I recently read a piece arguing, with considerable sophistication, that LLMs represent an unprecedented psychological threat – that conversational systems operating at a planetary scale change the geometry of human susceptibility in ways that demand serious governance responses. The author wasn’t wrong about the effects. This isn’t the debate, but she was wrong about the story. The effects are real, and the narrative erected around them is the oldest displacement manoeuvre in the repertoire
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.
I read from the Wrong Curve: Free Speech, Pseudo-Invariance, and the Grammar of Liberal Rights. This essay is freely available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19636760. This segment is the Abstract and the Introduction.
In this essay, I argue that free speech discourse is structured by a category error whose source lies upstream of speech itself: in the treatment of ‘freedom’ as a stable philosophical primitive when it functions, in practice, as an essentially contested concept operating under a systematically inflated presumption of effectiveness.
tl;dr: I don’t believe in free speech.
We’ve all likely heard that the freedom to swing one’s fist ends at the tip of another’s nose. I can accept this without argument for the purpose of this assertion. Your freedom TO violates my freedom FROM.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The problem is that one’s words don’t stop. In some cases, they continue in the manner of pollution that I don’t want my ear holes to be exposed to this noise. In the social media age, this effect is trebled and molests my eyes. This is especially egregious for misinformation and disinformation, which is to say, much of the internet and beyond.
This impact hasn’t been suitably addressed, so I wrote about it. Here, I read.
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.
Why Dating Is Not Shopping, No Matter How Many Apps Insist Otherwise
Firstly, be nice, and remember that I’m a recovering economist, so I can’t fully abandon this lens. There’s a concept in economics called the double coincidence of wants. For barter to work, I must have what you want, and you must have what I want, simultaneously, in the right quantities. The implausibility of this – that two strangers would arrive at the same moment, each holding exactly what the other needs – is traditionally the justification for money. Money decouples giving from receiving. It lets me sell my grain today and buy your lumber next month. Problem solved. It is tempting, and initially illuminating, to notice that dating is a double coincidence of wants with no money.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Two people must simultaneously possess what the other desires. There’s no abstract medium of exchange. Listen, I don’t make up the rules, but you can’t deposit romantic capital in a bank and draw on it later with a different partner. Every transaction must clear bilaterally, in real time, between specific parties. The reason dating is difficult, on this account, is the same reason barter is difficult: the coordination problem is enormous.
This is a genuinely useful analogy – for about sixty-nine seconds. After that, it begins to collapse. And the way it collapses turns out to be more interesting than the analogy itself.
NB: I swear I started this post before I saw Louisa’s. Damns algorithms.
Wants can’t be enumerated
In an economy, wants are at least notionally specifiable. You want grain, I want lumber. We can write a contract. In attraction, nobody can write the contract, because nobody knows the terms. You can list proxies – symmetry, wit, income, dentition – but the list never cashes out the phenomenon. There’s always a residue. Someone ticks every box and provokes nothing. Someone ticks none of them and provokes everything. The attributes aren’t the attraction. They’re at best rough correlates of something that resists decomposition.
Evolutionary psychology claims to have the list – fertility signals, resource indicators, and bilateral symmetry – but this is just dressing up economic grammar. It takes the lived phenomenology of attraction, which is irreducibly aesthetic, and rewrites it as a covert optimisation problem. The evo-psych account is the friend who explains why you should find someone attractive and then looks puzzled when you don’t.
Tolerances are fuzzy, interactive, and opaque
Even granting an approximate list of attributes, each one functions not as a threshold but as a band of acceptability. And the bands interact. A deficit in punctuality can be compensated by a surplus in making-you-laugh-until-you-cry. But the exchange rate between these dimensions isn’t fixed, it’s not linear, and almost certainly not conscious. Nobody’s running this calculation. If you ask them to formalise it, they’d produce a confabulation, not a report.
The evaluator is noisy
Kahneman’s Noise documents a finding that should alarm anyone who believes in stable preferences: the same agent, evaluating the same inputs, will produce different outputs on different occasions – not because of bias (which is at least systematic and therefore correctable) but because of irreducible stochastic variability. The judge sentences harshly before lunch and leniently after. Same person, same case, different output.
Applied to attraction, means that the person you’d swipe right on at nine in the morning, you might pass over at eleven at night – or vice versa, as the case might be <winkie>– not because you’ve learnt anything new, but because you aren’t a stable instrument of measurement. The evaluation function drifts across a single day. Across months and years, it’s rebuilt entirely.
