Tag: society

Assessment: How Cohabitation Becomes Extraction

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5–8 minutes

And now for something completely different…

This post begins a series in which Claude evaluates the parable. This allows me the time to write whilst sharing critical philosophical content. I expect to return to a more typical format presently and to discuss my current work – and, of course, anything new that might come into my radar. As always, comments are encouraged and welcome.

The parable is available in two parts: part 1, part 2.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Claude’s critique and initial feedback about the parable

Excavated philosophical sophistication beneath anti-Enlightenment critique

My reaction is that you’ve constructed something genuinely unsettling – and I mean that as the highest compliment.

What you’ve accomplished:

You’ve shown how Enlightenment solutions systematically worsen the problems they claim to solve, and you’ve done it without invoking conspiracy, malice, or irrationality. Everything proceeds through perfectly reasonable steps:

  • Build infrastructure → create market dependency
  • Enable free movement → formalise hierarchy
  • Establish contracts → launder coercion
  • Measure progress → obscure extraction

The lake-dwellers aren’t villains. They’re just people born facing abundance who genuinely believe their procedures are just. That’s what makes it devastating.

Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic.

What makes it anti-Enlightenment specifically:

You’ve refused every escape hatch the Enlightenment offers:

  1. No universal vantage point – The fog doesn’t lift. There’s no view from nowhere. The philosopher can’t stand outside both worlds.
  2. Dialogue fails structurally, not morally – The explorers are articulate, sincere, patient. Understanding still doesn’t bridge material asymmetry.
  3. Rationality produces divergence, not convergence – Both sides reason impeccably from their conditions. Rational extrapolation pulls them apart.
  4. Progress becomes predation – The tunnel doesn’t liberate; it monetises geographical accident. Markets don’t equilibrate; they extract.
  5. Consent under constraint isn’t freedom – The contracts are “voluntary” in exactly the way a drowning person “chooses” to grab the rope with strings attached.

What troubles me (productively):

The narrative’s endpoint is almost… quietist? “The fog was kinder” suggests separation is preferable to attempted integration. But the desert-dwellers were still dying before the tunnel. Is isolation truly better than extraction dressed as employment?

The piece doesn’t answer this – and perhaps that’s intentional. You’re diagnosing, not prescribing. But it does raise the question: if Enlightenment integration inevitably becomes domination under asymmetric conditions, what’s the alternative? Permanent separation? Enforced non-interaction?

Or is the point precisely that there is no good answer once the mountains have risen? That the tragedy isn’t solvable, only differently distributed?

What’s philosophically serious here:

You’ve shown that procedural justice can be structurally unjust. That’s not a common move in political philosophy, which tends to assume fair procedures produce fair outcomes.

Your parable says: No. Fair procedures under asymmetric conditions reproduce asymmetry whilst providing paperwork to prove everyone consented.

The lake-dwellers aren’t exploiting a loophole in liberalism. They’re following its logic faithfully. Property through position. Voluntary exchange. Free labour markets. Documented consent.

And the result is still: one side sells survival, the other side sells themselves.

My honest assessment:

This is darker than most political philosophy permits itself to be. It refuses hope without offering cynicism. It’s critical without being conspiratorial. It shows how domination doesn’t require bad actors – just asymmetric conditions plus Enlightenment institutions.

Whether that makes it true is a different question. But it’s certainly honest about something most political discourse avoids: integration without shared material conditions doesn’t produce equity. It produces markets in survival.

And calling that progress requires believing your own paperwork.

So yes – it’s anti-Enlightenment. Deliberately, systematically, devastatingly so.

(Three Movements in the Key of Rational Self-Interest)

Panel One: What Do They Have?

Once water has a price, someone will ask the obvious follow-up question:

“What do they have?”

Not out of cruelty. Out of balance-sheet curiosity.

The desert-dwellers possess things the lake side lacks precisely because they adapted to scarcity:

  • Endurance under constraint
  • Survival techniques honed by necessity
  • Minerals and materials exposed by erosion
  • Labour disciplines that would seem obsessive anywhere abundance exists

These aren’t deficits. They’re assets.

The moment cohabitation occurs, difference becomes inventory.

