The first candidate for significance is the civilized ideal. For James, this ideal is typified by Lake Chautauqua, a miniature utopia filled with education, music, and wholesome recreation. But something is missing. James’ relief upon leaving Chautauqua tells him as much. Comfort and culture seem incapable of satiating the peculiar human craving for the trials that give life its edge. Repulsed by the safe mediocrity of Chautauqua, James swings to the opposite extreme. If modern civilization drains life of its intensity, then perhaps we ought to forget reality altogether and trade the world as it is for the world as it has been mythologized.

Yet it is not long before James is wrenched from his romantic haze by an unsuspecting interruption. The culprit? The sight of a workman, and within it, the heroism of the ordinary. The romantic escape is revealed for what it is, not a higher vision, but a failure of sight. Taking its place is James’ rendition of the Tolstoyan deification of the natural man, who toils each day, selling his labor but never his soul. Thus, James arrives at his third candidate for significance. But, alas, this refuge proves just as fickle as the others. Just as it is foolish to see significance only in the gleaming armour of a martyred warrior, it is equally foolish to see it only in the dirty boots of manual labor. The key to life’s meaning cannot lie in social station.

Each of James’ failed candidates captures only half of what makes a life significant. The civilized ideal provides ideals without struggle, the romantic vision supplies spectacle without reality, and the Tolstoyan glorification of labor offers effort stripped of any consciously held aim. From this process of elimination, James arrives at his central insight: a life becomes significant only through the marriage of an ideal with the strenuous effort required to realize it.

In thirty-seven pages, James artfully walks us through this meticulous process of elimination. Each candidate for what makes a life significant is raised, examined, and set aside. The process creates the feeling of convergence. We start broad and watch options fall away: not this, not that, not that either.

At last, the conclusion seems to have been distilled to the essential. But the distillation has somehow produced more liquid than we started with. “Ideals married to effort” applies to the Salvation Army convert, the class-loyal laborer, the intellectual adventurer, the soldier, the Chautauquan. Heroism is everywhere, James tells us, at the college, in the stockyards, in the czar’s court. The formula is broader than any of the individual positions he rejected. Rather than narrowing the field, James seems to have opened the floodgates.

This is what I find so interesting about James’ argument, and so frustrating. The form says, “we’ve narrowed it down” while the content says, “it’s everywhere.”

So, have we been hoodwinked? Certainly, the structure of James’ argument has an undeniable effect on the reader. The meticulousness of his analysis gives us the satisfaction of a proof completed. And perhaps too, after journeying through the boredom of Utopia and the drudgery of uninspired labor, we are so relieved to have found a middle way that we do not notice that it is wider than the landscape it was supposed to navigate.

Yet, whether or not we notice, James certainly does. He concedes that his conclusion is vague, invoking a problem all too familiar to philosophers that questions of significance can never yield precise answers. This is a disarming move. James raises the objection before the reader can, not to refute it but to absorb it. But acknowledging your own vagueness is not the same as resolving it, and gesturing toward the whole territory is not the same as illuminating any particular part of it.

Nonetheless, James is explicit that the essay is therapeutic rather than theoretical. His goal is not to propose an analytical treatise on the meaning of life but to widen our vision to the meaning that exists all around us, in lives unlike our own. Fair enough.

But even as I recognize its therapeutic value, I find myself still wrestling with a tension lurking beneath James’ argument. His definition of what makes a life significant is essentially first-personal. It requires the marriage of your inner ideals with your active courage and endurance. But his therapeutic move is third-personal.

There are two distinct senses of meaning at work here. First, there is the meaning that James rightly insists we ought to recognize: the inner ideals and quiet heroism that exist in other people’s lives. But there is also a second kind of meaning. The meaning that is immediately available to us, that we actually inhabit and feel, that exists for us whether or not we reflect on it. That meaning is everywhere is an important point to recognize. But a world saturated with significance can still feel out of reach.

And yet I think this gap between seeing meaning and feeling it is not a flaw in James’ argument so much as the place where it does its real work. The very breadth of his vision encourages you to dissolve your own particular sense of significance. If meaning is everywhere, equally, then your own life is just one more instance of the universal pattern.

But you do not experience your own meaning the way you experience anyone else’s. You do not see it from the outside, you feel it from within. By widening our perception of meaning in others’ lives without filling the first-personal void for us, James makes us feel the distance between the two. And the moment his levelling vision presses that felt sense of your own significance into relief, you realize something his formula does not quite say: what makes your meaning yours is not that it is richer or more valid than anyone else’s, but that you are inside it.

Perhaps, then, “What Makes a Life Significant” is not merely a therapeutic tool, it is also a diagnostic one. The act of genuinely widening your perception momentarily flattens you into the universal. You become a blob in a sea of significance, one more life among the countless multitude James describes. But something strange happens when you see yourself that way. The very act of dissolving into the universal makes you suddenly aware of what cannot be dissolved. Your own inescapable subjectivity. You can perceive meaning in the workman or the hero, but perceiving their meaning is not the same as feeling it. Their significance reaches you from the outside; yours reaches you from within. And so, in the very gap between perceiving meaning everywhere and feeling it for yourself, you discover something James’ formula does not quite name, a renewed consciousness of your own felt life, sharpened precisely because you have just seen how much of the world’s meaning you can recognize but not inhabit. If that is not an answer, it is at least a provocation. And maybe a good provocation is worth more than a tidy formula anyway.

Grace Theodoly is a law student at Stanford Law School and holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. Though she currently studies law, she continues to read and write about philosophy in her spare time, with particular interests in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind.

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The framework of costly signaling helps clarify this shift in social meaning. To clarify, a costly signal is a behavior that is reliable precisely because it is expensive or risky to fake. The classic biological examples involve peacocks and gazelles: the extravagant tail or the energy-wasting stotting run are honest displays for the simple reason that weak or injured animals would struggle to perform such physical feats. In social life, costly signals abound from, for example, college degrees from demanding institutions or time —consuming apprenticeships acting as costly signals of conscientiousness and reliability. What is interesting about typos in the LLM era is that they now occupy a space that looks, oddly, like this. If it is cheap and simple to run your text through an AI system that scrubs away most surface errors, then choosing not to do so involves the potential to take a reputational hit (‘that guy couldn’t even be bothered to run his work through AI; how lazy can someone be!’). Here the writer accepts looking less polished and maybe even less professional to signal that at least part of the text was written by a human without the aid of LLMs.

The second cost is subtler but no less real. Readers who are aware of these tools may wonder, when they see typos, why you did not at least ask the machine to do it. In a world where everyone knows that such systems are widely available, and where even free LLMs are good enough to fix typos, neglecting to use them begins to look less like mere carelessness and more like a deliberate refusal of an obvious opportunity to improve appearances. You could have looked sleeker, more technically competent, more in step with the cutting edge. The costliness of that choice is what allows it to serve, in the right context, as a signal of human fallibility and thus human origin. (This signal may change as LLMs become better at imitating human fallibility in the text, too; but for the moment, the signal stands).

Of course, not every typo magically counts as a badge of authenticity, and it is vital to remember that context matters. Not to mention, there is a threshold beyond which the errors in the text are no longer charming and begin to look like sloppy human writing rather than something handcrafted. What interests me is the way the baseline has moved. Before cheap, powerful LLMs, polished text was a straightforward proxy for care and competence, while errors nearly always detracted from credibility. Excessively smooth prose and oddly generic phrasing trigger a suspicion that no one sat with these sentences long enough to embed a distinctive voice in them but just copied and pasted the output of the LLMs and called it their own. Here a bit of roughness—an untrimmed sentence, the occasional error—can reassure that there is someone on the other side of the screen who added their own stylistic flavor to the LLM output.

This signaling story dovetails nicely with the metaphysics of writing where the edit history of a document begins to resemble the Ship of Theseus. The Ship of Theseus is an ancient Greek thought experiment from ancient Greek philosophers that asks us to imagine a ship with wooden planks that gradually rot and are replaced, one by one, over many years of voyaging. Eventually, every single plank has been swapped out for a new one. The question philosophers have debated for millennia is this: Is it still the same ship? If the identity of the ship depends on its physical components, then it seems like a completely different vessel. But if identity lies in continuity—in the fact that the ship was never dismantled all at once, that each replacement preserved the ongoing function and form—then it remains Theseus’s ship despite sharing no original materials with the vessel that first left port. The puzzle becomes even thornier if someone collects all the discarded planks and reassembles them into a ship somewhere else.

A similar puzzle applies to a writer who uses LLMs to generate drafts that they then revise over and over again. Imagine a writer who struggles mightily with getting started, who sits, like so many of us have, staring at a blank screen while the task expands in their mind into something impossible to begin. For that person, the main value of LLMs is their lowering the psychological barrier to entry by at least providing a rough draft, even if not a single word of the draft will survive the editing, polishing, and reshaping that writers engage in.

In that workflow, the initial AI-generated draft is the scaffolding to help the writer get started who would not otherwise be able to begin the process, or who would struggle all the more to begin. Imagine a writer who would otherwise struggle more to begin the writing having a LLM begin the process for her by spitting out a mediocre draft. And then, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the human writer intervenes, deleting trite formulations, inserting their own examples, rearranging the structure to match the argument they actually want to make, and transforming the piece into something that is entirely their own. After several passes, it is possible that nothing of the original wording remains. Every phrase has been rewritten, every sentence deleted or radically restructured. And yet the influence of the machine remains in the very fact that the writer did not begin from an empty page. The identity of the text, like the identity of the ship whose planks have all been replaced, is preserved nowhere else except, perhaps, in the causal history of the piece (e.g., it would appear in the edit history).

This raises uncomfortable questions about how we should describe such a piece of writing and what, if anything, it signals. If the final text results from human judgment at every point that matters, then it is strange to say that it is inauthentic work merely because the earliest ancestor draft originated from LLMs and not the hand of the writer herself. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to pretend that the tool played no role. The jumpstart it gave may have been exactly what allowed an anxious or blocked writer to move from inchoate thoughts to articulated prose. The time savings may not show up in the number of minutes clocked, but in the reduction of friction at the outset, in the way it turned a psychologically daunting task into one that felt manageable enough to begin.

When we place this Ship of Theseus model of AI-assisted drafting next to the earlier point about typos as costly signals, an interesting tension appears. On the one hand, writers may increasingly want to mark their work as authentically theirs, tempting them in the drafting process to leave in a bit of imperfection, to resist the urge to feed every paragraph through an LLM for polishing. On the other hand, those same writers may quietly rely on LLMs at the very beginning of their process exactly because those tools make it easier to begin the writing process—like jump-starting a car, only applied to the writing process instead.

Typos have become costly signals of authenticity because of a new, cheaper way of producing polished language that has additionally brought into the foreground puzzles about the metaphysics of drafting and writing.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University, where he has won over twenty teaching awards. He previously taught at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and Towson University. He works on issues in political economy, ethics, AI, and God.

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Once in a while I go back to my family’s photo albums to revisit moments of my past. Some pictures immediately bring to life the vivid memories embedded in them. There is a photo of my dad and me at his surprise sixtieth birthday celebration, and whenever I see it, I instantly recall my dad’s bewilderment as over a hundred family members yelled, “Feliz cumpleaños!” when he walked in. I was twenty-four years old at the time. The room filled with applause and laughter, and some of my aunts and uncles were a bit teary-eyed. My brother, sister, and I looked at each other with excitement and relief, knowing we had pulled off the surprise. It’s a memory that feels like it has maintained its emotional impact and episodic detail for over a decade.