The evaluator is path-dependent
Every prior relationship recalibrates the apparatus. Someone who’s been betrayed doesn’t simply move ‘trustworthiness’ higher on their list. Their entire perceptual system for detecting trustworthiness has been restructured. The sensor’s been rebuilt by its prior readings. In no market economy do my preferences over apples change because I once had a bad experience buying oranges from a particular vendor. In relationships, this is the norm.
Returns are asymmetric
Standard preference theory assumes diminishing marginal returns, and this holds for attraction in the obvious direction: the tenth bunch of flowers yields less delight than the first. But the inverse does not hold symmetrically. The absence of a previously supplied attribute often produces increasing marginal disutility. You habituate to presence but sensitise to withdrawal. The utility of gaining X and the disutility of losing X are not mirror images. The preference function is path-dependent in a way that wrecks any static equilibrium model.
Search space is radically local
And all of this assumes the candidates are available for evaluation. They mostly aren’t. Your evaluation function, however sophisticated or broken, only gets applied to whatever washes up in your vicinity – no offence to Ariel. Your so-called soulmate might reside in Istanbul, but you live in London, and you don’t share a language, and you’ll never meet. This isn’t a logistical barrier. It’s a legibility barrier. You could stand next to this person in an airport and the aesthetic response function would not even fire, because the medium through which half of attraction is constituted – conversation, the texture of someone’s verbal mind – is simply unavailable. The instrument requires an input format that the candidate can’t provide. Consider you spy this person across an expanse, gain enough courage to introduce yourself, and they don’t speak your language. Body language will only compensate so far.
Local maxima
The cumulative force of all this is simple and devastating: we are stuck on local maxima. The search space is computationally intractable. The evaluation function is noisy and path-dependent. The attributes resist enumeration. The tolerance bands are fuzzy and interactive. The returns are asymmetric. The search is geographically and linguistically truncated. And so agents do what any rational agent would do under these conditions: they satisfice. They adopt a threshold of ‘good enough’ – a threshold which is itself endogenous to all the noise and path-dependence described above – and they stop searching when they cross it.
This is not a failure of nerve. It is the only coherent strategy available to an agent who can’t identify, or even in principle define, the global optimum. Committing to a local maximum is the rational play, precisely because optimising is impossible 0150 at least legible in the sense of James C. Scott.
Which makes the cultural mythology of ‘the one’ a rather cruel grammatical artefact. It presupposes a global search that no one has conducted or could conduct. It borrows its intelligibility from the economic grammar of optimal allocation – there is a best match, you just have to find it – and projects it onto a domain where ‘best’ has no operational definition, the search is radically local, and the searcher is a different instrument on different days.
Los Angeles, and why it matters
I lived in Los Angeles from twenty-one to twenty-seven, in the early to mid-1980s. I loved it. It was my favourite place on earth. I returned to LA from thirty-five to forty-five, and it was just another place.
It may have turned out that way even had I never left. The point is not that Los Angeles changed – though of course it did. The point is that I changed. Different profession, different situation, different appetites, different saliences… The evaluation function that produced ‘favourite place on earth’ at twenty-three was a fundamentally different instrument from the one that produced ‘just another place’ at forty. No longer a club rat on the prowl, I walked the same streets and saw a different city, because the perceptual apparatus that constructed the city as an experienced object had been rebuilt by fifteen years of living.
‘Favourite place on earth’ and ‘just another place’ aren’t two judgements issued by one stable subject upon one stable object. They’re two outcomes produced by two historically different configurations of salience, appetite, profession, circumstance, and age.
Los Angeles is useful here precisely because it’s not a person – RHCP, not withstanding. It lets you see the structure before sentiment starts mucking about with it.
We don’t even evaluate cities consistently across a lifetime. The same is true, more painfully, of persons.
The partner one adored at twenty-five may not have become deficient in any simple sense. The evaluative field changed. New dimensions became salient, old ones lost force, tolerances narrowed or widened, and costs are reweighted. The same partner now appears under a different aspect, because the apparatus of appraisal has been rebuilt in the interim.
And here, three claims should remain separate: the object may change; the evaluator may change; and the relation between them may change even if neither has altered dramatically. This third one prevents this from collapsing into a banal ‘people grow’ sermon. Sometimes the drift isn’t a defect in either party. It’s a change in fit.
Many:many
It would also be a mistake to think any of this operates as a 1:1 match. The dimensional space isn’t shared. Any two people will overlap on some dimensions, diverge on others, and be mutually illegible on others still – dimensions where one party’s response function is active, and the other’s doesn’t even register the input. He cares intensely about how she loads the dishwasher. She doesn’t experience dishwasher-loading as a dimension at all. It’s not disagreement. It is incommensurability.
A long relationship isn’t a transaction. It’s two non-congruent evaluative systems attempting to maintain a shared narrative of congruence as the terrain shifts beneath them. The miracle isn’t finding someone who matches. The miracle is sustaining a workable fiction that two-dimensional spaces are more commensurable than they are.
Consider the statistically perfect match – bilateral alignment across every operationalised dimension. Even if you could construct such a thing, it would be a snapshot: a cross-section of two moving systems that happened to align at time t. By t+1, the dimensional spaces have already drifted. The statistical portrait is a death mask of a living process.
And here is a green-eyed test. Suppose the perfect match has green eyes. It doesn’t follow that a blue-eyed twin – identical in every other respect – would or wouldn’t provoke the same response. Because whatever was operative in the encounter was not an attribute, or a bundle of attributes, but something that emerged from the specific interaction and can’t be decomposed back into the components that produced it. The entire enterprise of algorithmic matching is cataloguing attributes on the assumption that the attributes are the attraction. It is like analysing a joke by listing its phonemes.
The spot market and the long game
Let’s consider one-night stands as an example to clarify the taxonomy. A one-night stand really is the nearest thing romance has to a spot transaction. The time horizon is short, the narrative load is low, path-dependence is weak, and local salience dominates. The calculus is narrow and immediate. The economic grammar almost applies. Whatever gets you through the night.
A long relationship isn’t a transaction at all, but an evolving coordination problem between changing evaluators. The longer the time horizon, the more layers of critique come into play, and the more absurd the matching grammar becomes. Over time, relationships are not discrete exchanges but moving equilibria between non-stationary systems. That’s why long partnerships are so fragile and so impressive when they endure.
Post hoc rationalisation, or: the story we agree to tell
Having arrived at their local maximum, both parties then construct a narrative in which the outcome was the product of discernment rather than constraint.
‘I knew she was the one when…’ isn’t a report. It’s a reconstruction – a story imposed on a stochastic process to make it legible in the grammar of rational choice. The same person, encountered on a different Tuesday or in a different postcode, might never have registered at all. But the narrative requires necessity, so necessity is confabulated.
And it runs in both directions. She thinks it was his quiet confidence. He thinks it was the argument about Godard. Both are post hoc pattern-matching on noise – selecting from the welter of early interactions the moments that fit the ‘recognition’ narrative, and discarding the rest. It’s survivorship bias applied to one’s own love life.
This also explains the peculiar ferocity of heartbreak after the narrative has been constructed. What collapses is not merely the relationship but the explanatory framework. The story that made the local maximum feel like a global one disintegrates, and the agent is returned to the raw landscape: noisy, path-dependent, locally constrained, and aesthetically illegible. The grief is partly about the person. It’s also about the loss of the rationalisation that made the search feel concluded – losing the construct of the person rather than the person, per se.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Enfin
The dating app asks you what you want as though you’re ordering from a menu, when what is actually happening is that the menu is rewriting itself based on what you had for lunch yesterday, how much sleep you got, and that thing your ex said in 2019 that you think you are over.
We don’t find ‘the one’ – sorry, Neo. We become different readers of the same world, and occasionally manage to remain legible to one another for a while. Which is, if you stop demanding it be a fairy tale, quite a lot.
Alasdair MacIntyre is persuasive when he argues that moral discourse is never neutral, and that modern liberalism smuggles in substantive standards while pretending not to. But he dismisses emotivism too quickly as a cultural disaster rather than considering whether it might describe moral language more accurately than his own teleological alternative. If moral utterance is fundamentally prescriptive or expressive rather than descriptive, then the collapse of ‘view from nowhere’ morality doesn’t send us scurrying back to Aristotle. It simply shows that moral language was never doing the metaphysical work MacIntyre wants from it.
The Aristotelian remedy also depends on a nostalgic and anachronistic social model. The Athens he implicitly romanticises was a small polis whose demos consisted of citizens, meaning property-owning males, already bound by shared norms, proximity, and cultural inheritance. In other words, the sort of thick local world that made a certain kind of practical ethical life possible in the first place. MacIntyre’s causal arrow points the wrong way. In Athens, democratic practice emerged from that prior social texture. You do not reproduce the same conditions by philosophical edict.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
To put it more bluntly: I don’t think moral realism is tenable, and I am not convinced MacIntyre really thinks so either. His project reads less like a discovery of moral facts than an attempt to promote an ought into an is by force of inheritance and rhetorical confidence. If he carved out a bounded cohort and imposed the right shared practices, perhaps something like his model could function. He may need to annex a reasonably sized car park for the purpose.
There’s a certain kind of cultural panic that tells you more about the panickers than about the thing they are panicking about. The current hysteria over AI-inflected prose is a good example.
The argument, insofar as it deserves the name, goes roughly like this: LLMs produce prose with identifiable features – a certain blandness, a fondness for the em dash, a tendency toward tidy three-part structure. Writers who use these tools risk absorbing those features. The authentic human voice is therefore under threat. Something precious is being diluted by contact with the machine.
This is sentimental rubbish, and it is worth saying so clearly before doing anything else – and a sort of virtue signalling.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I use LLMs daily. For research, for editorial pushback, for smoothing passages that have gone awry. This means I spend hours a day reading a particular kind of output. You’d have to be delusional not to admit it has effects. Certain phrasings start feeling natural that didn’t before. Certain rhythms begin to recur. Certain words might not have otherwise come into use. I notice this and note it without particular alarm, because I’ve read enough to know that this is just what environments do.
Read nothing but McCarthy for a month, and your sentences will start hunting for the spare declarative. Spend a year editing academic philosophy, and you will catch yourself reaching for ‘insofar as’ and ‘it’s worth noting’ in casual conversation. Live in a city long enough, and its cadences work their way into your syntax. This isn’t contamination, the negative moralist dispersion. It’s how language acquisition works for as long as one is alive and reading. Voice isn’t a spring. It’s a river, a moving accumulation of every tributary it has passed through.
The prestige game being played by the anti-LLM faction isn’t difficult to spot. When Dostoyevsky shapes a young writer’s cadence, we call it influence and treat it as evidence of a serious literary education. When a game world shapes a child’s imagination – I homeschooled my son in the manner of unschooling, and his primary corpus for years was World of Warcraft and its attendant lore before shifting to Dark Souls – and that child ends up reading Dante and Milton unprompted in year seven, the same mechanism has clearly operated. The source was not canonical, the outcome was. But the respectable hierarchy of influences cannot easily accommodate this, because the hierarchy was never really about the mechanism. It was about the cultural status of the inputs.
The more interesting observation isn’t about those of us who use these tools. It’s about those who conspicuously do not.
A minor genre has emerged – charitably, I’ll call it a genre because cult feels morally loaded – consisting of writers anxiously purging their prose of anything that might read as AI-generated. It’s worth noting that they have read the lists. Telltale signs of LLM authorship: excessive hedging, em dashes, transitional summaries, the phrase ‘it is worth noting’. And so they scrub, redact, replace, and perform a kind of stylistic hygiene that’s a creative decision made in direct response to LLM discourse.
These writers aren’t free of the machine’s influence. They’re among the most thoroughly shaped by it. They simply have the more theatrical relationship – the counter-imitator, the purity-performer, the one who reorganises their entire aesthetic in orbit around the thing they claim to reject.
Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, observes that a child raised by an alcoholic parent tends to become either an alcoholic or a committed teetotaller. He presents this as a dichotomy, which is too neat, but the underlying point holds. Reactions are still relata – see what happens when you read too much philosophy and logic? The teetotaller has organised their life around the bottle as surely as the alcoholic has. Both are defined by it.
Opposition is one of influence’s favourite disguises.
The fair objection is that LLM influence may differ from other influences in kind rather than just in kind. Dostoyevsky is strange. Bernhard is strange to the point of pathology. A canonical prose style is idiosyncratic by definition, which is why it’s worth absorbing. In contrast, LLM output aims for plausible fluency and statistical centrality. Its pull may be more homogenising than the pull of a singular authorial sensibility.
That’s a real point. The environment in question has a centripetal force toward the mean that most literary influences lack.
But conceding the point doesn’t really rescue the panic. It just specifies the kind of influence involved. The mechanism remains identical to every other case of environmental absorption. And ‘this influence tends toward the generic’ is an ironically generic critique of a particular environment’s character rather than a claim that the environment is doing something ontologically unprecedented to the notion of authorship.
The question that actually matters aesthetically is not was this touched by AI? It is what did the writer do with the environment they inhabited? That’s always been the question. It remains the question. The machinery has changed; the problem of influence has not.
What the current schism actually reveals is not that AI is doing something new to writing. It’s that we’ve been operating with a fairy tale about what writing is. The fairy tale holds that voice is self-originating, that somewhere beneath the reading AND the editing AND the genre conventions AND the institutional pressures AND the decade of a particular editor’s feedback, there is a pristine you, unconditioned and pure, expressing itself directly onto the page.
This was always false. Writers have always been patchworks of absorbed environments. The only difference now is that one of the environments is a machine, and the machine is new enough that people haven’t yet learned to be comfortable with what it reveals about the rest.
The environment always wins. The only interesting question is which environments you choose, and what you make of them.
So glad I took time out to watch a short exchange between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins on whether music is becoming content rather than art. The question is framed in musical terms, but it hardly stops there. The same corrosion is visible in writing, visual art, criticism, and now, with grim inevitability, in AI-mediated production more broadly. The disease is not confined to music. Music merely makes the symptoms easier to hear.
For music, my aversion to pop music goes back to my youth. I was a kid when the Beatles practically invented pop music, but they left it to grow and continued exploring. Sadly, as solo artists, they mainly – not always – failed and rested on their laurels in pop. It’s not that their version or any pop music is inherently unlistenable. Surely, it’s not, if only by the aspiration of the pop moniker, but it has no depth, no soul, as it were. Some make this argument for Organic food. In essence, it involves an appeal to nature fallacy.
Audio: Slightly off, but not bad, NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
My own aversion to much pop music begins there. It is not that pop is necessarily bad, nor even that it is always shallow. That would be too crude and too easy. The problem is that pop often presents itself less as an artistic act than as a consumption object engineered for immediate uptake: catchy, frictionless, emotionally legible, and just disposable enough to make room for the next one. It is built to circulate.
That, for me, is the difference between content and art. Art may be accessible, even popular, but it retains some residue that exceeds its delivery mechanism. It resists total reduction to utility. Content, by contrast, is made to be processed. It is optimised not for depth but for throughput. Its highest ambition is not transformation, but engagement.
This is why the question matters beyond music. Writing, too, now lives under the same pressure. One is increasingly expected to produce not essays, arguments, or works, but units of output: posts, threads, reactions, takes, summaries, explainers, and other forms of polished verbal debris. The point is no longer to say something worth dwelling on, but to remain visible within the churn.
The issue, then, is not simply whether one should consume AI-generated material. That framing is too pious and too easy. The more interesting question is what the consumer thinks they are consuming. If a reader, listener, or viewer wants only speed, familiarity, and surface competence, then AI content is not a scandal at all. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has already demoted art into a deliverable.
This is where the fuss over labelling enters. Is it a principled demand for honesty, or merely a theatrical gesture by people who still want the aura of art whilst consuming content on industrial terms? Some of it is clearly protectionism. Some of it is virtue signalling. But not all of it is empty. The insistence on labelling betrays an intuition, however muddled, that authorship still matters, and that not all artefacts are equivalent merely because they occupy the same screen-space.
The deeper question is whether we still want art at all, or whether we merely want the aesthetic styling of art attached to things optimised for convenience. Once a culture learns to prefer seamless output over resistance, recognisability over risk, and quantity over form, it should not act surprised when machines begin to serve it perfectly. They are only completing a trajectory already chosen.
So no, the issue is not AI alone. AI is only the latest mirror held up to a public that has spent years confusing availability with value and polish with depth. The real question is not whether machines can make content. Plainly, they can. The question is whether we still possess the appetite, patience, and seriousness required for art.
Image: Full image because the cover version is truncated. Generated by Gemini Nano Banana.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the Substack topic.
It starts like this:
You’ve had the argument. Everyone has. You present evidence. Your interlocutor presents counter-evidence. You cite data. They cite different data – or the same data, read differently. Eventually, someone says something like how can you possibly believe that, and the conversation is effectively over, though the words might continue for another hour.
What’s left is the quiet conviction that the other person is either ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith. Perhaps all three. And you can be certain they’re extending you precisely the same courtesy.
I want to suggest that something structurally different is going on – something that none of the usual explanations (media bubbles, declining education, algorithmic polarisation) quite reach. These explanations aren’t wrong, but they’re shallow. They describe accelerants. The thing they’re accelerating is more foundational.
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.