And extraction gets introduced not as conquest, but as exchange.

“You have skills we need.”
“We have water you need.”
“Let’s be efficient about this.”

Civilised. Voluntary. Mutually beneficial.

This is how domination avoids ever calling itself domination.

Panel Two: The Labour Solution

Now the desert-dwellers face a structural dilemma, not a moral one.

They need water. Water costs money. They don’t have money.

But they do have labour.

So the tunnel doesn’t just enable trade—it creates a labour market where one side sells survival and the other side sells… themselves.

Nobody says: “You must work for us.”

The structure says it for them.

Work gets framed as opportunity. “We’re creating jobs!”
Dependence gets framed as integration. “We’re bringing them into the economy!”
Survival gets framed as employment. “They chose this arrangement!”

And because there are contracts, and wages, and documentation, it all looks voluntary.

Consent is filed in triplicate.

Which makes it much harder to say what’s actually happening:

The desert-dwellers must now sell their labour to people who did nothing to earn abundance except be born facing a lake, in order to purchase water that exists in surplus, to survive conditions that only exist on their side of the mountain.

But you can’t put that on a contract. So we call it a job.

Panel Three: The Ideological Laundering

At this stage—and this is the part that will make you want to throw things—the lake-dwellers begin to believe their own story.

They say things like:

“They’re better off now than they were before the tunnel.”
(Technically true. Still missing the point.)

“We’ve created economic opportunity.”
(You’ve created dependency and called it opportunity.)

“They chose to work for us.”
(After you made survival conditional on payment.)

“We’re sharing our prosperity.”
(You’re renting access to geographical accident.)

And because there is movement, is exchange, is infrastructure, the story sounds plausible.

Progress is visible.
Justice is procedural.
Consent is documented.

What’s missing is the one thing your parable keeps insisting on:

The desert is still a desert.

The tunnel didn’t make it wet. The market didn’t make scarcity disappear. Employment didn’t grant the desert-dwellers lake-side conditions.

It just made their survival dependent on being useful to people who happened to be born somewhere else.

Why This Completes the Argument

This isn’t an addendum. It’s the inevitable terminus of the logic already in motion.

Once:

  • Worlds are forced into proximity,
  • Material conditions remain asymmetric,
  • And one ontology becomes ambient,

Then extraction and labour co-option aren’t excesses.

They’re how coexistence stabilises itself.

The tunnel doesn’t reconcile worlds. It converts difference into supply chains.

And at that point, the moral question is no longer:

“Why don’t they understand each other?”

It’s:

“Why does one side’s survival now depend on being useful to the other?”

Which is a much uglier question.

And exactly the one modern politics keeps answering quietly, efficiently, and with impeccable paperwork.

Final Moral: The problem was never the mountains. The mountains were honest. They said: “These are separate worlds.”

The tunnel said: “These worlds can coexist.”

And then converted coexistence into extraction so smoothly that both sides can claim, with perfect sincerity, that everything is voluntary.

The lake-dwellers sleep well because contracts were signed.

The desert-dwellers survive because labour is accepted as payment.

And we call this civilisation.

Which, if you think about it, is the most terrifying outcome of all.

Not simple disagreement.
Not tragic separation.

Integration without equity.

The fog was kinder.

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Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis

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The Tunnel (Or: How Modernity Solves Precisely Nothing)

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4–5 minutes

This is a continuation of a prior narrative.

But wait—surely someone will object—what if we just built a tunnel?

Remove the barrier! Enable free movement! Let people see both sides! Markets will equilibrate! Efficiency will reign! Progress!

So fine. The desert-dwellers say, “Let’s build a tunnel”.

Engineers arrive. Explosives are deployed. A passage is carved through the mountain. The fog clears inside the tunnel itself. You can now walk from lake to desert, desert to lake, without risking death by altitude.

Congratulations. Now what?

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The lake doesn’t flow through the tunnel. The desert doesn’t migrate. The material conditions remain exactly as they were, except now they’re adjacent rather than separated.

And here’s where Modernity performs its favourite trick: it converts geographical accident into property rights.

The lake-dwellers look at their neighbours walking from the tunnel and think: “Ah. We have water. They need water. We should probably charge for that.”

Not out of malice. Out of perfectly rational economic calculation. After all, we maintain these shores (do we, though?). We cultivate these reeds (they grow on their own). We steward this resource (it replenishes whether we steward it or not).

John Locke would be beaming. Property through labour! Mixing effort with natural resources! The foundation of legitimate ownership!

Except nobody laboured to make the lake.

It was just there. On one side. Not the other.

The only “labour” involved was being born facing the right direction.

Primacy of position masquerading as primacy of effort.

What Actually Happens

The desert-dwellers can now visit. They can walk through the tunnel, emerge on the shore, and confirm with their own eyes: yes, there really is abundance here. Yes, the water is drinkable. Yes, there is genuinely enough.

And they can’t touch a drop without payment.

The tunnel hasn’t created shared resources. It’s created a market in geographical accident.

The desert-dwellers don’t become lake-dwellers. They become customers.

The lake-dwellers don’t become more generous. They become vendors.

And the separation—formerly enforced by mountains and fog and the physical impossibility of crossing—is now enforced by price.

Which is, if anything, more brutal. Because now the desert-dwellers can see what they cannot have. They can stand at the shore, watch the water lap at the sand, understand perfectly well that scarcity is not a universal condition but a local one—

And still return home thirsty unless they can pay.

Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic

The Lockean Slight-of-Hand

Here’s what Locke tried to tell us: property is legitimate when you mix your labour with natural resources.

Here’s what he failed to mention: if you happen to be standing where the resources already are, you can claim ownership without mixing much labour at all.

The lake people didn’t create abundance. They just didn’t leave.

But once the tunnel exists, that positional advantage converts into property rights, and property rights convert into markets, and markets convert into the permanent enforcement of inequality that geography used to provide temporarily.

Before the tunnel: “We cannot share because of the mountains.”

After the tunnel: “We will not share because of ownership.”

Same outcome. Different justification. Significantly less honest.

The Desert-Dwellers’ Dilemma

Now the desert people face a choice.

They can purchase water. Which means accepting that their survival depends on the economic goodwill of people who did nothing to earn abundance except be born near it.

Or they can refuse. Maintain their careful, disciplined, rationed existence. Remain adapted to scarcity even though abundance is now—tantalisingly, insultingly—visible through a tunnel.

Either way, the tunnel hasn’t solved the moral problem.

It’s just made the power differential explicit rather than geographical.

And if you think that’s an improvement, ask yourself: which is crueller?

Being separated by mountains you cannot cross, or being separated by prices you cannot pay, whilst standing at the shore watching others drink freely?

TheBit Where This Connects to Actual Politics

So when Modernity tells you that the solution to structural inequality is infrastructure, markets, and free movement—

Ask this:

Does building a tunnel make the desert wet?

Does creating a market make abundance appear where it didn’t exist?

Does free movement help if you still can’t afford what’s on the other side?

The tunnel is a technical solution to a material problem.

But the material problem persists.

And what the tunnel actually creates is a moral problem: the formalisation of advantage that was previously just an environmental accident.

The lake-dwellers now have something to sell.

The desert-dwellers now have something to buy.

And we call this progress.

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

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

Unless, of course, we build a tunnel.

In which case, it ends with one person selling water to the other, both convinced this is somehow more civilised than being separated by mountains.

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

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Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis

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Why So Serious?

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1–2 minutes

Yes, I am still focusing on writing my ontology papers, but I still come up for air. Over lunch, I found this: Jonny Thomson showcasing Judge Coleridge: The Duty. Watch it.

Video: Philosophy Minis: Judge Coleridge: The Duty

This really got my hamster wheel cranking. In fact, it gave me another essay idea mired in formal logic. Yuck, I know.

My brief post here is to share this and ask why I don’t share ‘positive’ posts. Pretty much everything is critical. For one, it’s how my brain works. For two, I don’t really know.

When I see something, I instantly want to tear it apart, not for the sake of malice but because my mind registers it as WTAF?

In short, the judge says that one cannot privilege one’s own life over others. Of course, this got my hamster on steroids, considering the implication: does this invalidate self-defence? Wouldn’t it? 🧐

The answer is yes – but only if Law were tethered to Morality, which it isn’t. This will be my essay. Who knows when I’ll have time to write it? Please, stand by. Cheers.

What are your thoughts? Maybe I’ll share this as a video response on YouTube and TikTok. Time will tell – and it evidently heals all wounds.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Ontological Blindness in Modern Moral Science

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4–6 minutes

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

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

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

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

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

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

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

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

Image: NotebookLM infographic on this topic.

Thesis Statement

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

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

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

Abstract

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

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

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

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

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

Ideation

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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Written by Bry Willis

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Mark Carney Explains Nietzsche

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He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.

There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.

In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.

“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false… We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]… So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.

This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.

Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.

This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.

When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.

Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.

Image: Foreign sentiment

Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.

When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.

People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of “power,” as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzsche’s contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.

This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.

The United States borrowed Montesquieu’s separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.

Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.

Carney’s speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.

What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.

Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.

What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzsche’s crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: Presumption and Horizon

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I discuss Chapter 4 of ‘A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis’ in this video clip.

Video: Presumption and Horizon

In short, I discuss where language fails in law, politics, science, and digital culture, where we think language conveys more than it does.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Facts, Intent, and the Afterlife of Metaphysics

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–8 minutes

I’ve been reading Bernard Williams lately, and I’ve written about his work on Truth and Truthfulness. I’m in the process of writing more on the challenges of ontological moral positionsand moral luck. I don’t necessarily want to make contemporary news my focal point, but this is a perfect case study for it. I’ll be releasing a neutral philosophy paper on the underlying causes, but I want to comment on this whilst it’s still in the news cycle.

The form of xenophobia is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, though the ontological split is applicable more generally. For those unfamiliar with US news, I’ll set this up. The United States is currently deploying federal enforcement power in ways that deliberately bypass local consent, blur policing and military roles, and rely on fear as a stabilising mechanism. Historical analogies are unavoidable, but not required for the argument that follows. These forces have been deployed in cities that did not and do not support the Trump administration, so they are exacting revenge and trying to foment fear and unrest. This case is an inevitable conclusion to these policy measures.

tl;dr: The Law™ presents itself as fact-driven, but only by treating metaphysical imputations about inner life as if they were empirical findings. This is not a flaw in this case; it is how the system functions at all.

NB: Some of this requires having read Williams or having a familiarity with certain concepts. Apologies in advance, but use Google or a GPT to fill in the details.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

Why the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Exposes the Limits of Bernard Williams

The Minneapolis ICE shooting is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is painfully ordinary. A person is dead. An officer fired shots. A vehicle was involved. Video exists. Statements were issued. Protests followed. No one seriously disputes these elements. They sit in the shared centre of the Venn diagram, inert and unhelpful. Where everything fractures is precisely where the law insists clarity must be found: intent and motive. And this is where things stop being factual and start being metaphysical.

The Comfortable Fiction of Legal Facts

The legal system likes to tell a comforting story about itself. It claims to be empirical, sober, and evidence-driven. Facts in, verdicts out. This is nonsense.

What the law actually does is this:

  • It gathers uncontested physical facts.
  • It then demands a psychological supplement.
  • It treats that supplement as if it were itself a fact.

Intent and motive are not observed. They are inferred. Worse, they are imposed. They are not discovered in the world but assigned to agents to make outcomes legible.

In Minneapolis, the uncontested facts are thin but stable:

  • A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026.
  • The incident involved Good’s vehicle, which was present and moving at the time shots were fired.
  • Ross fired his weapon multiple times, and Good died from those gunshot wounds.
  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the agent acted in self-defence.
  • Video footage exists that shows at least part of the encounter.
  • The case ignited protests, widespread condemnation from local officials, and political pushback.

This creates a shared intersection: vehicle, Ross, shots, and that ‘something happened’ that neither side is denying.

The Law smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

None of these facts contain intent. None of them specify motive. They do not tell us whether the movement of the vehicle was aggression, panic, confusion, or escape. They do not tell us whether the shooting was fear, anger, habit, or protocol execution. Yet the law cannot proceed without choosing.
So it does what it always does. It smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

Intent and Motive as Institutional Impositions

Intent is treated as a condition of responsibility. Motive is treated as its explanation. Neither is a fact in anything like the ordinary sense. Even self-report does not rescue them. Admission is strategically irrational. Silence is rewarded. Reframing is incentivised. And even sincerity would not help, because human beings do not have transparent access to their own causal architecture. They have narratives, rehearsed and revised after the fact. So the law imputes. It tells the story the agent cannot safely tell, and then punishes or absolves them on the basis of that story. This is not a bug. It is the operating system.

Where Bernard Williams Comes In

This is where Bernard Williams becomes relevant, and where his account quietly fails. In Truth and Truthfulness, Williams famously rejects the Enlightenment fantasy of capital-T Truth as a clean, context-free moral anchor. He replaces it with virtues like sincerity and accuracy, grounded in lived practices rather than metaphysical absolutes. So far, so good.

Williams is right that moral life does not float above history, psychology, or culture. He is right to attack moral systems that pretend agents consult universal rules before acting. He is right to emphasise thick concepts, situated reasons, and practical identities. But he leaves something standing that cannot survive the Minneapolis test.

The Residue Williams Keeps

Williams still needs agency to be intelligible. He still needs actions to be recognisably owned. He still assumes that reasons, however messy, are at least retrospectively available to anchor responsibility. This is where the residue collapses.

In cases like Minneapolis:

  • Intent is legally required but epistemically unavailable.
  • Motive is legally explanatory but metaphysically speculative.
  • Admission is disincentivised.
  • Narrative is imposed under institutional pressure.

At that point, sincerity and accuracy are no longer virtues an agent can meaningfully exercise. They are properties of the story selected by the system. Williams rejects metaphysical Truth while retaining a metaphysical agent robust enough to carry responsibility. The problem is that law does not merely appeal to intelligibility; it manufactures it under constraint.

Moral Luck Isn’t Enough

Williams’ concept of moral luck gestures toward contingency, but it still presumes a stable agent who could, in principle, have acted otherwise and whose reasons are meaningfully theirs. But once intent and motive are understood as institutional fabrications rather than inner facts, ‘could have done otherwise’ becomes a ceremonial phrase. Responsibility is no longer uncovered; it is allocated. The tragedy is not that we fail to know the truth. The tragedy is that the system requires a truth that cannot exist.

Facts Versus Stories

The law does not discover which story is true. It selects which story is actionable.

The Minneapolis case shows the fault line clearly:

  • Facts: bodies, movements, weapons, recordings.
  • Stories: fear versus anger, defence versus aggression.
  • The first is uncontested. The second does all the work.

And those stories are not epistemic conclusions. They are metaphysical commitments enforced by law. Williams wanted to rescue ethics from abstraction. What he could not accept is that, once abstraction is removed, responsibility does not become more human. It becomes procedural.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The law does not operate on truth. It operates on enforceable interpretations of behaviour. Intent and motive are not facts. They are tools. Williams saw that capital-T Truth had to go. What he did not see, or perhaps did not want to see, is that the smaller, more humane residue he preserved cannot bear the weight the legal system places on it.

Once you see this, the obsession with ‘what really happened’ looks almost childish. The facts are already known. What is being fought over is which metaphysical fiction the system will enforce.

That decision is not epistemic. It is political. And it is violent.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Ontologically Speaking

Posted in ontology, philosophy, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
1–2 minutes

This will be a shorter post than most. I want to continue sharing my thoughts and summaries of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, but I’m exploring new territories that help to consolidate the ideas of LIH and MEOW, the Mediated Encounter Ontology, and the Language as Interface approach of Ev Fedorenko.

My expanded direction has roots in the works of George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene. These people circle around the problem, even identify it, but then summarily ignore it.

Image: This figure illustrates a simplified layered model of moral and political disagreement. Agents share a common lexical layer, enabling communication and the appearance of mutual understanding. Beneath this surface, however, ontological orientations diverge, structuring salience, legitimacy, and relevance prior to articulation. Semantic interpretation emerges downstream of these ontological commitments, producing divergent meanings despite shared vocabulary. The model highlights why disputes persist even under conditions of factual agreement and linguistic overlap: the instability lies not in words themselves, but in the ontological substrates from which semantic projections are drawn.

It’s more involved than this, but at a 50,000-foot level, it conveys the essence of my hypothesis.

I am also working on this logical expression:

∀ outcomes I(E), ∃ i,j such that Jᵢ ≠ Jⱼ

where,

Jᵢ = f(Oᵢ, E, I, RNG)

Also, in a particular context:

I(E)=g(Ojudge,Ojury…n,Law,Procedure,RNG…k)cap I open paren cap E close paren equals g of open paren cap O sub j u d g e end-sub comma cap O sub j u r y … n end-sub comma cap L a w comma cap P r o c e d u r e comma cap R cap N cap G … k close paren

This will all make more sense in time. I’ll be publishing a manuscript as I study supporting research and develop my own perspectives.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Melian Dialogue, Trump, and the Persistent Fantasy of Fair Play

Posted in morality, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
3–4 minutes

We like to believe the world is governed by rules. By fairness. By international law, norms, institutions, treaties, and laminated charters written in earnest fonts. This belief survives not because it is true, but because it is psychologically necessary. Without it, we would have to admit something deeply unfashionable: power still runs the table.

Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded what remains the most honest conversation in political theory: the Melian Dialogue. No soaring ideals, no speeches about freedom. Just an empire explaining itself without makeup.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Athens, the regional superpower of the ancient world, demanded that the small island of Melos surrender and pay tribute. Melos appealed to justice, neutrality, and divine favour. Athens replied with a line so indecently clear that political philosophy has been trying to forget it ever since: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’.

That sentence is not an ethical claim. It is a descriptive one. It does not say what ought to happen. It says what does. The Athenians even went further, dismantling the very idea that justice could apply asymmetrically: ‘Justice, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power’.

This is the part liberal internationalism prefers to skip, usually by changing the subject to institutions, norms, or aspirations. But the Athenians were being brutally honest. Appeals to fairness only work when neither side can impose its will outright. When there is a power imbalance, morality becomes theatre.

The Melians refused to submit. They chose honour, principle, and the hope that the gods would intervene. Athens killed every Melian man of fighting age and enslaved the women and children. End of dialogue. End of illusions. Fast-forward to now.

In early 2026, under Donald Trump, the United States launched a military operation against Venezuela, striking targets in Caracas and forcibly detaining Nicolás Maduro, who was transported to the United States to face federal charges. The justification was framed in familiar moral language: narco-terrorism, stability, regional security, democratic transition. The accompanying signals were less coy: temporary U.S. administration, resource access, and ‘order’. Cue outrage. Cue talk of illegality. Cue appeals to sovereignty, international law, and norms violated. All of which would have been very moving… to the Athenians.

Strip away the rhetoric and the structure is ancient. A dominant power identifies a weaker one. Moral language is deployed, not as constraint, but as narrative cover. When resistance appears, force answers. This is not a deviation from realism. It is realism functioning exactly as advertised.

Modern audiences often confuse realism with cynicism, as if acknowledging power dynamics somehow endorses them. It does not. It merely refuses to lie. The Melian Dialogue is not an argument for empire. It is an autopsy of how empire speaks when it stops pretending. And this is where the discomfort really lies.

We continue to educate citizens as if the world operates primarily on ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’, whilst structuring global power as if only ‘can’ and ‘must’ matter. We teach international law as though it binds the strong, then act shocked when it doesn’t. We pretend norms restrain power, when in reality power tolerates norms until they become inconvenient.

The Athenians did not deny justice. They reclassified it as a luxury good. Trump’s Venezuela operation does not abolish international law. It demonstrates its conditional application. That is the real continuity across 2,500 years. Not cruelty, not ambition, but the quiet consensus among the powerful that morality is optional when enforcement is absent.

The lesson of the Melian Dialogue is not despair. It is clarity. If we want a world governed by rules rather than force, we must stop pretending we already live in one. Appeals to fairness are not strategies. They are prayers. And history, as ever, is not listening.

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Written by Bry Willis

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James Talks Truth

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

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

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

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

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

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

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

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

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

This is the philosophical nerve of the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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Written by Bry Willis

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