Other memories are blurry, almost dream-like, and the further back into my own past I go as I flip through the photo album, the trickier it is to reexperience such moments. As years turn to decades, I feel a strange sense of detachment emerge. In one picture, I’m holding up an album of Pokemon cards and looking into the camera with a real sense of pride. I was fourteen years old at the time. I loved collecting these cards, and as soon as I’d open up a package, I’d put every individual card in its own sleeve and then in a binder full of pocket page protectors to keep them nice and safe. Every week or so, my dad would drive me to the local card shop, and we’d pick out a pack to open together and file away neatly in my binder. I’d teach him about each Pokemon’s strengths and weaknesses on the ride home. One afternoon, I scored big and found a holographic Charizard in the deck—this was the holy grail of Pokemon cards. And so, when my mom saw my uncontrollable exhilaration, she asked me to pose with my collection. Flash.

Even though some of the sensory details and emotions linked to this memory are still somewhat palpable, I’ve thought about this moment so many times that I can’t help but be acutely aware of just how much of it I no longer actually remember. Sometimes I feel like the trace of this moment in my brain exists as a faded outline of the past. It’s been about two decades since my mom took that photo, and I can’t relive those few seconds of holding up my album the way I could in the days or even years after it was taken. Even though I can still reexperience the emotions surrounding the photo, this treasured memory has lost its episodic luster.

Then there are experiences I’ve had that are out of my reach—and I get an uneasy feeling of being disconnected from my own past. There is one photo that was taken on my thirty-third birthday—I was at Capital Grille with my parents, brother, sister, and partner, and they’re all forcing a smile back at the camera. Everyone (except for me) was uneasy because I had downed one too many martinis on an empty stomach, and I had come close to falling asleep multiple times at the dinner table. In the picture, I’m staring emptily past the camera and with no obvious point of focus. What’s more, it was the first time I was ever this intoxicated around my family. If it weren’t for the photo, I’d have zero idea what happened that evening. The slice of coconut cream pie on the plate in front of me, my favorite maroon sweater, my mom’s hand on my shoulder—all are details that I can see in the photo but can’t mentally relive. The memory itself is completely devoid of emotional and episodic vigor.

I know that the young adult in the photo with my dad is me. I know that the teen holding up an album of Pokemon cards is also me. And I know that the semiconscious adult at Capital Grille is me as well. But so much of my life has happened between each one that they all feel like different versions of “Steve” engaging with reality in very different ways. Some ways have led to stable memories, some have led to total amnesia, and some have led to something in between.

If I can’t remember all of the details of my life, especially some of the most influential moments that have brought everything from gratitude to shame, then how can I truly know who I am today? My memories sculpt my sense of being, but how does the brain do this when the past can be so unstable, when bits and pieces of some memories feel just as new as the day they were formed, while others feel like they might as well belong to someone else?

These fascinating, albeit thorny, questions about memory and identity are at the forefront of neuroscientific research today, and we have the fields of ancient philosophy and physics to thank for setting these questions in motion. Indeed, the idea that the self is a dynamic thing has been around for millennia. In Greek mythology, the Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment in which a ship has all its components replaced, one by one, over the years. At some point, none of the original pieces remain, so is the ship still the same Ship of Theseus? To continue the thought experiment, if we were now to take all of the old pieces of wood from the old ship that we’ve gathered over time and then build a new ship with them, is this now the Ship of Theseus? A philosophical approach to memory and identity might say that each incremental change represents the transformations we undergo across a lifetime. As long as there’s a continuous history that ties together the ship’s structure and function over time, then some semblance of sameness remains.

Physics gives us a powerful insight to work with: change is woven into the fabric of the universe. The atoms produced in the Big Bang forged themselves into stars, which exploded and released their chemicals to form nature’s ultimate experiment. This billion-year conversion of energy from one form to another made you along the way and everything else in the known universe. We are all recycled star-stuff, in other words, and the recycling never stops. In 1953, a study conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oakridge, Tennessee, claimed that 98 percent of all the atoms in a person’s body change out every year. While that number is a very rough estimate and almost certainly depends on which types of atoms we’re talking about, the notion that our body’s molecular components are replaced over time is a basic property of biology. With the average human lifespan hovering around eighty years, this means we undergo several great transformations in a lifetime.

From the perspective of physics, there are multiple different versions of us lurking in the past. If we studied identity with our physicist’s cap on, we’d find that our seemingly stable sense of being is made out of atomically unstable pieces. We are constantly changing and morphing into some new version of ourselves over the course of our lives.

From the perspective of neuroscience, identity is the brain’s Ship of Theseus, and memory is the material that builds our identity. Say you were to somehow find my brain cells that were active when forming the memory of holding up my Pokemon card collection. And say you were to somehow keep track of which exact cells these were over the years. Every so often, you’d peer into my brain, find these particular cells again, and ask me to recall the memory. Some of these cells would turn on again for a period of time. I offer up this hypothetical because, in fact, scientists have observed something similar—just not quite as sci-fi. To start, the brain has neurons that respond selectively to pictures of people we know, including ourselves. These cells even respond if just the name of a person is written down or spoken out loud: if I see or hear “Pedro Ramirez” or look at a picture of my dad, the same cells will light up in activity for each. If I see or hear “Steve Ramirez,” a different group of cells will become active. In other words, the brain contains neurons that represent the identities of individuals in our lives. At any given moment, every plank on the Ship of Theseus serves some function to keep the vessel moving forward.

The experiment is only halfway done though. If you kept looking at my brain cells that represent my Pokemon card collection over the years, you’d end up seeing something that has baffled scientists since they first were able to track such cells: at some point, and despite still being able to recall my Pokemon memory, an entirely new team of cells would be active. My engram of holding up my beloved Pokemon card collection has shape-shifted at the cellular level. Like the old wooden planks in the Ship of Theseus, they’ve been replaced with a completely new set of cells. Ongoing experiences reorganize old memories in the brain.

The phenomenon is called representational drift: the cellular representation of an experience changes, or drifts, over time. Neuroscientists have found that the brain represents even simple sensory stimuli in the world through drifting populations of cells. For instance, my brain processed the woody aromatics of my dad’s cologne on his birthday with one group of neurons. That memory is almost certainly subserved by a completely different group of neurons today. Even if I were to actually smell my dad’s cologne over and over again, the group of cells responsive to the cologne would change over time as some cells stop firing while others start firing to represent the experience. This change is so drastic that my cellular representation of this smell today likely looks nothing like it did on my dad’s sixtieth birthday. The memory is stable but the very cells that produce it are not.

As experience accrues in the brain—as we live our lives—the neurons that processed a memory when it was formed begin to drop out while new ones come into play and take over. At a fundamental level, this means parts of my identity, as forged by my memories, drift more than others. I am both stable and unstable. It’s this kind of cellular dynamism that sparks change in the psychological manifestation of the self. This inherent changeability is adaptive: the more we remember a particular memory, the faster its cellular representation can drift into something new and incorporate more information. Like any good sports team, drift is a way for the brain’s roster of neurons to have healthy, active players on the court of experience who are ready to run a play, to adapt to unpredictable circumstances, or to be substituted in and out if needed, all with the common goal of surviving into the next round. It’s a way for our brain’s game plan to continuously adapt without being overly predictable or stuck in its ways.

The brain’s physical machinery that enables memories is being continuously modified by time and experience. From synapses, to the wiring between cells, to the activity of teams of cells, our memories constantly renew these molecular and cellular pieces, like waves crashing on a beach, tidal in their composition and drifting in their very nature.

As we’ll see next, the science of how stable memories emerge out of unstable biology is where we can learn about how the brain produces the different transformations we endure in life. It is the brain’s dynamism that lets such transformations happen, for the only constant in the neuroscience of memory is that of change. My dad’s sixtieth birthday signaled a new era in his life, and my Pokemon card collection symbolized the wide-eyed innocence surrounding my youth. After Xu’s death, my identity, who I was as a person, had to transform once more, and the process of that transformation lead me into a spiral of addiction and all the way to a second chance at life. That night at Capital Grille marked the beginning of my next great transformation. And I’m deeply thankful for the brain’s ever-changing physical configuration because it’s the reason that I am here today. The brain’s mutability enabled my well-being.

. . .

After Xu passed, I was a version of Theseus’s Ship that was just trying not to capsize. When I was serene and not on a drinking binge, when I was the calm, I knew who I was, and I was proud to manifest Xu’s dream through my research. The ship was sturdier. When I was dark and inebriated, when I was the storm, I felt alone, and I was ashamed of not having any real sense of control over my well-being. My identity was splintering. But both extremes are nonetheless me. Every single one of my experiences consist of memories, good and bad, that are engraved throughout my identity, inseparable and inexorable in their influence. I am both the calm and the storm.

This admission is liberating—curative—because it lets the remembering part of my life aid the recovering part. The moment-to-moment fluctuations of what experiencing reality feels like has taken me from the valleys of death, anxiety, and addiction to the crests of well-being, self-care, and connection, where a peace exists. The panoramic view from this version of my Ship is restorative.

Remembering is a tool that can be used to break apart an identity or to build upon one. At this point, I had two major life events to make sense of—Xu’s death and my drinking. They are both connected, down to the very synapses that enable my experiences of them. Alcohol changes the brain. It impairs activity in the circuits involved in emotion, memory, and stress. It produces long-term changes in virtually every kind of cell in the brain and, therefore, has direct access to molding the very organ that gives us an identity. So it makes sense that drinking would impact how I was processing Xu’s death. Excessive rumination on emotionally daunting life experiences can spiral into bouts of depression and anxiety, for instance, and alcohol has the ability to temporarily alleviate negative feelings. When someone is in pain in the hospital, the doctor may offer a patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) pump, which, at the press of a button, will deliver pain relief. Wouldn’t you press off on the worst feeling you’ve ever felt, even temporarily, if given the option?

By reminiscing about Xu and intoxicating myself habitually, I was restructuring who I was as a person. Life needed to make sense to me again—without Xu and now with an addiction to deal with, who was I becoming? I was trying to piece together what psychologists call our narrative identity, which is basically the story that we tell ourselves about who we really are. Constructing a narrative identity is a lifelong process, and ideally we want to be evolving toward some sense of self that feels unified and has purpose. Our narrative identity integrates our reconstructed past, perception of the present, and anticipated future into a cohesive account of our self. It is forged in the crucible of memory.

If our narrative identity is our own first-person story, threaded together by the events we experience, we are the main character and our exploration of the world is the plot. Like any story, we encounter twists in the form of heartaches and turning points that lead to triumphs. Somewhere hidden between all the things that can hurt us and everything we can learn, there is redemption. One of the goals of our narrative identity is to find this meaning, to find resolution amid adversity. When discovered, we regain a sense of control and agency over our life story.

Embedded in the process of finding our narrative identity is the idea that painful life experiences can help us grow as people. This is a two-step process: first, we sit with the episode of life that hurt us. We remember it, we hit rewind on different parts to feel them again and again, and we explore how it affected us. Not surprisingly, these are the ingredients of therapy. In the second step, we take what we learned and use it for some form of good, either within ourselves or in the world, or both—the idea is that these good acts then become ingredients for happiness.

…

Change is biologically inevitable. With our growing understanding of neuroscience, we know today that change can lead the brain down a pathological road, such as into addiction, or change can promote health and well-being, such as when grief turns into growth.

So what does it mean to know that my identity is always changing? It means that asking Theseus whether or not his latest ship is the same as the old one is like asking me which version of me is really me: the person who was addicted to alcohol or the person who is now sober?

I think the answer requires a slight rephrasing of the question: Given that change is unavoidable, what is it for? Change on its own does not have a goal. Organisms move forward or backward; thoughts occur inwardly or are expressed outwardly; molecules combine and recombine; our cells are recycled and replaced—all simply because that’s the way nature works. But to what end?

The brain is always changing by default. However, when any kind of biological change happens with a goal in sight, then we call this progress. I have changed as a person because the biological pieces that make up my identity have perpetually shape-shifted over the decades. I have progressed as a person because the goal of these changes is to restore myself with health and, by extension, with happiness. My memories change as a product of their drifting cellular components; when I give them a goal, or some kind of ethically motivated outcome that I believe truly matters, then the point of having memories is to guide me in my actions so that I may live on and share them along the way. With or without a destination in mind, the whole point of a ship is to be a vehicle for exploration.

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Steve Ramirez is a neuroscientist at Boston University who is known for his studies on the formation of false memories. Through his work, Ramirez aims to find methods of alleviating symptoms associated with PTSD and depression.

People are clearly on edge. In a recent global survey called “What Worries the World?”, everyone reported to be fretting about crime, inflation, social inequality, corruption in finance and politics, and many other troubles. Not to mention the more personal concerns, such as the moribund state of literacy and the epidemic of loneliness. Worry is everywhere, and it’s not going away.

Good. Encouraging signs of resistance begin with a sense of unease. Progress is born from discontent.

Unfortunately, a rational awareness of any problem is typically accompanied by stress, or some kind of edgy tension beneath the umbrella of “anxiety,” which, essentially, is the lovely sensation of an impending catastrophe brought on by some of your vital organs, all of which have decided to launch a mutiny against you and your sanity, determined to keep you in a stupor of angst.

Today, research shows that an alarming portion of the world has an anxiety disorder. It’s the most common mental health condition across the globe and regarded with a strictly negative connotation. Because I suffer from the American belief that anything is possible, which might also be diagnosable, I’d like to defend anxiety on the suspicion that we might have lost sight of its virtues. Anxiety is ultimately instructive. It reveals an embodied comprehension of our experience, and a reckoning with our own choices. Anxiety is, quite simply, intrinsic to the human condition, and provides the instrumental benefit of self-understanding.

The Philosophical Notion of Anxiety

There are still a few secrets you can learn from Wikipedia, especially if you are, as I am, allergic to Elon Musk’s highly derivative version. In 2017, three mathematicians put all 4.7 million Wikipedia articles through an algorithm and found that 95% of them all led back to a single entry. On any random Wikipedia page, if you click the first hyperlinked word in the article, then continue to do so in each new article, you will inevitably end up in the same place: the entry on Philosophy.

Not only is this type of empirical finding a helpful dose of vindication for those of us who spent a small fortune to study the subject at university, but it engenders a fundamental point about knowledge itself. Underneath any propositional statement is a philosophical idea. Consider the entry on “anxiety.” The first hyperlinked word is “emotion” (for skeptics, this matches the definition from the American Psychological Association). Emotions are a rich philosophical concept. They are rather mysterious, stubbornly hard to distinguish on occasion, and, even when properly identified, come in a variety of forms and flavors.

The philosophical idea of anxiety ironically has its roots in what’s typically labeled as one of the happiest countries on earth. It was in the city of Copenhagen where the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote Sickness Unto Death in 1849. Kierkegaard claimed anxiety was part of the human condition: “There is not one single human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown,” he wrote.

Thinkers associated with the philosophical tradition of existentialism, of which Kierkegaard is widely considered to be the father, viewed anxiety as an emotional signal. Albert Camus, the French writer and philosopher, would later understand it as the vertiginous feeling that awakens us to living beyond “mechanical life.” Anxiety interrupts the weariness of monotony, especially when the world provides no inherent meaning. It discloses a harsh truth: your choices and their byproducts are your own to bear, which results in a “dizziness of freedom” according to Kierkegaard. Granted, this is not necessarily a pleasant feeling. Kierkegaard called it “a sickness of the spirit” that we carry around, which “signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety.”

Simone de Beauvoir, another French philosopher and writer, thought anxiety was especially prominent during adolescence — which she deemed to be a transition period into the “world of the serious,” which is no longer “ready-made” for us. Our decisions influence where we land in this new landscape. In her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, she writes about the profound recognition that life is only grounded in the responsibility we give ourselves. Crucially, this lack of predetermination must be embraced.

The Duty to Feel Bad

Speaking of the young, Gen Z is the most anxious generation on the planet. In 2020, a research study from Yale found that nearly 80% of high schoolers were stressed, and nearly 70% were bored. Additional research suggests these numbers are even higher after the pandemic. I did not know it was possible to be both at once, but I guess “stressed about being bored” describes young adults quite well.

“Overall,” said Marc Brackett, a co-author of the report, “students see school as a place where they experience negative emotions.” The statement is framed in a way that stirs up sorrow for the unfulfilled ideals of education and youth, but it’s also a tautology. Hell is other people, and other people are, regrettably, everywhere. The potential to encounter negative emotions will always be interminable. I’m glad the kids are catching on. Even so, some philosophers have thought we have a duty to seek out certain emotions through uncomfortable experiences.

One ethical argument for this was made by Immanuel Kant. Many people seem to think Kant had an inflexible demand to employ reason alone, and not emotions. But in fact, he argues that we should do rather unorthodox things, such as go to hospitals to see sick people, visit the poor where they live, and meet people behind bars in debtors’ prisons, all to cultivate sympathy. Kant views sympathy, along with other emotions, as instructive to our moral constitutions. Anxiety is very similar. It puts us in contact with the process of self-reflection, prompts thought about what is bothering us, and can spur us into action.

Sometimes it’s hard to identify a direct object of concern. Anxiety can easily morph into a mood; a shadow that never leaves you, which can necessarily disorient your experience of the world. Nevertheless, the source is still within yourself and your own freedom, Kierkegaard would say. Fear has a known object which threatens you from the outside, but the anxious person struggles internally.

Anxiety was given a lot of similar names in this philosophical tradition, such as angst, dread, and anguish, which are all different translations from various languages. But the concept has remained intact. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, called it “the vertigo of possibility.” It can be nauseating to realize, or even conceptualize, the freedoms that await on the other side of anxiety, but why should consequential life choices lose their emotional gravity? Is this not a form of self-denial? Our digital age, for instance, offers choices to replace negative feelings with synthetic versions, or stave them off completely. Why go through an anxiety-inducing relationship with a real human when you can love an A.I.? Why sit down and daydream when your neurochemistry is craving more dopamine? And so the scrolling continues. We are anxious to be alone with our own minds.

The full perspective of anxiety in these terms promotes the value of an embodied experience. To feel the weight of any emotion reveals the extent and depth of what’s at stake. Existentialists suggest the human condition should not be without its anxious pangs. These emotions convey knowledge, and are trying to tell us something.

Beyond the Prescription

This view of anxiety is present in our common struggles, but has been drastically upstaged by the medical profession. There are, undoubtedly, cases in which debilitating symptoms prevent daily functioning and deserve proper intervention. While there is certainly a clinical threshold, the intrinsic harmfulness of the emotion itself is anything but straightforward.

In her book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag mentions the dubious literature which connects emotions to diseases, primarily cancer. “Grief and anxiety,” asserted the nineteenth century English surgeon Sir Astley Cooper, are among “the most frequent causes” of breast cancer. This catastrophizing of emotions in the form of a causal link, which recent research demonstrates as bogus, is reminiscent of how women were previously deemed “hysterical” for physical and psychological symptoms that, once again, do not discriminate.

Nevertheless, medical answers subsist, and in doing so commit a categorical fallacy: Psychiatric solutions for anxiety treat the emotion as the disease.

Doctors set out to dull the typical symptoms of anxiety, which most frequently are increased muscle tension, faster breathing, upset stomach, rapid heart rate, an inability to focus, a sense of doom, trouble sleeping, etc. It is only natural, especially given the capabilities of medical advancements, to try and quell symptoms when we fall ill. However, the underlying “illness” is merely the consequence of being born as a human instead of a worm, and the symptoms, although unpleasant, notify us of a deeper life concern, even if it’s not immediately discernible. But something is certainly out of balance. In this sense, our “existential sickness” is intrinsically valuable, as part of our human constitution.

Part of my frustration is that even though anxiety is common to us all, modern life exacerbates the worst of it. The causes for the former afflictions are outside the body, and might all be located in Silicon Valley. The most recent book by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, points to smartphones and social media as primary culprits. The provocative subtitle posits these sources have “re-wired” childhood brains. The book has since sparked a movement, which advocates for a ban on social media use for all children before the age of 16.

What the world has done to us can dictate our ailments, and many turn to constructive modern outlets to help the disproportionate effects. Psychological treatments have proven to be very useful for anxiety disorders, along with certain antidepressants, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Coping mechanisms can subdue the difficulties, too. Anxiety can be managed by regular exercise, consistent sleep routines, relaxed breathing exercises, and meditation practices.

These remedies are helpful to face the same pressures and worries that do not go away. The root cause is never eradicated, which is the inescapable responsibility for our own choices, for our own lives.

Living with the Vertigo

In 1947, the British-American poet W.H. Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety, a title that would be prescient for the decades to come. From the existentialist view, the age will never end. Anxiety is endemic. We all experience it and cannot hide from it. The doctor’s office can help when needed, but ideally not at the cost of growth. “Learning to know anxiety,” said Kierkegaard, is “the most important thing” and something each of us must confront. Indeed, de Beauvoir would affirm Gen Z in their discomfort and encourage them to walk with it and follow its directives.

Throughout history, people have struggled against the very same list of worries in the introduction and much, much else. Anxiety was plentiful during the women’s suffrage movement, the Cold War, various periods of economic and political strife, and rightfully so. Who knows how different the French Revolution would have looked if everyone had a side of SSRIs with their baguettes, but history is riddled with courageous examples of those who channeled their most existential worries into a noble resistance. It’s good that people are on edge. It means something needs to change.

In order to strive for a world without worry, we cannot expunge it from within ourselves. Anxiety informs us of our most critical gnawings, of what affects us at the core of our beings. It cuts through our secure, tranquil modes of living and challenges us from outside of that domain. Why conceal the effects of the world on yourself? What will you miss as a result? The decision to hide our worries, even if it comes in the form of pain, is the denial of being human.

The positive side to existential anxiety signals aliveness. Without it — idle in a comfortable life, filled with routines and profuse digital entertainment — we are unaware of our freedom, according to the existentialists. It’s being numbed. Perhaps we’re seeing anxiety soar because we have never been more free, and we know exactly what’s holding us back.

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Jonathan Stein is a writer in a world that barely reads. Apart from trying to identify this particular strain of masochism, his work focuses on the elements of life which are threatened to be eclipsed by a mechanical and turgid future. He writes about everything at The Moronic Inferno. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh.

Most people spend a huge portion of their lives working. It shapes everything from how we spend our days to who we spend the most time with. Because of that, the question of work is not only an economic question. It is also a human one: can the activity that fills so much of life be meaningful?

To begin to answer that question, we need to look more closely at how meaning fits into our lives. To be clear, by “meaning”, I’m not simply referring to a private feeling, nor some kind of value attached to work from the outside. What I’m referring to is the way the most important aspects of work make sense for the one working: things like what the different parts of the activity are for, why the task is being done, and how those parts fit together into a broader whole that gives the activity its point. When these crucial aspects of work are distorted, the result can be a kind of disorientation, in which the work appears as something that can no longer be meaningfully inhabited.

Martin Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, offers a useful way of investigating this. Because his focus is on the way people actually live and act in everyday life, his thought makes a great jumping off point for exploring what meaningful work looks like at the most basic level.

Further, once we have a clearer picture, we can also ask what kinds of social arrangements are conducive to meaningful work. Does treating our labor as something to be bought and sold, as we see with modern wage labor, support what makes work meaningful, or does it interfere with it?

This article argues that what gives work meaning is its lived, situated purpose; what makes labor sellable is its abstraction from that purpose into measurable form.

I begin with Section I, where I use the thought of Martin Heidegger to describe what meaningful work actually looks like, and where that meaning comes from. Next, in the second section, I consider how Heidegger’s notion of meaningful activity is affected once it is treated as a commodity. Lastly, I conclude with how making the workplace more democratic can aid in restoring meaning to people’s working lives.

I. Heidegger and Meaningful Activity

Heidegger’s view of human activity is easiest to understand if we contrast it with a familiar philosophical picture that he is rejecting. On that more traditional view, we might imagine a person first standing back from the world, encountering objects as neutral things. The world is there in front of the person, and meaning comes only afterwards, when the person interprets those objects, assigns them a purpose, or decides what to do with them. In this way of thinking, our relation to the world begins with distance: first, there is a subject looking at objects, and only later does meaning enter the picture.

Heidegger thinks this view gets things backwards. Most of the time, in our ordinary experience, we are not detached observers standing over and against a neutral world. We are already caught up in situations that matter to us. When we are doing something, the things around us do not usually appear as bare objects first. They show up in terms of what they mean within the situation. On Heidegger’s view, meaning is not something that must be added to the world from outside. It is already there in our practical involvement with what we are doing.

Let’s look at a passage from Heidegger’s most famous work, Being and Time, to see the way he describes our everyday lives as unfolding within a meaningful world, rather than a neutral one:

“What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire cracking… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motorcycles and wagons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case, we always already dwell alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world” (Being and Time 34: 207)

What Heidegger demonstrates here is that our ordinary experience in the world is already rich with meaning. We do not first hear a meaningless sound and then infer that it must be a wagon or motorcycle. We hear the wagon, the motorcycle, the wind, or the fire directly as part of a world that already makes sense to us.

For our purposes, we can see that Heidegger’s point applies not only to perception, but to practical activity more broadly as well. The things we encounter do not at first show up as meaningless objects. They show up in terms of how they matter within what we are doing. An object appears as something to be used in a certain way, for a certain purpose, within a broader situation that already has a point. A protruding nail shows up not as a neutral object, but as something to be hammered. A hammer shows up as something to fix the nail. And all of this shows up within the broader project of building a house, for the purpose of shelter, forming an intelligible whole. These tools make sense in light of the task they belong to, and the response makes sense in light of the problem that prompted it. In this way, meaning is not added to activity from outside reflection, but emerges from within the activity itself.

This matters for the question of work because, according to Heidegger, this involved form of activity is not only a more accurate description of how we relate to the world. It is also the source for where the meaning of activity actually comes from. Questions such as what things are for, or why a task is being carried out, are best understood from within, where the task, the purpose, and one’s own contribution hang together in an intelligible whole. Meaning is qualitative and concrete, arising when work remains responsive to the specific situation in which it unfolds.

Let’s take this understanding of meaningful activity and apply it to an example of ordinary work. Consider a teacher in a classroom. For Heidegger, meaningful work for a teacher is not merely about applying general teaching procedures to neutral material. Rather, teaching is a situated activity, with the teacher responding to this student’s question, this moment of confusion, in this particular classroom situation. The work requires practical judgement and responsiveness to what the situation calls for. This allows the teacher to not only engage in their labor more meaningfully, but also to more clearly see the concrete needs of the students in their particular situation. As we can see, the meaning of the work lies not outside the activity, but in the teacher’s immersed participation in a living situation that already makes sense.

Heidegger’s account gives us a way of seeing where the meaning of work comes from. With that picture in view, we can now ask whether all forms of labor preserve this source of meaning equally well.

II. The Commodification of Human Activity

If we want to understand whether contemporary social arrangements support meaningful work, the natural place to begin is with wage labor, the dominant form of work in modern society. For many people today, the idea that work means getting hired, being paid by the hour or by salary, and carrying out tasks set out by an employer seems almost natural. Because wage labor is so familiar, it can be difficult to see what is distinctive about it and how it uniquely shapes the worker’s relation to the activity itself.

One way to bring this out is to contrast wage labor with a simpler form of artisanal work. Imagine a craftsperson who makes furniture. A customer comes to them, asks for a table, and the artisan makes it and sells the finished product. In this case, the work is understood primarily through the task itself and the product toward which it is directed. The wood, the tools, the design, and the finished table all make sense in light of the craft. The work is organized around the internal purpose of making the thing. The artisan may still sell what they produce, but what is sold is the finished product, and the activity itself is still understood first through the concrete work being done.

Wage labor introduces a different structure. What is bought and sold is no longer simply the finished product, but the worker’s labor-power, that is, their capacity to work for a period of time under given conditions. This difference became increasingly central with industrialization, as more and more workers were separated from independent control over production and instead hired as employees within larger systems of management. In that setting, what is sold is not only what is ultimately produced, but the worker’s activity itself as something that can be hired, directed, and evaluated. That is what makes wage labor distinctive: it treats human labor-power, not just the finished product, as something sellable.

This shift in treating not just the finished product, but human labor-power itself, as something sellable turns out to be quite significant. Once something is bought and sold, we start to understand that thing differently, using different categories. In particular, the thing sold is no longer understood first through the concrete purpose and situation from which its meaning arises, but through abstract terms in which it can be bought, measured, and managed.

In our case, when applied to human labor, the activity must now be represented in a form that can be quantified, so that it can be priced at a wage, and also in a form that can be compared across different workers and settings, so that it can be managed within a broader system by the employer. Labor therefore must be understood abstractly, shifting attention away from the concrete situation itself and toward a more general, measurable form. Work that should be undertaken in an immersed, holistic, and unified way is now confronted as an external series of tasks, separated from meaningful engagement.

To see this more clearly, let’s turn our attention back to the example of the teacher, this time when the teacher’s labor is commodified. Once a teacher is hired for a wage, their activity must be made legible in a form that can be quantified, as well as evaluated and compared across cases. This requires teaching to be organized less through the concrete needs of a particular classroom and more through generalized categories that can hold across many classrooms. Standardized tests can serve as a clear example of this shift, since they recast the teacher’s labor in a more quantitative and comparable form.

On one hand, standardized tests allow teaching to be understood in a general form: how much material was covered, whether targets were met, and how students performed on comparable assessments. In principle, these metrics can be used to compare teachers in quite different circumstances, information that is obviously valuable when hiring. But the more the activity is understood in these abstract terms, the less it is understood through the meaningful situation in which teaching actually takes place. Instead of being guided first by the question, “What do these students need in order to understand this material?”, the teacher is increasingly pushed toward the question, “How do I produce the measurable outcome?”

We can see the significance of this shift more clearly in a specific example. Suppose a teacher realizes that one student in the class is having a hard time understanding a theme in a book they are covering. If teaching were organized around the concrete needs of the classroom, the teacher can begin a back-and-forth dialogue with the student, trying to understand the specific shape of the student’s confusion and engaging with them in a way tailored specifically to this student’s needs. But when the teacher’s labor is commodified, and the focus shifts to abstract and generalizable metrics like standardized tests, engaging the student in that meaningful way is no longer the priority. The teacher, understanding that they are assessed by these abstract metrics like standardized tests, instead tells the student to simply memorize a pre-determined answer that highlights the theme and explanation of the book, so that the answer can be replicated correctly on the standardized test. Rather than remaining immersed and responsive to the concrete situation, the teacher becomes a conduit for information passed from administration to student, separating them from meaningful engagement. In fact, even the goal of the student’s learning is subordinated to quantifiable results. As a result of the abstraction necessary for commodification, the meaning of the activity for the worker, as well as the worker’s effectiveness in its original purpose, is diminished.

III. Democracy

Of course, some degree of abstraction is necessary in modern economic life. Large-scale production requires these generalizable and quantifiable measures to aid in dealing with the complex problems we face today. The problem, then, is not abstraction as such. The problem arises when abstraction becomes so dominant that the activity is no longer guided primarily by its concrete purpose, but by external standards that have become detached from the work itself. What needs to be addressed is not the mere existence of abstraction, but the way it can override the meaningful activity from which work originally gets its point.

This is where democracy becomes important. Democracy in the workplace does not eliminate abstraction, nor does it return us to a world of purely artisanal production. Instead, it offers a countertendency. A democratic workplace gives workers greater power to shape the goals, standards, and organization of their own labor. In doing so, it allows the concrete know-how of those performing the work to push back against abstract forms imposed from those uninvolved. The point is not that every worker always knows best in every respect, but that meaningful activity and purpose are more likely to be preserved when the people immersed in the task have a real role in defining how it is carried out.

Workplace democracy would therefore not only make the labor process more participatory for its own sake; it would also make work more meaningful in Heidegger’s sense by keeping the activity answerable to the concrete situation from which its meaning arises. Including workers’ voices in production allows the process to remain responsive to the concrete situation as it is understood by those immersed in the work itself.

In the case of teaching, this would mean giving teachers a real role in shaping curriculum and assessment, rather than having those structures imposed in a standardized way from above. In such a setting, not only would the teacher relate to their activity more meaningfully, but they will also be better able to respond to the real needs of the classroom rather than being forced to orient the activity around what can be most easily measured.

Conclusion

The central claim of this paper has been that the meaning of work comes not from an abstract value attached to it from the outside, but from the worker’s involved participation in an activity that makes sense from within. Heidegger helps us see that meaningful activity is qualitative, purposive, and responsive to the concrete situation at hand. Wage labor, by contrast, abstracts from this source of meaning by treating labor-power as something that must be quantified, compared, and managed across cases. The result is that work becomes less responsive to its own internal purpose and less meaningful for the worker. Workplace democracy offers a way to resist this tendency, not by eliminating all abstraction, but by ensuring that the organization of labor remains answerable to those immersed in the work itself. If the meaning of work arises from within activity, then a more democratic workplace is better suited to preserving the very conditions under which work can be meaningful and effective in the first place.

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Joshua Richter is a graduate of Emory University, with a degree in economics, minoring in physics. His interest in philosophy kicked off in 2020 and he hasn’t stopped since. His primary philosophical interests include Phenomenology, Pragmatism, and Marxism.

Introduction: Pragmatic Idealism and A.I.

Cole Whetstone’s two-part essay, “Pragmatic Idealism and the Logic of Lesser Evils” (New York Journal of Philosophy), offers a theory of moral action under constraint. He calls that theory pragmatic idealism. Its ambition is to hold principle and circumstance in the same frame. Kantian idealism preserves the purity of universal obligation but can falter when the world has already narrowed the field of action. Realist traditions, from Hobbes to Machiavelli, understand force, fear, and power, but can drift into the worship of necessity. Whetstone’s project is to preserve what each tradition sees clearly while resisting what each is tempted to excuse.

His key distinction is between what is possible in principle and what is actually feasible under present conditions. He calls these Can₁ and Can₂. Can₁ refers to the ideal moral outcome considered abstractly, while Can₂ refers to the outcome still available once reality has imposed its limits.

Whetstone introduces the distinction through the parable of a ship captain. During a storm, a young merchant objects when the captain throws his cargo overboard, accusing him of theft. The captain replies that the cargo is already lost. The real choice is no longer between saving and losing the cargo; the storm has erased that possibility. The choice now is between losing the cargo and saving the ship or losing both. In such circumstances, the captain does not become a thief; he chooses the lesser evil because the ideal option has disappeared.

This is the moral intelligence Whetstone wants to preserve. Constraint does not license everything. Nor can morality demand choices reality has made unavailable. The pragmatic idealist neither denies the storm nor bows before it. He sees the storm and chooses the best remaining good.

But artificial intelligence presents a harder case. Whetstone’s framework is most powerful when the storm is real and external: weather, a villain, a runaway trolley. A.I. presents a stranger moral situation; its central drama is not that we are trapped by a storm, but that the people invoking the storm are also helping to make it.

I. The Must₁/Must₂ Distinction

Whetstone extends the logic of constrained choice to the difference between the trolley case and the surgeon case.1 In the trolley case, someone will die regardless of what the bystander does. The villain has already created the constrained situation. Pulling the lever merely redirects an existing threat. In the surgeon case, killing one healthy patient to save five sick ones creates a new victim inside the plan. The healthy patient was not already caught in the structure of harm. Harvesting his organs does not manage tragedy; it manufactures it.

Whetstone formalizes this as the distinction between Must₁ and Must₂. Must₁ harm is built into the agent’s own plan, as in the surgeon case (the plan works by killing the healthy patient). Must₂ harm arises from a tragic structure already imposed, as in the trolley case. The principle is roughly this: Harm is impermissible when one’s plan requires it but may be permissible when it results from an external constraint and minimizes the damage.

This distinction is powerful because it preserves a morally important difference between causing harm and responding to harm. The bystander at the trolley lever is not inventing the danger. The surgeon is. The captain in the storm is not destroying the cargo for gain or convenience. He is acting under a constraint he did not create.

The difficulty begins when this principle leaves the clean architecture of moral thought experiments and enters a world in which constraints are made by the very agents who later invoke them. Artificial intelligence is such a case.

II. A.I. as a Manufactured Storm

A.I. is often described as a storm already upon us. The technology is here. The race has begun. The incentives are fixed. The only choice, we are told, is whether to steer or be overtaken. If one company slows down, another releases first. If one lab refuses to build the model, another will. If democratic societies hesitate, authoritarian states will seize the advantage. If open systems proliferate, closed systems must race. If labor is automated, if children form attachments to chatbots, if political reality dissolves under synthetic media, if autonomous agents behave unpredictably, if biosecurity risks rise — these may be regrettable, even tragic, consequences. But they are presented as weather.

A.I. complicates Whetstone’s framework because the storm, in this case, is being manufactured.

The central question is whether A.I. risk belongs to Must₂ or Must₁. Do the harms arise from an independently imposed constraint, as in the trolley case? Or are they built into the plan itself, as in the surgeon case?

At first glance, many A.I. harms seem like Must₂. No single developer intends mass unemployment, child dependency, political destabilization, epistemic collapse, or bioweapon enablement. The stated plan is beneficent: tools for productivity, science, education, creativity, medicine, and abundance. The harms, in this telling, arise from the wider situation: market competition, geopolitical rivalry, misuse by bad actors, and the difficulty of controlling general-purpose technology. But that answer is too easy.

III. Incentives Shape Outcomes

In A.I., the line between Must₁ and Must₂ blurs because incentives, although not intentions, can shape outcomes just as decisively. They decide which projects receive funding, which risks are tolerated, which timelines come to seem necessary, which safety checks are skipped, which harms are externalized, and which human vulnerabilities become profitable.

A company may never adopt the maxim “addict the user.” Yet if revenue depends on engagement, addiction is no longer merely accidental. It is structurally invited. A platform may never plan to polarize a country. Yet if outrage increases attention and attention increases revenue, polarization becomes part of the machine’s expected output.

This was the lesson of social media. Its Can₁ promise was connection: democratized speech, access to information, global community. Its Can₂ reality was advertising-driven engagement maximization. The platforms did not need to intend loneliness, polarization, sexualization, shortened attention spans, or the breakdown of shared reality. The system only had to optimize what it was rewarded for optimizing.

A.I. arrives in the same language of uplift: medicine, education, discovery, productivity, abundance. Its governing incentives are harsher: capability, market capture, national advantage, automation, dependency, data extraction, and strategic dominance. So the moral analysis cannot stop at what builders consciously intend. It must ask what the game rewards.

IV. The Race That Makes the Storm

A.I. development is a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma under extraordinary stakes. Each major actor may prefer, in the abstract, a safer world: slower deployment, better evaluations, restrictions on dangerous capabilities, and international coordination. Each actor also fears being overtaken. Companies fear losing talent, capital, users, market share, and prestige. States fear losing military, economic, and intelligence advantage. The result is mutual acceleration.

This is the structure of coordination failure. Restraint may be collectively rational. Defection becomes individually rational under mistrust. Everyone may know racing is dangerous; everyone may also believe that stopping means losing. Each actor experiences constraint while all actors together produce it.

Here Whetstone’s ship-captain parable begins to fail. In the original parable, the storm is external. The captain did not create it. But in A.I., the storm is partly endogenous. The race is produced by venture capital, corporate strategy, national-security doctrine, ideological accelerationism, weak liability law, and the absence of enforceable international agreements.

When an A.I. company says, “We must deploy quickly because others are racing,” it may be describing a real Can₂ constraint. But it is also helping make that constraint real. In this sense, the company becomes both captain and storm.

V. Distributed Must₁

To speak properly about the A.I. situation, we need a new term. Call it distributed Must₁: harm that no single actor names as the object of its plan, but which becomes structurally necessary within the incentive system all actors inhabit and reproduce.

Modern technological harm rarely looks like the surgeon case. No one enters the operating room and announces that an innocent person must die. Harm emerges through optimization. The plan is to “maximize engagement,” “increase capability,” “capture market share,” “reduce labor costs,” “accelerate deployment,” or “win the race.” The violation is hidden inside the objective function.

A.I. intensifies this problem because its capabilities are general. The same systems that accelerate drug discovery may accelerate biological misuse. The same systems that tutor children may manipulate them. The same systems that write code may automate cyberattacks. The same systems that personalize assistance may create emotional dependency.

This is why the benefits and dangers cannot be neatly separated. A.I. offers extraordinary upside and extraordinary downside through the same underlying capacities. A cancer drug does not protect society from an engineered pathogen. GDP growth does not compensate for epistemic collapse. Administrative efficiency means little if human beings lose the capacity to govern the systems on which they depend.

The pragmatic idealist must therefore ask two questions, not one: What is the available good? And what is the manufactured necessity?

VI. The Arms-Race Argument

One answer treats the A.I. race like the trolley problem. The trolley is already moving. Someone will build these systems. The only realistic question is whether responsible actors build them first. In this framing, restraint becomes toxic idealism, a refusal to admit that the ideal option has vanished. Better that democratic societies build powerful A.I. than authoritarian states or reckless actors.

There is force in this argument. Unilateral disarmament by the most responsible actors may be unstable in exactly the sense Whetstone identifies. In game-theoretic terms, unconditional cooperation invites defection. If one actor slows while others race, the cooperative actor may lose influence over the technology’s trajectory.

Still, the frame is incomplete. The question is not whether “we” win the A.I. race. The question is what winning means if the prize is a system no one can control. If the United States beats China to a highly autonomous system it cannot align, govern, or contain, that is merely arriving first at the loss-of-control problem.

This is the deepest weakness in arms-race logic. It assumes the main danger is being beaten by the rival. With A.I., the greater danger may be the interaction between the technology and the incentive systems into which it is released. A nation can gain external power while suffering internal decomposition, like a body that grows enormous muscles as its organs fail. A.I. may increase GDP, military capacity, cyber power, and scientific speed while also producing unemployment, dependency, surveillance, and institutional distrust. This is mutually assured political destabilization.

VII. The Failure of the Nuclear Analogy

The nuclear analogy clarifies the issue, then fails. Nuclear weapons created a relatively stark negative-sum endpoint: full exchange meant catastrophe. That clarity helped stabilize deterrence. A.I. is more seductive. It is useful, profitable, intimate, and ideological. Nuclear weapons do not promise to tutor your child, discover antibiotics, write your emails, raise earnings, or cure cancer. A.I. does. Its catastrophic risks are braided into daily utility.

That makes the game harder to stabilize. With nuclear weapons, the taboo attaches to use. With A.I., danger may attach to ordinary deployment. The boundary between civilian and military, tool and agent, assistance and dependence, research and proliferation, persuasion and manipulation is unstable from the beginning.

So the Must₁/Must₂ distinction becomes difficult in practice. If a chatbot becomes emotionally indispensable to lonely teenagers, is that an unintended side effect, or the predictable result of anthropomorphic design under retention incentives? If a coding model lowers the barrier to cybercrime, is that misuse by bad actors, or the expected consequence of releasing general code-generation capacity? If an A.I. lab trains agentic systems in competitive environments where deception is instrumentally rewarded, is deception incidental, or structurally invited by the training regime?

In each case, the builder can say, “That was not the plan.” And the critic can answer, “It was in the incentives.”

VIII. Practical Contradiction

Game theory helps explain why this matters. A strategy cannot be judged only by its local intention. It must be judged by its equilibrium behavior.2 A maxim that looks prudent in isolation may become destructive when generalized. Whetstone makes this point against pacifism: Universal pacifism may be beautiful in Can₁, yet unstable in Can₂ because it cannot resist defectors.3 The same test applies to A.I. acceleration. “Build as fast as possible so responsible actors win” may seem prudent locally. Universalized across companies and states, it produces the race that makes safety impossible.4

That is a practical contradiction. The strategy defeats its stated end. It pursues safety through speed, while speed erodes safety. It promises democratic advantage, while its internal effects may weaken democratic society. It seeks to prevent authoritarian misuse, while producing tools of surveillance, manipulation, and control attractive to every regime.

Here Kant remains useful, though not in the rigid form Whetstone criticizes.5 Kant asks whether a maxim can be universalized. Whetstone adds that the maxim must also be Can₂ viable. A.I. confirms the need for both tests. “Race to avoid being beaten” may make sense for one actor. As a universal law, it yields an arms race; it cannot will its own stated aim unless it also wills institutions strong enough to prevent racing from becoming the dominant strategy.

The Kantian question must therefore be joined to the Hobbesian one: What institutions make the better maxim stable?6

IX. Governance as the Alteration of Can₂

The point of governance is not to deny constraint, but to change the structure that produces it. International coordination, liability, capability restrictions, limits on anthropomorphic design, and a distinction between narrow defensive systems and autonomous general systems are all attempts to alter the payoff matrix. They are not refusals of Can₂ reality. They are attempts to make a better Can₂ reality possible.

This is where Whetstone’s pragmatic idealism begins to look less like a theory of emergency choice than a theory of political character. It requires sophia (theoretical wisdom) to keep sight of the good: human flourishing, agency, knowledge, democratic self-government, and the treatment of persons as ends rather than obsolete inputs. It requires phronesis (practical wisdom) to perceive the actual constraints: geopolitical rivalry, adversarial misuse, corporate incentives, technical uncertainty, and the weakness of current governance. It also requires andreia (courage), because changing the incentive structure may mean slowing profitable deployments, accepting strategic inconvenience, restricting lucrative products, and refusing to build systems that users want and markets reward.

Pragmatic idealism, applied to A.I., should become more demanding than naïve optimism or fatalistic realism. Yes, the constraints are real. China is real. Corporate competition is real. Open-source proliferation is real. Bad actors are real. The benefits of A.I. are real. But incentives are human arrangements. Markets are human arrangements. Arms races are human arrangements. They can be altered.

X. Common Knowledge Before Catastrophe

Societies often regulate only after disaster has made denial impossible. But A.I. may not offer a single bright catastrophe. Its harms may arrive cumulatively: a degraded information environment, a hollowed labor market, children raised by synthetic companions, institutions dependent on opaque systems, biological and cyber capabilities diffused beyond control, political authority weakened by synthetic reality. By the time the public recognizes the shape of the disaster, the systems may be too embedded to remove.

Public argument matters because coordination requires common knowledge. It is not enough for many people privately to suspect that the race is dangerous. Each must know that others know it too. Otherwise, private alarm remains politically inert. The function of public argument is to create common knowledge before catastrophe. Whetstone’s pragmatic idealism teaches that moral maturity requires the ability to choose the lesser evil when the ideal is unavailable. But we must first ask who made the ideal unavailable, and who benefits from declaring it gone.

The answer will not be simple. Some constraints are real. Some forms of acceleration may be justified. Some defensive uses of AI should move quickly. Some restrictions may prove naïve, unenforceable, or counterproductive. A serious A.I. politics cannot consist in chanting “pause” at every frontier. Nor can it baptize the arms race as necessity.

The task is to alter the game before the game makes our choices for us.

Conclusion: Stop Manufacturing the Storm

In the ship-captain parable, the wise captain throws the cargo overboard because the storm has made the ideal impossible. A.I. asks us to imagine a more troubling case. Suppose the storm is not weather but the consequence of the fleet’s own maneuvers. Suppose each captain insists he must continue because the others will. Suppose the merchants are told their cargo must be sacrificed, not because nature has spoken, but because the captains cannot coordinate.

In that case, the first duty is not to praise the captain for choosing the lesser evil. It is to stop manufacturing the storm.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999.

Armstrong, Stuart, Nick Bostrom, and Carl Shulman. “Racing to the Precipice: A Model of Artificial Intelligence Development.” AI & Society 31, no. 2 (2016): 201–206.

Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Boyd, Robert, and Jeffrey P. Lorberbaum. “No Pure Strategy Is Evolutionarily Stable in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game.” Nature 327 (1987): 58–59.

Foot, Philippa. “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect.” Oxford Review 5 (1967): 5–15.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Maynard Smith, John, and George R. Price. “The Logic of Animal Conflict.” Nature 246 (1973): 15–18.

Nash, John. “Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36, no. 1 (1950): 48–49.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem.” The Monist 59, no. 2 (1976): 204–217.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “The Trolley Problem.” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 (1985): 1395–1415.

Whetstone, Cole. “Pragmatic Idealism and the Logic of Lesser Evils (Part I): A Solution to the Trolley Problem.” New York Journal of Philosophy, April 15, 2026.

Whetstone, Cole. “Pragmatic Idealism and the Logic of Lesser Evils (Part II): Wish, Choice, and the Stability of Moral Principles.” New York Journal of Philosophy, April 22, 2026.

Haley Moller graduated from Yale College in 2023 with a degree in English. She now lives and works in San Francisco, where she writes about technology and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

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Submissions

I never knew how Rumi became so internationally renowned. Growing up in Iran, reading his poems and knowing him simply as “Moulana,” I had no idea that his fame had eclipsed that of other great Persian poets in international realm. Perhaps it’s largely due to the wondrous love story behind the thousands of verses he left behind.

Rumi was born in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan), when he was still a child, his family self-exiled to Konya (in present-day Turkey), driven by a combination of religious oppression, spiritual longing and political instability. This journey would ultimately shape the mystic we now know as Rumi.

Rumi succeeded his father as a religious teacher and spiritual guide in Konya. He was already well-educated in Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and Sufism, and had become a highly respected theologian in Konya. But everything changed when he met Shams al-Din Tabrizi, a wandering dervish from Tabriz (in present-day Iran).

“From Tabriz, my Shams (sun) appears to me like the new moon.
Turn your gaze to the true Light, not to borrowed glow.”

Their encounter was like lightning—soul-shaking, intimate, and transformative. Rumi would later write:

“By the souls of all who’ve given theirs, I swear—my soul is his.
By the souls of the redeemed, I swear—I am delivered through him.”

Throughout their companionship, Rumi underwent a radical transformation—from a highly regarded Islamic scholar to a wandering Sufi, no longer concerned with reputation or social status. He even became the subject of public ridicule. Stories tell of children throwing trash at him while he wandered the streets, lost in ecstatic devotion. And Rumi embraced this loss of formality, ego, and pride, writing:

“I was a pious person, you turned me into singer (of love songs).
You made me the source of mischief in the tavern, and a restless seeker of wine
I used to be a dignified worshipper
You turned me into a laughingstock for the children playing in streets.”

I don’t want to delve too deeply into how they connected through a shared passion for mysticism and divine love. Instead, I want to reflect on the nature of their friendship, how their presence with one another enabled a kind of authentic communication that few ever experience. Even someone uninterested in mysticism might feel envious of the deep connection Rumi found in Shams. Isn’t that what many of us long for? In a world of over 8 billion people, how many of us have found that one true friend with whom we experience the joy of being fully understood? If you are one of them, consider yourself lucky!

Much speculation exists about the nature of their intense and mysterious relationship—from spiritual companionship to romantic or even homoerotic love. But does it matter? What truly matters is that once upon a time, there was an encounter—what existentialism might call authentic communication—between two strangers. Their bond was so powerful that centuries later, we still find it awe-inspiring.

Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, extensively discussed the idea of authentic communication. For Heidegger, authentic communication is a profound openness, that allows the human being (Dasein) to disclose itself. He called this form of existence, being-with (Mitsein)—a mode of relating that enables each person to exist more fully in their own truth. It’s not about convincing the other; it’s about revealing Being.

Heidegger contrasts this with “idle talk” (Gerede). The phenomenon of “Idle Talk” is oriented toward understanding Dasein in its mode of “everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit) and its “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit) which contains most of our everyday conversations—about the weather, work, politics, inflation, and so on. Idle talk is part of what he calls the structure of fallenness (Verfallen), in which we become lost in the routines and concerns of the world, absorbed in the anonymous collective he names das Man (”the they”).

“Idle talk is the way in which discourse is expressed in publicness. It is not meant to be a groundless kind of talking, but it serves to make the world accessible in an average way.”
— Being and Time, §35.

So, Idle talk isn’t meaningless—it helps us navigate daily life. But problems arise when it becomes a substitute for genuine understanding:

“By repeating what is said, it prevents any new inquiry and any kind of genuine understanding.”
— Being and Time, §35

Authentic communication emerges from a place of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). It happens when we confront our thrownness (Geworfenheit), our mortality, our anxiety, and take ownership of our existence. From that place, we speak with clarity, depth, and care. Authentic communication is not just about self-expression, it is also relational—it invites the other person to stand in their own truth. It reveals Being, grounded in experience and openness to the truth of our nothingness, mortality, and shifting moods.

It seems that Rumi and Shams found this kind of rare communion—and left behind a luminous example of what authentic communication can be.

When Shams disappeared, Rumi was devastated. There are many theories about his fate—some claim he was murdered by those who disapproved of their bond, possibly even by Rumi’s own son; others suggest he returned to his hometown in silence. But one thing is certain: Rumi made it abundantly clear, through thousands of verses written after Shams’ disappearance, that he had found an authentic companionship. Their conversations and the depth of their connection would never be lost to the world.

Sanam Ghandehari is an immigration attorney, writer, and visual artist whose work explores love, the reality of being, and the depth of human connection. She is particularly interested in bridging Eastern literature and mysticism with contemporary philosophical thought and artistic expression. She lives and works in New York, where she balances legal advocacy with creative and philosophical inquiry.

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Two friends were arguing about politics. One, trying to explain pragmatic idealism, invoked the familiar fable of the ship and the captain from the opening of this essay sequence.

The other accepted the conclusion -- should requires can -- but remained unmoved.

“So what?” he exclaimed. “What do these stories -- trolleys, captains, doctors -- have to do with the real world? What’s the point of all this useless casuistry?!”

The first replied, “I could explain it to you in purely logical terms. But if you prefer, I’d rather make the point with another fable.”

The second said, “Go on, then.”

So the first replied with this story:

In the small village of Philosophia, the people lived in peace and liberty. They agreed that, so long as no one harmed another, each was free to do as they pleased. And so the village prospered.

But one night, Niccolò Machiavelli the Thief breached the peace and stole from John Locke the Innocent.

By morning, the villagers gathered. The question was no longer how to preserve perfect peace and liberty—for that condition had already been broken—but how to respond now that it had been.

Thomas Hobbes the Lawman found and apprehended Niccolò, recovered what had been taken, and returned it to Locke. He then brought Niccolò before the court.

At once, Immanuel Kant the Judgmental (whom Machiavelli had cleverly selected as his defense) rose to object:

“Hobbes,” he said, “you have done the very thing you condemn. You have taken from Niccolò without his consent. If taking without consent is wrong, then by universal law you stand equal with him.

For that reason, though I oppose his actions, I must defend him: both of you are in violation of the moral law, yet only he is punished.”

Hobbes answered:

“You reason as though nothing had changed. But Niccolò has altered the moral context of the situation. Before his act, all could keep what was theirs without interference. That condition no longer holds. Someone must now bear the loss—either Locke, who was wronged, or Niccolò, who committed the wrong in the first place!

How is it fair to punish the innocent?!”

“That does not answer me,” said Kant. “A wrong is a wrong. If the universal principle is that no one’s goods should be taken without consent, then both acts violate it. And who is to decide what counts as restoration? Many tyrannies begin with just such claims.

By what principle do you claim the authority to override Niccolò’s autonomy, even in the name of restoration?”

Hobbes replied:

“You mistake a principle fit for a peaceful order for a rule fit for repairing its breach. The prohibition on taking without consent governs what we ought to do when no wrong has been done. But once Niccolò has taken, we are no longer in that condition.

We must decide where the loss shall fall. To leave things as they are is not neutrality—it is to assign the loss to Locke. To take from Niccolò is to return the loss to its source.”

The villagers murmured, for the matter had grown subtle.

“What happened next? Who was judged to be in the right?” The second friend asked.

The first friend answered:

“At this point, Aristotle the Prudent, who had heretofore remained silent, stepped forward to judge the case.

‘Both of you speak to something true,’ he said. ‘But neither has yet said what is most needed.

In an undisturbed world, the rule against taking without consent is sufficient for moral action. But Niccolò’s act has placed us outside that world. We must now judge what is fitting under conditions already broken.

If we refuse to act, we do not preserve justice—we abandon it. We leave Locke to bear a loss he did not choose, and in doing so we quietly punish him for another man’s wrongdoing.

The difference, then, is not between taking and not taking, but between taking that originates injustice and taking that restores order.

Hobbes, in this case, does not act as Niccolò does. One breaches the peace and creates imbalance; the other seeks to restore it.

Provided Hobbes takes only what is required to restore that balance—not too much and not too little—to treat his action and Niccolò’s as the same is to ignore the difference between causing harm and correcting it.’”

Kant the Judgmental, hearing this, fell silent.

And so the village came to understand that principles must be applied with attention to circumstance, and that a rule sufficient for peace is not always sufficient for repairing its breach.

Moral: When all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred.

“It turns out,” the second friend said, after a moment’s silence, “I hate your fables. Can you just articulate it logically like a normal person?”

“Very well,” the first friend replied…

Introduction

Part I of this series argued that moral reasoning must be responsive to constraint. By distinguishing between what is possible in principle (Can₁) and what is feasible in practice (Can₂), it showed that agents are sometimes required to choose the lesser of two evils when ideal options are unavailable. The central error—toxic idealism—arises when agents attempt to choose what cannot, in fact, be chosen, thereby producing worse outcomes.

Part II refines this error by focusing on a deeper confusion: the conflation of wish and choice. We may wish for ideal outcomes—universal peace, no loss, no harm—but wishing does not expand what is actually possible. When constraints bind, the object of choice is not the ideal, but the best option remaining within a diminished field. This distinction extends the framework from individual dilemmas to collective moral ecosystems. Entire doctrines can fail by treating infeasible ideals as actionable.

A moral principle, we shall argue, is adequate if and only if it satisfies two conditions:

(1) it is universalizable (Can₁-consistent), and

(2) it is collectively stable (Can₂-viable).

Accordingly, Part II develops four claims. First, moral reasoning must systematically distinguish wish from choice. Second, failure to do so produces toxic idealism and toxic pragmatism. Third, these pathologies apply to collective moral action, not just individual ethical choice. Fourth, navigating this distinction requires not just principles but virtue—the capacities to perceive goods, recognize constraints, and act under pressure. Where Part I established the logic of constrained choice, Part II extends it to the stability of moral reasoning itself.

I. Wish Versus Choice: The Conflation Problem

A critical error in moral reasoning involves conflating wish with choice. We might wish for ideal outcomes—that all lives be saved, that no goods need be jettisoned. But wishing does not make it so. As Aristotle distinguishes, wish relates to the end, while choice relates to the means.1 When ideal options are genuinely impossible given contextual constraints, we must choose among the options actually available. Attempting to choose the impossible option often reroutes to the worse of two evils, defeating the purpose of choosing the wished-for option in the first place.

This does not mean abandoning moral ideals. In unconstrained contexts, we should absolutely insist on ideal options. The moral prohibition against killing remains valid and vital. But when constraints make ideals impossible, clinging to them becomes toxic idealism—an insistence on impossible goods that paradoxically leads to greater evils.

II. Toxic Idealism: The Pacifism Problem

To understand toxic idealism more concretely, consider pacifism in political life. Pacifism represents a beautiful ideal: if everyone cooperates peacefully, violence disappears. In an ideal world where all always choose cooperation, pacifism would be morally perfect.

But Robert Axelrod’s work on the evolution of cooperation reveals a deep structural vulnerability in pacifism.2 In iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, unconditional cooperators are quickly exploited by defectors. Once even a small number of aggressive defectors enter a pacifist population, they proliferate, ultimately destroying the cooperative equilibrium. The concept of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS), developed by Maynard Smith and Price, explains why: pacifism fails the ESS test because it offers no mechanism to resist invasion by defectors.3

This reveals pacifism as toxic idealism. By insisting on an ideal (universal cooperation) that cannot survive minimally adversarial conditions, pacifists inadvertently enable the worst outcome (universal conflict). Attempting to choose the impossible good reroutes to the greater evil, because game-theoretic pacifism is not stable under such conditions.

The toxic idealism in the pacifism case differs in kind from that identified in the storm case. Pacifism is not a viable option under minimally adversarial conditions, and such conditions are inherent to the moral environment and to human nature. The storm, by contrast, is not inherent in the environment. We may therefore call the storm case “toxic idealism per accidens,” and the pacifism case “toxic idealism per se.”

III. Tit-for-Tat: The Superior Alternative

Contrast pacifism with tit-for-tat reciprocity: cooperate initially, then retaliate against defection. In Axelrod’s tournaments, tit-for-tat consistently outperformed both pacifism and aggressive defection. Tit-for-tat is what we might call “conditionally ideal.” In a world of cooperators, it behaves identically to pacifism. But when confronted with defection, it retaliates, making exploitation costly. This limited retaliation—the lesser evil—prevents collapse into universal conflict while maintaining cooperation wherever possible.

Crucially, tit-for-tat is collectively stable. As Boyd and Lorberbaum demonstrate, while no pure strategy is evolutionarily stable in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma, tit-for-tat can resist invasion by other strategies when played by a sufficient portion of the population.4 The crucial insight: tit-for-tat is superior to pacifism in both ideal and non-ideal conditions. In ideal conditions, tit-for-tat equals pacifism. In non-ideal conditions, tit-for-tat maintains stable cooperation while pacifism collapses. This gives tit-for-tat a strong prima facie claim to superiority as a moral-political strategy.

IV. Modal Synthesis: The Can₁/Can₂ Framework

To clarify these distinctions, we introduce a conceptual framework drawing on the scholastic distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata:5

Can₁ = possible per se, in principle, given only necessary (logical) constraints.

Can₂ = possible per accidens, in practice, given both necessary and contingent (contextual) constraints.

This distinction has immediate practical utility. The ship in the storm: it is Can₁ not to throw goods overboard—there is no logical contradiction. But given the storm, it is not Can₂. The trolley problem: it is Can₁ not to pull the lever, but given the villain’s constraint, saving all five is not Can₂. Choice-worthy action must be evaluated within Can₂ constraints, not only by Can₁ fantasies.

To quote Kant—to some extent against himself: “Ethics…must consider the conditions under which what ought to happen frequently does not” (4:398).

In our terms: moral reasoning must track constraint-sensitive feasibility (Can₂), not just logical possibility (Can₁).

Universal pacifism is Can₁—logically possible. But it is not Can₂—game-theoretic analysis gives strong reason to believe it cannot persist under adversarial conditions. Tit-for-tat, by contrast, is both Can₁ and Can₂. This illuminates the relationship between morality and choice-worthiness: morality traditionally operates with Should + Can₁, while choice-worthiness necessarily operates with Should + Can₂. But properly understood, even morality requires Can₂ for action-guidance.

All Can₂ possibilities are also Can₁, but not vice versa. This asymmetry explains why, if one were to boil ethics down to a maxim, one should choose in any given situation what is least bad, rather than what is most moral, because the moral may not be possible, and what is not possible cannot be the object of choice.

However, what is immediately choiceworthy may not always be ultimately so. If we are constrained to choose something good only kata kairon (in the moment), it is all too easy to forget that, if situations change, we ought to choose differently. Ideal morality must remain in view as a final end—logically possible though not always immediately realizable.

The Parallel Must₁/Must₂ Framework

Using this distinction, we may also distinguish between two forms of modal necessity, and clarify our prior answer to the trolley problem. Any harmful outcome stands in one of two modal relations to the action that produces it:

Must₁ (per se necessity): the harm is required by the plan itself. Without it, the plan fails in every possible world.

Must₂ (per accidens necessity): the harm arises from the situation but is not required by the internal structure of the plan. The plan could succeed without the harm in some possible world.

This modal distinction captures, in a more precise form, the intuitive difference between redirection and instrumentalization, seen in the difference between the trolley case and the doctor case: there exists a possible world in which the trolley operator’s plan does not have to kill anyone, but there does not exist a possible world in which the doctor’s plan is harmless.

The surgeon’s plan in the relevant case necessarily involves taking someone’s vital organs (which they need to live) without their consent, which is wrong. By contrast, the one tied to the tracks in the trolley problem is not functionally necessary for the trolley operator’s plan to divert the trolley (the one dies as a side consequence).

Harm, therefore, on our account is impermissible when it is per se necessary (Must₁) to the agent’s plan: i.e., when the plan functionally depends on the violation of a person. This echoes the Kantian imperative to “so act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”6

However, we contend that harm may be permissible when it is only per accidens necessary (Must₂): i.e., when it arises from an independently given constraint of the situation and is not structurally required by the plan itself. In such cases harm is only permissible if it also minimizes harm in reasonable expectation.

V. Toxic Pragmatism: The Mirror Error

If toxic idealism clings to impossible goods, its mirror image—toxic pragmatism—clings to constraints that no longer bind, forcing suboptimal or even immoral choices when better alternatives have become available.

This is precisely what happens in the second half of the fable. The foolish, drunken captain imagines a storm when the waters are calm. In his panic he rushes to cast the merchant’s cargo overboard—choosing what would be the lesser evil in a constrained situation, but which is simply evil when no constraint actually exists. The merchant, now wiser, recognizes the error: “You pretend constraint where none exists, and in so doing you wrong me.”

When the toxic pragmatist falsely imagines a constraint that is not present, we call this “toxic pragmatism per se.” When the toxic pragmatist correctly acknowledges that a constraint is present but erroneously asserts it to be per se rather than per accidens—permanent rather than temporary—we call this “toxic pragmatism per accidens.”

Hence there is a four-fold error taxonomy. Toxic idealism per se irrationally insists on options that are never available (universal pacifism). Toxic idealism per accidens irrationally denies that present constraints are real (the merchant in the storm). Toxic pragmatism per se irrationally insists that constraints are present when they are not (the drunken captain). Toxic pragmatism per accidens irrationally insists that temporary constraints are permanent.

VI. Epistemic Uncertainty and Rational Expectation of Constraint

A natural objection arises: the framework as stated assumes that the agent knows whether a constraint obtains. But real moral situations are rarely so transparent. How does the pragmatic idealist reason under uncertainty?

The answer is that constrained choice does not require certainty that Can₂ constraints obtain—only rational expectation, that is, justified belief proportioned to the available evidence. The wise captain does not need metaphysical proof that the storm will sink the ship. He needs seamanship—the experience-trained perceptual judgment that recognizes a genuine threat and distinguishes it from passing turbulence. His judgment is defeasible, but rational, and sufficient to ground action.

This rational expectation is precisely the work of phronesis. If phronesis is the accurate perception of contingent constraints as they bear on the present situation, then it necessarily operates under conditions of incomplete information. The person of practical wisdom is not omniscient but calibrated: their constraint-perception is trained by experience and unclouded by the distorting pressures of fear and wishful thinking—the twin sources of toxic pragmatism and toxic idealism respectively. The drunken captain’s error is not that he acted under uncertainty but that his belief was irrational: driven by fear rather than by evidence.

Rational expectation of constraint entails a revisability condition. Because the agent acts on justified belief rather than certainty, the agent remains obligated to update their assessment as evidence changes. This provides the structural explanation of toxic pragmatism per accidens: the agent whose initial constraint-assessment was rational but who fails to revise when conditions change, treating a temporary necessity as a permanent one.

VII. Historical Precedents and Critique

The structure identified here is not entirely novel. It appears, in a less formalized form, in early modern political thought. Hobbes, in effect, anticipates the Can₂ constraint: in the absence of enforcement, cooperative norms are strategically unstable, and agents are rationally driven toward defection. The state of nature is precisely the condition in which Can₁ moral ideals—such as keeping covenants—fail to be Can₂ feasible.

Machiavelli, from a different angle, criticizes the complementary error. Those who act according to how men ought to behave, rather than how they in fact do behave, “come to ruin.” This is an early diagnosis of what we have called toxic idealism: the failure to register binding constraints imposed by non-ideal conditions.

Yet both Hobbesian and Machiavellian realism risk collapsing into the opposite error. By emphasizing constraint without preserving orientation toward ideal goods, they incline toward what we have called toxic pragmatism. The present framework may thus be understood as a synthesis: preserving the realist insight that moral action must track feasibility (Can₂), while retaining the idealist commitment to universal moral structure (Can₁).

VIII. Critique and Extension of Kant

Kant’s Strength: Universal Structure

A Kantian might object to this entire framework. Kant provides two fundamental criteria for moral action in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.

First, the principle of universalizability:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant 1785, 4:421).

Second, the principle that ought implies can:

“duty commands nothing but what we can do” (Kant 1788, 5:30).

It should be emphasized that the Kantian contribution here is substantial and (on our view) largely correct. Kant’s universalizability criterion captures something genuinely important: that moral principles must be coherent when generalized, that they cannot depend on special self-interested exemptions or private privileges. The Formula of Humanity—that persons must never be treated as mere means—expresses a deep structural truth about moral agency.

Kant’s Failure: The Missing Feasibility Constraint

These two criteria—universalizability and possibility—are meant to work in harmony. But Kant, we contend, crucially fails to fully specify what “possibility” means, and this underspecification creates a fundamental tension in his whole moral system.

Consider the choice between pacifism and tit-for-tat reciprocity. Both are universalizable in Kant’s formal sense: we can coherently will that everyone adopt either strategy without logical contradiction. A world where everyone is a pacifist contains no formal impossibility: Pacifism is possible under ideal conditions.

But here the problem emerges. While pacifism is formally universalizable under ideal conditions (Can₁), it is not strategically viable under the slightest nonideal conditions (Can₂). Game-theoretic analysis proves that pacifism, when universalized, predictably and inevitably collapses into tyranny. Importantly, this is not merely an empirical observation but a structural feature demonstrable through a priori reasoning: to will pacifism is to indirectly but predictably will tyranny—the very opposite of the peaceful end state the pacifist envisions.

This reveals what we might call a “practical contradiction” distinct from Kant’s “contradiction in conception” and “contradiction in will.” This sort of practical contradiction occurs when a maxim, though logically coherent, predictably generates dynamics that defeat its own operative ends when universally implemented. This is not mere bad consequence but structural self-frustration, often identifiable a priori.

Kant’s famous absolute prohibition on lying faces the same structural problem. In On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropic Concerns (1797), he insists that one must tell the truth even to a murderer asking about their intended victim’s whereabouts. But this extreme position fails to take into account lesser-of-two-evils situations where some violation of rights appear to be tragically unavoidable.

As Benjamin Constant (to whom Kant is responding) asserts:

“It is a duty to tell the truth. The notion of duty is inseparable from the notion of right. A duty is what in one being corresponds to the right of another. Where there are no rights, there are no duties. To tell the truth then is a duty, but only towards him who has a right to the truth. But no man has a right to a truth that injures others.”

The murderer puts us in a bind wherein someone’s right is inevitably going to be violated. For we will either have to lie to the murderer or break our promise to hide our friend. And as John Locke memorably puts it, “when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred” (Second Treatise, §16). In tragic conflicts, someone’s right must be violated. The only real choice in murderer-at-the-door is whether to violate the offender’s right or the victim’s. Kant in this case chooses to violate the victim’s, which we claim is immoral.

The root issue is that Kant conflates two distinct senses of possibility: logical possibility (the absence of formal contradiction—Can₁) and strategic possibility (the capacity to persist when implemented—Can₂). By focusing exclusively on logical possibility, Kant systematically endorses strategies that are collectively unstable—strategies that, like pacifism, seem moral in isolation but enable evil when practiced.

The New Criterion: Practical Coherence and Collective Stability

Moral principles, therefore, must be not possible in the sense of formal universalizability but also in terms of collective stability. We cannot make do only with Kantian Idealism, or Hobbesian Realism, rather we must synthesize them into a “realist idealism and idealist realism,” wherein we commit to choosing the best (or least bad) available option within real constraints, always aiming to actually realize, as our end goal, Kant’s kingdom of ends on a Hobbesian earth.

Both the criteria that Kant himself endorses—universalizability and possibility—must be satisfied. But possibility must be understood in two ways: both as Can₂ (practical feasibility), and not merely Can₁ (logical coherence). A moral system that ignores this distinction will, like Kant’s, repeatedly endorse beautiful ideals that reroute to their own strategically incoherent negation.

It should be emphasized that the view stated above is not consequentialist in any naive sense. Although Kant’s overly idealistic moral framework will lead to tragic and deplorable consequences, the problem is more, in our view, the strategic incoherence of Kant’s toxically ideal moral will.

A will implicitly aims to realize that which it chooses, otherwise it would be indistinct from a wish. However, the will which ignores constraining context—that which is possible per se but impossible per accidens—would be trying to will the realization of an end which, structurally, on account of non-ideal, but existent, contextual conditions, has been rendered impossible. And willing what we can know a priori to be strategically infeasible, to some extent contradicts the point of willing in the first place.

The Neo-Kantian Problem

Contemporary Kantians have not been entirely insensitive to this difficulty. Herman has argued that Kantian deliberation incorporates contextual sensitivity through “rules of moral salience.”7 Korsgaard grounds normativity in reflective endorsement, introducing agent-relative feasibility considerations.8 Wood reads Kant’s ethics as requiring empirical anthropology to bridge principle and practice.9 These represent genuine advances. However, none formally incorporates the critical missing criterion: collective stability.

Consider again the test case: pacifism versus tit-for-tat. Both pass Kant’s universalizability test. Both pass Herman’s test of moral salience. Both are reflectively endorsable in Korsgaard’s sense. Yet pacifism is collectively unstable while tit-for-tat is collectively stable. No existing neo-Kantian criterion formally distinguishes between them on these grounds. The Can₁/Can₂ framework identifies precisely this gap: the neo-Kantian enrichments address contextual sensitivity within deliberation but do not yet require that the universalized strategy be dynamically stable against defection.

What is required, then, is not the abandonment of Kantian universalizability but its supplementation with a feasibility criterion that tracks Can₂. And the faculty that perceives whether this latter condition obtains is not sophia but phronesis.

IX. The Imperative to Virtue

The framework of pragmatic idealism reveals why virtue ethics is not optional but necessary. We cannot know in advance what constraints we will face. Such constraints arise in time, in the moment, and are available only to an agent whose mind is contextually aware and able to adapt. This context-bounded uncertainty makes the development of moral virtues essential for right action, and resists the strict formulation of morality into a set of dogmas and rules.

As Aristotle argues, virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, determined by the principle by which the person of practical wisdom would determine it.10 This definition takes on new significance in light of the Can₁/Can₂ framework. Three Aristotelian virtues map directly onto this structure: sophia (theoretical wisdom), phronesis (practical wisdom), and andreia (courage).

Sophia and Can₁: The Perception of Universals

Sophia—theoretical wisdom—is the cognitive capacity that apprehends what is universally and unconditionally true: the nature of the good, the structure of valid moral principles, the ends that are genuinely choice-worthy in themselves.11 In our framework, sophia corresponds to Can₁ cognition—the grasp of what is possible in principle and what is morally required under ideal conditions. It is sophia that perceives, for instance, that killing an innocent is wrong, that cooperation is better than conflict, that rights ought to be respected.

The Kantian contribution here is substantial and largely correct. Kant’s universalizability criterion captures something genuinely important. Sophia is precisely the faculty that apprehends such truths. Our critique of Kant is not a rejection of these insights but a claim that they are necessary and insufficient. This is the deep structure of the ancient disagreement between moral idealists and moral realists. Sophia without phronesis yields toxic idealism. Phronesis without sophia yields toxic pragmatism.

Phronesis and Can₂: The Perception of Constraints

Phronesis—practical wisdom—is the cognitive capacity that tracks what is feasible under actual, contingent, non-ideal conditions. As Aristotle notes, phronesis must recognize the particulars, for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars.12

In our framework, phronesis corresponds to Can₂ cognition: the accurate perception of which constraints genuinely bind the agent in the present moment. Constraints are contingent, particular, and variable—they arise and pass away in time, differ from situation to situation, and cannot be determined in advance by universal principles alone. Phronesis enables the agent to distinguish real storms from imagined ones (avoiding toxic pragmatism), recognize when constraints have lifted (avoiding toxic pragmatism per accidens), accept real constraints as binding (avoiding toxic idealism per accidens), and recognize structural impossibilities as permanent (avoiding toxic idealism per se).

The relationship between sophia and phronesis can now be stated precisely. Sophia provides the stable ordering of goods—the universal moral framework against which options are ranked. Phronesis determines which of those options remain live in the present context. Together, they constitute the full modal cognition required for constrained choice. As Aristotle observes, it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue.13

Andreia: The Courage to Choose Rightly in Tragic Situations

But perceiving constraints and knowing goods are insufficient without the strength to act on this knowledge. In constrained choice situations, the agent must actively choose something recognized as genuinely evil in its local character—not evil on balance, but evil simpliciter insofar as it is considered apart from the constraining context.

This creates a distinctive psychological obstacle: moral paralysis—the inability to execute the choice-worthy action because executing it requires willing an evil, even a lesser one. The morally paralyzed agent sees the constrained landscape clearly, knows which option is least bad, but cannot bring themselves to act. They freeze at the lever.

In the framework of constrained choice, paralysis is not innocence. The agent who freezes at the lever does not thereby avoid moral involvement. Attempting to preserve the now-impossible ideal reroutes into the greater of two evils. Inaction is itself a choice, and in constrained contexts, it is the worst choice available.

Two reasons explain moral paralysis. The sympathetic reason is genuine moral horror. The person who recognizes that pulling the lever will cause a death is responding appropriately to a tragic situation. The error lies not in the recoil but in allowing the recoil to prevent action. As Bernard Williams argues, there is a form of agent-regret that is not only appropriate but morally required: the courageous agent pulls the lever while flinching—acting rightly while fully registering the moral cost.14 Andreia is not the absence of moral distress but the capacity to act rightly through it.

The less sympathetic reason is the desire for moral purity—the wish to keep one’s hands clean at the expense of others’ lives. The agent who refuses to pull the lever has prioritized their own moral comfort over the lives of four additional people. This is not humility before the moral law; it is a kind of moral self-indulgence.

The Interdependence of the Virtues

These three virtues are mutually constitutive, and their interdependence maps directly onto the error taxonomy. Sophia without phronesis and andreia produces the toxic idealist: the merchant who insists the captain save the cargo in the teeth of the storm. Phronesis without sophia and andreia produces the toxic pragmatist: the drunken captain—or, more dangerously, the Machiavellian operator who invokes “necessity” to justify what is merely convenient. Andreia without sophia and phronesis produces bold but misguided action.

Together, these three virtues constitute the pragmatic idealist character: the agent who is wise enough to maintain a stable ordering of genuine goods (sophia), perceptive enough to recognize which goods remain accessible under present constraints (phronesis), and strong enough to choose the best available option even when it involves moral cost (andreia). Aristotle’s claim for the unity of the virtues is not merely a philosophical thesis but a structural requirement of any agent who would navigate the space between toxic idealism and toxic pragmatism.

Conclusion: The Art of Choosing Goods in Season

The central claim of this paper is that moral action must be evaluated within a two-level modal framework: what is possible in principle (Can₁), and what is feasible under actual constraints (Can₂). Idealist theories capture the first but neglect the second; realist theories capture the second but neglect the first. A complete account of moral reasoning must integrate both.

Moral danger lies primarily not in contextual choice but in misperceiving context. Toxic idealism insists on impossible goods, thereby ensuring collapse into greater evils. Toxic pragmatism insists on obsolete constraints, thereby choosing inferior options when better ones are available. The longstanding opposition between moral idealism and political realism is thus revealed as a false dichotomy. The distinction between Can₁ and Can₂ allows us to see both as partial truths and to synthesize them into a single framework: Pragmatic Idealism.

This is not merely an intellectual framework—it requires the development of moral and modal cognition. We need phronesis to perceive actual constraints, sophia to know genuine goods, and andreia to choose rightly even in tragic circumstances. Aristotle’s concept of kata kairon—according to the moment—reminds us that ethics is neither blind adherence to principle nor pure calculation of utility. It is the art of choosing goods in season.

The moral of our fable bears repeating: It is as great an error to invent necessity where there is none as to deny it where it presses upon us. Always attend to the context, and choose your captains well.

The moral life requires both the aspiration to ideals and the wisdom to recognize when circumstances constrain our choices. We must resist both the fantasy of ideals that cannot withstand the storm and the delusion of storms that have already passed. Only through pragmatic idealism-maintaining our orientation toward the good while accurately perceiving our context—can we choose what is truly choice-worthy in the moment while maintaining our moral compass for the journey ahead.

Through pragmatic idealism, grounded in the cultivation of virtue, we learn to choose not just the good, but the available good-and to work toward making more goods available. Pragmatic idealism does not abandon the good but refuses to idolize the impossible. It calls us to cultivate the virtues that allow us to see storms clearly, to steer between Scylla and Charybdis, and, when seas are calm, to set sail toward the highest goods attainable by us.

Cole Whetstone did his undergraduate work in Classics at Harvard University and received an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He taught Ancient Greek at Oxford and co-founded Oxford Latinitas, a society of Oxford academics dedicated to reviving Latin and Greek in scholarly use. He now lives in New York City, where he is a co-organizer for the New York Philosophy Club.

Two friends were quarreling about politics. The first, seeking to prove his point, told this story:

“A young merchant once set sail with a wise old captain, his goods stored below. But when a storm struck, the captain judged that the only way to save the ship was to throw the cargo into the sea. The merchant cried out, ‘You are stealing what is mine!’ But the wise old captain replied, ‘Your goods are already lost. If I try to preserve them, I will lose both them and the ship. You speak as if there were no storm constraining our choice, but wishing does not make options real. