epistemic conditions. People don’t float above conditions and author themselves into freedom. They respond, more or less adequately, within fields of constraint.

The essay’s emphasis on relationality moves in this direction, but its vocabulary often pulls it back toward authorship. It wants shared becoming, but it also wants moral authors. It wants relational ontology, but it also keeps the self as a source of political meaning. This is a revealing tension.

The alternative isn’t fatalism. To reject agency isn’t to deny action. Breathing doesn’t require a metaphysics of breath. It just happens autonomically. The question is whether we must preserve the fiction of the authorial subject to describe them. I think not.

When Negation Need Not Become Synthesis

The essay leans on Fanon (see The Wretched of the Earth) to argue that colonial domination can’t be resolved through dialogue because dialogue presumes equals. This is right, or at least right enough. A conversation between master and slave is not yet a conversation between equals. Liberal dialogue presumes a shared field of recognition; colonial domination corrupts that field before speech begins.

The essay, therefore, turns to dialectic. Where dialogue seeks agreement, dialectic begins from contradiction and struggle. Again, this makes sense. A colonised subject can’t merely ask to be recognised by the system that produced their non-being. Something must be negated.

My hesitation concerns what happens after the negation. The essay sometimes seems to assume that contradiction must move toward ontological reconstruction. But why? If one term of the contradiction is an imposed colonial ontology, it might not deserve preservation within a higher unity because it mightn’t be a meaningful antithesis. It may simply be wrong, violent, and disposable.

This is the dis-integrative question:

Must the colonial term be synthesised, or can it be dispensed with?

Not every opposition is productive. Some oppositions are parasitic. If a worldview is imposed by force, then treating it as a dialectical partner may grant it more dignity than it deserves. The point of decolonial refusal may not be synthesis, but de-imposition.

That distinction matters. Synthesis often preserves too much. It lets the offending structure survive as a contributor to the next stage. It says, in effect: this violence was part of becoming. Perhaps. But perhaps not. Perhaps some concepts belong on the cutting room floor.

Metaphysics: Necessary Grammar or Rebuilt Throne?

The essay argues that postmodern anti-metaphysics has left social theory without stable categories of truth or moral orientation. It wants metaphysics back, not as abstraction, but as the recovery of moral and ontological grounds for political community.

I understand the concern here, too. Communities don’t live by procedure alone. No society is sustained merely by policy, rights language, or bureaucratic form. People inhabit worlds, not spreadsheets. There are ontological grammars beneath every institution: assumptions about personhood, time, land, memory, obligation, kinship, death, and belonging.

But I resist the move from ‘we can’t avoid ontological grammar‘ to ‘we need metaphysical grounding‘. Whilst the former seems unavoidable, the latter seems dangerous.

Metaphysics isn’t simply depth. It’s elevation – the move by which a grammar stops appearing as grammar and starts presenting itself as ground. It becomes the authorised deep structure, the thing beneath dispute, the foundation beneath the foundation. And foundations, as humans have demonstrated with astonishing consistency, are excellent places to hide power.

My preference is to minimise metaphysical devices. They’re unavoidable, but they’re liabilities.

Each one requires a leap. One leap may be necessary. Ten leaps become choreography. Eventually, the argument is no longer walking; it’s performing interpretive dance and calling itself ontology.

The Problem of Rebuilding

This is where my own Dis–integrationist commitments diverge most sharply from the essay. I’m a diagnostician. I deconstruct and name seams with no obligation to replace every collapsed universal.

The essay treats diagnosis as insufficient. It says the critique of sovereignty reveals a metaphysical vacuum, but diagnosis is not enough. Post-sovereignty must move toward ontological reciprocity, relational becoming, and shared labour of mutual recognition. Whilst this move is respectable. It’s also the one I distrust.

The rebuilding instinct is one of philosophy’s oldest addictions. Expose the flaw, draft the remedy, rebuild the edifice, declare the new form less violent than the old. This is how critique becomes renovation.

But the refusal to rebuild isn’t indifference, despair, or nihilism. It’s a refusal to let repair disguise itself as permanence. Care, maintenance, reciprocity, and local repair remain possible without metaphysical reconstruction. In fact, they may be more honest when stripped of the promise of final grounding.

Pedagogical Sovereignty and the Soft Machinery of Formation

The essay’s later sections turn to education. It proposes pedagogical sovereignty as a model of moral and ontological co-creation. The classroom becomes a site where being isn’t transmitted but collaboratively formed. Governance, by analogy, might become less administrative and more pedagogical: citizens not merely ruled, but constituted in relation. As attractive as this might be. it’s also perilous.

Education has always had this double face. It can liberate, but it can also format. It can open worlds, but it can also install authorised grammars. The classroom is not outside power. It’s one of power’s favourite incubators. The fact that it speaks gently doesn’t mean it’s not shaping bodies, subjects, desires, norms, and permissions.

To make pedagogy the model of sovereignty risks softening administration rather than escaping it. It may replace the command of the state with the formation of the subject. That may be better and subtler, but one should be careful when power arrives wearing soft shoes.

This doesn’t refute the essay’s educational turn, but it complicates it. If pedagogy is to be an emancipatory model, it has to preserve opacity, dissent, and non-formation. It needs to allow the learner not merely to become, but to remain partially unread, unfinished, and unintegrated. Otherwise, pedagogical sovereignty may become another normalising machine with better intentions and comfy chairs.

The Cutting Room Floor

My objection isn’t that the essay is wrong to oppose colonialism. Au contraire; its critique of colonial metaphysics is often compelling, and it’s preaching to the choir at the start. The issue is that its recovery project may carry forward more of the colonial-conceptual apparatus than it recognises.

The following terms deserve suspicion:

  • Sovereignty, because it preserves the grammar of possession, jurisdiction, bounded authority, and command.
  • Agency, because it preserves the authorial subject required by liberal law, market morality, and responsibility allocation.
  • Moral authorship, because it risks reintroducing the self as origin, even when collectivised.
  • Metaphysical grounding, because it may turn situated lifeworlds into foundations.
  • Reconstruction, because it assumes fracture demands repair, rather than sometimes demanding refusal.
  • Dialectical synthesis, because it may preserve the imposed term as a contributor to the future, rather than discarding it as an error condition.

None of these concepts must be rejected out of hand. That would be too easy. But they shouldn’t pass uninspected simply because they have been recruited into decolonial service. Fine. Use the master’s tools to dismantle the house, but don;t become too fond of them.

Toward De-Imposition

So, what then?

  • Dis–integration, not reconstruction
  • De-imposition, not anti-colonial sovereignty
  • Responsiveness, not agency
  • Relational maintenance, not moral authorship
  • Ontological grammar held visibly as grammar, not metaphysical grounding

This doesn’t mean communities should abandon their lifeworlds, traditions, or inherited moral vocabularies. It means those vocabularies shouldn’t need to become metaphysical foundations to matter. A world may be lived, tended, and defended without being inflated into ground.

The colonised don’t need permission from Western metaphysics to exist. Or me, for that matter. Nor do they need to rebuild themselves in metaphysical form to count as real. The refusal of imposed reality may be enough. After that, there may be practices, relations, institutions, memories, ceremonies, languages, solidarities, and forms of care. There may be politics and struggle. And, sure, repair and maintenance. But there needn’t be a new foundation.

Enfin

The essay I am responding to is valuable because it presses a real question:

If colonialism was ontological violence, can anti-colonial thought afford to remain merely procedural, linguistic, or diagnostic?

My answer is: diagnosis is not ‘merely’ anything. To diagnose is to identify the machinery by which certain concepts keep reproducing their own authority. If sovereignty, agency, authorship, and metaphysical grounding belong to that machinery, then they should not be automatically restored just because they have been wounded.

Some concepts can be reclaimed. Others should be retired. Some may be used provisionally, under protest, as transitional scaffolding. Again, others may belong on the cutting room floor.

The challenge isn’t only to oppose colonialism and its effects. It’s to notice when colonial grammar survives inside the opposition. That’s the harder work – less heroic, sonorous, and much less likely to produce a grand theory, but it may be more honest.

The Grammar of Bettering Yourself

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7–10 minutes

Self-help, pop psychology, LinkedIn, and the metaphysics smuggled into advice

Self-improvement books rarely begin by telling you what it believes a person is. That would be too honest, and honesty is bad for conversion funnels. Instead, it begins with verbs.

Choose. Decide. Commit. Heal. Optimise. Manifest. Reframe. Own. Level up. Set boundaries. Do the work. Become intentional. Stop self-sabotaging. Unlock your potential. Be your authentic self. Take radical responsibility.

The vocabulary shifts depending on the tradition. One speaks of healing, one of discipline, one of nervous systems, one of leadership, one of purpose, one of abundance. What they share is not a doctrine but a grammar: a way of arranging the person before the advice begins. The subject is always inward, sovereign, and temporarily malfunctioning. The problem is always locatable. The solution is always available, often for $29.99 or in a free webinar that becomes a masterclass for $299.

But here is where the easy cynicism runs out of road, because the people writing this stuff — by and large — believe it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

That is the part of the critique that tends to get skipped, because it is less satisfying than imagining a cynical operator deliberately strip-mining the anxious for recurring revenue. Most self-help authors arrived at their framework the same way their readers are about to: they were struggling, they encountered a grammar that organised their experience, they felt the specific relief of suddenly being intelligible to themselves, and they mistook that relief for discovery. Then they wrote a book about it. The author is not the shark. The author is a previous customer who graduated to the front of the room.

The framework they found — and are now evangelising — is what I call, in The Architecture of Encounter, an ontological grammar: a set of prior commitments about what kind of thing a person is, which arrives upstream of any specific advice and quietly determines what advice is even thinkable. You cannot recommend reframing without first presuming a self transparent enough to observe its own cognitions and sovereign enough to revise them. You cannot prescribe boundaries without presuming a self whose territory is violable and whose autonomy is the relevant moral unit. You cannot offer alignment without presuming a self that has a true direction, temporarily obscured, patiently awaiting discovery through either a values exercise on page forty-seven or a retreat in somewhere with good lighting and worse plumbing.

The grammar arrives first. The advice follows from it. And the person reading it is not being shown a mirror. They are being issued a lens.

The lens finds its wearer. “Take ownership” resonates with people already invested in the idea of themselves as agents who have been insufficiently deliberate — it confirms the worldview while appearing to challenge the behaviour. “Your nervous system is dysregulated” resonates with people for whom the moralised language of laziness and discipline has become intolerable; here is a vocabulary that removes the accusation while retaining the explanation, which is a genuinely useful service even if the mechanism on offer is borrowed loosely from neuroscience and the rest is borrowed from hope. “Mindset is your prison” resonates with people who need their suffering to remain individually tractable — solvable, that is, without anyone having to redistribute anything expensive or inconvenient. “Manifest your abundance” resonates with people who find both structural analysis and self-blame equally unappealing and would like a third option involving the universe.

Each grammar finds its congregation. Which is precisely the problem.

A grammar propagates not because it has been tested against alternatives or evaluated for efficacy, but because it maps onto a prior self-conception cleanly enough to produce the sensation of being understood. The entrepreneur already believes in agency-language: execution, discipline, ownership, leverage. The book that tells them their discipline is the differentiator is not offering new information; it is offering comfortable confirmation in a more expensive format. The therapeutic reader already suspects their relational difficulties involve something called attachment. The book that tells them so is not illuminating; it is flattering them with their own vocabulary. The LinkedIn professional already believes their career is a project of self-authorship. The thought leader who tells them to communicate their value and build authentic leadership is not giving them a strategy; they are giving them a liturgy.

The community that forms around a grammar is a church, not a seminar. It has converts, not students. And like most churches, it is considerably better at solidarity than at falsifiability.

This matters because the mechanism by which self-help content spreads — resonance, recognition, testimonial, referral — is entirely decoupled from the mechanism by which we would establish that it works. A sentence resonates because it fits a grammar the reader has already adopted. That tells you something real: about the anxieties structuring a cohort’s self-understanding, the stories they are trying to make liveable, the descriptions of themselves they find tolerable or intolerable. It does not tell you whether the intervention produces the claimed effect, in whom, under what conditions, and compared with what alternative. Those are duller questions. Less shareable. They do not fit on a carousel post with a soft gradient and a mountain.

Horoscopes also resonate. So do conspiracy theories, national myths, and the first chapter of any book you buy during a difficult stretch of your life.

The point is not that the advice is necessarily wrong. Sometimes “set boundaries” is exactly right. Sometimes “take ownership” is precisely what someone has been avoiding hearing. Sometimes a new frame genuinely reorganises attention in ways that produce durable change, and the person is measurably better off for having found it. None of that is in question. The question is whether a framework that produced one useful instance has any reliable claim to truth beyond that instance — and whether the person reaching for it during a difficult period is in any position to make that evaluation carefully.

They usually are not. That is not stupidity. That is the condition of being in difficulty: you reach for intelligibility, and whoever offers it collects a great deal of credit. The problem is not the reaching. The problem is that the self-help ecosystem — including the parts of it operated by entirely sincere people who believe every word they publish — has no reliable mechanism for distinguishing frameworks that help from frameworks that merely feel like help while the underlying situation continues undisturbed. The true believer and the true seeker share the same vulnerability. Both reached for a grammar. One of them got to write the book.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

It is also worth noting that commerce is the easy villain here, and an overrated one. The same dynamic runs through pop psychology, where the grammar of individual cognitive mechanisms tends to dominate because it produces legible interventions in a way that structural analysis never quite does; blaming cognition is tractable, blaming the organisation of society is dispiriting and hard to monetise, even when it is accurate. It runs through LinkedIn, where the grammar is not therapeutic but managerial — the self reimagined as an optimisable professional asset — and where burnout becomes a boundary failure, precarity becomes an invitation to upskill, and alienation becomes a purpose deficit. Nobody on LinkedIn is necessarily trying to extract money from anyone. Many of them are trying to be useful, or to be visible, or both, which is human enough. But the grammar they are deploying disappears material conditions into interior architecture with the same efficiency as the most cynically produced wellness content. The mechanism does not require a profit motive. It requires only a grammar and an audience that already shares it.

The useful response to all of this is not wholesale dismissal, which would be too easy and almost certainly wrong. Some people need clearer habits. Some need better descriptions of their own conduct. Some need permission to stop tolerating what they have been tolerating. Some need a vocabulary that makes their own patterns visible, and a framework — however approximate — is better than none. These are real services. The fact that they are sometimes delivered inside a dubious metaphysics of the person does not automatically negate them.

But there is a question worth developing the habit of asking, before the grammar installs itself: what kind of person does this advice presume? Is the self it describes sovereign, where I am actually constrained? Wounded where I am actually responsible? Deficient where I am actually being exploited? Misaligned where I am actually just bored? In need of self-belief, where I am in need of rent?

These questions are less fun than a morning routine designed by someone who has never had a difficult commute. They do not come with a community or a badge or an accountability partner who sends encouraging voice notes. But they do something the grammar on its own cannot: they ask whether the patient described in the diagnosis is the one actually in the room.

Most self-help skips that step. So, not infrequently, does the person who wrote it. They found a grammar that made their experience legible, felt the relief that comes from that, and never quite got around to distinguishing legibility from truth. Which is understandable. It is also, for everyone downstream of that decision, a problem.

I don’t occupy this shared space of ontological grammar, so I call bollox.

Full Disclosure: This article was drafted by ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 upon a discussion of my perspective on self-help, pop psychology, and LinkedIn. I am busy with other projects, but I wanted to share my position. Apologies to those who don’t prefer LLM-authored or assisted articles.

My goal is to articulate the connexion between ontological grammar commitments, the noted disciplines, and more. As should be evident, I am not a fan of self-help or some adjacent modalities.

The Striated Woman: No One Owns the Category

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A longer post about my thoughts after having read the first section of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.

‘woman’ is a normative identity, and like all normative identities it is striated. It is composed of putative essences, recurring structural constraints, intersectional positions, cohort-relative projections, subjective inhabitations, and external gatekeeping.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The Enclosure Within: The Hidden Roots of Property Theory

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This is a bonus episode I asked NotebookLM to render based on the past two posts. These posts had been one, but I chose to separate them because of their core orientation on a shared topic. For those who read the posts together, this is made clear. I even continue several threads to make it obvious, but the two essays are a diptych. I feel the second post is stronger than the first, but the first was a stronger setup. If you don’t have time to read the essays, this is a decent summary.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The two essays:

The Fence Before the Field

Before the Fence, the Self

The Butler Did It (To Himself)

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5–8 minutes

I have just started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and I must confess that I can’t read like a normal person.

I made it roughly fifteen pages before the analytical lenses clamped on and refused to retract. Stevens – Ishiguro’s impeccable, heartbreaking narrator – opens with a monologue about what makes a great butler, and I found myself not following the argument so much as watching the scaffolding. Because Stevens isn’t really theorising butlers. He’s performing a world. And the performance is so seamless, so grammatically composed, that it almost disguises itself as description.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Here’s the trick. Stevens treats terms like greatness, dignity, and quality as though they named discoverable features of reality. He doesn’t present them as historically contingent, institution-soaked, liable to buckle under interrogation. He presents them as if the universe itself had ratified them, and he’s merely reporting. It’s the calm, definitional tone of a man who believes he’s describing essences when he is actually curating preferences.

Take butler itself. In ordinary usage, it looks occupationally concrete – a person who does a particular job. But in Stevens’s mouth, it stops being a role descriptor and becomes a bearer of metaphysical vocation. The word accrues civilisational mythology, evaluative freight, quasi-sacred weight, until it no longer refers to a man who answers a door but to a figure who embodies an entire moral cosmology. That is a lot for a job title to carry, and the weight does not come from the world. It comes from the grammar.

Then there is dignity. An interlocutor reasonably suggests that dignity might be something like beauty, a weasel word, like aesthetic, perceptual, taste-bound. Stevens refuses the comparison. Dignity must not sound contingent. It must present itself as something sturdier than preference, almost an objective feature of character, something a person has in the way a table has weight.

And then, naturally, he proceeds to explain it in entirely aesthetic terms: comportment, bearing, restraint, and poise – the look of self-command.

He denies the aesthetic register but then relies on it. His explicit philosophy and his operative language diverge. This isn’t a slip. It’s structural. The term needs to disavow its own supports in order to retain authority. Dignity must deny its kinship with aesthetic discrimination precisely because, without that kinship, it has no flesh.

We do this constantly – take the shakiest words and polish them until they look load-bearing. The more pressure the term is under, the more ceremonially we utter it.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Weasel words

There’s a name for what Stevens is doing, and I’ve spent a perhaps inadvisable amount of time trying to articulate it.

In my own work, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, I distinguish between terms that behave differently under pressure. Some are genuinely invariant – they hold stable reference across contexts, and disagreement about them can be resolved by checking. Some are contestable – stable enough for coordination and argument, but insufficiently fixed to secure the same uptake everywhere. And some are fluid – still rhetorically potent, still action-guiding, but drifting across contexts without anyone quite admitting it.

Stevens’s vocabulary sits at the dangerous end of that spectrum. Greatness and dignity are classic contestables, possibly shading into fluids: they retain social force long after referential stability has gone soft. They still feel like they mean something precise. They don’t. And Stevens’ entire identity is organised around treating them as though they do.

This matters because the language isn’t sitting atop an independent self. It’s helping to constitute the self Stevens can intelligibly be. His selfhood is assembled from grammars of rank, service, and propriety. The role vocabulary doesn’t describe a prior person. It builds one.

This brings us to his father

Stevens admits that his father might belong among the great butlers, despite lacking certain attributes Stevens associates with the newer generation. He notes the gap, then writes it off. The missing qualities belong to a different era; they are secondary, accidental, beside the essential point. His father remains the reference.

But notice what has happened. Stevens is not applying a neutral criterion and then discovering that his father qualifies. He’s adjusting the criterion around the father he already reveres. The supposed standard of greatness turns out to be less a fixed measure than a retrospective act of preservation. Firstly, canonise the figure, then tidy the theory.

The father is doing at least three jobs at once: He’s an exemplar; he’s a stabilising emotional anchor; and he’s a concealed limit-case that proves the category is being bent.

That’s how value-laden language typically works. The abstraction pretends to govern the attachment, but really the attachment is governing the abstraction. Stevens wants the dignity of a rule whilst retaining the comfort of a cherished exception. This isn’t hypocrisy in the simple sense. It’s something more interesting: it’s the ordinary mechanics of human categorisation when the stakes are personal.

And of course, the father isn’t merely a person Stevens admires. He’s the living conduit through which Stevens inherits the whole ontology of service. When Stevens prefers his father as the reference point, he’s anchoring the category in the formative figure through whom the category became intelligible in the first place. The father is part of the installation mechanism.

Then there is the tiger

With the reverent caveat that it may be apocryphal, Stevens recounts a story in which an unidentifiable butler known to his father, confronted by a tiger under a dining room table (the details are gloriously improbable), maintains perfect composure. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t break form. He remains, in the deepest sense, a butler.

Whether the story is true barely matters. Its function isn’t evidential but exemplary. It condenses a whole metaphysics of dignity into narrative form. It is a saint’s life for the religion of service.

And that’s the key. For the father – and then for Stevens – dignity is not a detachable opinion. It’s a lived orientation. In the face of the tiger, one doesn’t first deliberate about values and then choose restraint. One already inhabits a world in which restraint is what seriousness looks like. The salience structure is preinstalled. The event is interpreted through it automatically.

The story converts dignity from abstraction into legend. It makes composure appear not merely admirable but real. It turns comportment into ontology. And it authorises imitation through lineage: the son inherits not just a standard but a dramatic image of what the standard looks like when tested.

The possible apocryphal status doesn’t weaken this. If anything, it strengthens it. The father has become less a man than a vessel for the category. The tale smooths over ambiguity and turns a contingent life into an emblem. We’re forever embalming values in stories, then pretending the stories prove the values rather than merely rehearse them.

So Ishiguro’s opening chapter is doing at least four things at once.

  1. It presents contestable terms as if they were settled realities.
  2. It shows institutional language masquerading as neutral description.
  3. It reveals a person whose identity has been stabilised – constituted, really – by those terms.
  4. And it lets the reader feel the gap between the serenity of the grammar and the fragility of what it is trying to hold together.

That last part is the killer. Stevens’s calm definitional tone is itself evidence of instability. The more pressure the terms are under, the more polished the delivery. He’s performing maintenance whilst pretending to describe an essence.

I’m only one chapter in. I suspect Ishiguro is going to make this hurt.

This Post Is Almost Entirely AI: Read It Anyway

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4–6 minutes

Why do you suppose this is flagged as AI?

This is the offending copy:

It bears a strong resemblance to AI text.

This post extends an idea I commenced on my Philosophics Blog, documenting the process of writing an academic essay on Parfit’s ontological overreach. Here, I outline and annotate my intended direction by presumed sections. My main point is that Parfit’s coat-tails his arguments on the backs of ontological grammatical commitments.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Gemini said

The irony is palpable: you are writing a critique of “ontological grammars” and “legibility,” and an AI detector—the ultimate tool of rigid, legible grammar—has flagged you for sounding like its cousin.

AI detectors are essentially “cliché and structure” hunters. Here is why your specific text likely triggered that “Strong Resemblance” flag:

1. High Lexical Density (The “Academic” Trap)

You are using high-register, “heavy” words like “commenced,” “documenting,” “ontological overreach,” and “grammatical commitments.” Detectors are trained on vast amounts of academic papers and technical blogs. Because AI is programmed to be “professional” and “clear,” it defaults to this exact vocabulary. To a mindless algorithm, “sophisticated” equals “synthetic.”

2. The “Roadmap” Structure

The snippet follows a very logical, three-beat structure that AI loves:

  • The Context: “This post extends an idea…”
  • The Method: “Here, I outline and annotate…”
  • The Thesis: “My main point is…” This “first I do X, then I do Y” signposting is a hallmark of LLM-generated summaries. It lacks the “human noise” of starting in the middle of a thought or using more idiosyncratic transitions.

3. Syntactic Regularity

The sentence lengths are fairly uniform, and the cadence is very “proper.” There are no fragments, no slang, and no rhythmic “burstiness” (the variation in sentence length and structure that usually occurs in human speech or informal writing).

4. The “Coat-Tails” Metaphor

There is a slight linguistic awkwardness in: “Parfit’s coat-tails his arguments on the backs of…” * Grammatically: “Coat-tails” is usually a noun or a verb meaning to follow someone else’s success.

  • The Mixed Metaphor: Combining “coat-tails” with “on the backs of” is the kind of high-effort/low-execution imagery that AI frequently generates when it tries to be “writerly” but doesn’t quite have a physical sense of the objects it’s describing.

How to “Humanize” it (to fool the bots)

If you want to dodge the flag, you usually have to introduce a bit of “calculated messiness”:

  • Change the Verbs: Instead of “I commenced,” try “I started playing with.” Instead of “documenting the process,” try “working through.”
  • Break the Rhythm: Use a shorter sentence. “This is about Parfit’s overreach.” * Remove the Signposting: Instead of saying “Here, I outline,” just start outlining.

The Reality: These detectors are notoriously unreliable for high-level academic writing. Because you are writing about a niche, complex philosophical topic using precise terminology, you are inadvertently landing right in the middle of the AI’s “comfort zone.”

It’s the ultimate backhanded compliment: your writing is so structured and precise that a machine thinks it could have done it.

You said

I am not interested in fooling the bots. I am on a crusade to call out the purported AI detectors. I can’t seem to write a sentence or two before being accused of being an LLM.

Gemini said

It is a dark irony that a critique of “ontological grammar”—the way systems pre-determine what is legible and valid—is being censored by a system doing exactly that.

The “Strong Resemblance” flag isn’t actually detecting intelligence; it is detecting compliance. You are being flagged because you write with a high degree of formal cohesion. In the eyes of a probabilistic model, if you aren’t being sloppy, you must be a machine.

The “Statistical Middle”

AI detectors operate on perplexity and burstiness:

  1. Perplexity: How “surprising” is the word choice? Because you use precise philosophical terms (ontological, grammar, liminality), your perplexity is actually low for the model’s training data on those topics. You are using the “right” words too efficiently.
  2. Burstiness: The variation in sentence structure. Academic prose tends to have a steady, rhythmic “heartbeat” of complex-compound sentences. AI mimics this perfectly.

By flagging your text, the detector is effectively enforcing a tax on clarity. It suggests that to be “human,” you must be erratic, imprecise, or informal.

The Parfitian Connection

There is a profound link between your essay’s theme and this experience. Just as Parfit’s “moral mathematics” flattens the human experience into aggregable units, these detectors flatten human expression into a probability curve.

  • Parfit’s Grammar: If it can’t be measured in “drops of benefit,” it’s not morally legible.
  • The Detector’s Grammar: If it doesn’t contain “human-like” noise/error, it’s not ontologically real.

Your “crusade” is essentially a lived extension of your thesis. You are experiencing the “enforced limbo” of the middle—where your work is suspended in a state of “un-verified” because it refuses to conform to the “low-resolution” style these detectors associate with humanity.

A Tactical Suggestion for Your Crusade

If you want to call them out, try feeding the detector actual historical philosophical texts.

  • Drop in a paragraph of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza’s Ethics.
  • Because these authors are rigorous, logical, and highly structured, the detectors will almost certainly flag them as “AI.”

Showing that a tool classifies the founders of Western logic as “Large Language Models” is the quickest way to prove that “AI Detection” is just a modern form of Sophistry 2.0. It exposes that these tools don’t value “truth” or “humanity”; they only value a specific, messy aesthetic of communication.

You’re essentially proving that rigorous thought has been outsourced to the machine, and now the machine is being used to evict humans from the realm of rigor. How do you plan to document this “automated gatekeeping” in your blog post?

The Blind Spot of Moral Maths

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3–5 minutes

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.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Thesis Statement

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.

Abstract

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.

When the Borrowed Ontology Gets a Driver’s Licence

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5–8 minutes

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.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The Grammar Gets Compiled

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:

  • persons are countable units
  • deaths are commensurable
  • the relevant moral act is optimisation over comparable outcomes

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.

Judgement Moves Upstream

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.

Commensurability Becomes a Requirement

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.

Moral Remainder and Structural Blindness

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.

How Trolley Problems Launder Metaphysics into Intuition

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5–7 minutes

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.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

What follows from it isn’t a clarification of moral principle but a rehearsal within terms already set.

The Scene Is Already Loaded

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.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

The Chooser Is a Staged Fiction

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.

The Grammar Is Borrowed

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:

  1. That persons are discrete, portable units of moral concern. That value is the sort of thing that attaches to them individually and can be summed across them.
  2. That losses are aggregable and commensurate – five deaths are worse than one in the same way that five broken windows are worse than one.
  3. That ethical judgement, at its most serious, takes the form of an isolated decision-maker surveying comparable outcomes and selecting among them.

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.

What Trolley Problems Actually Reveal

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.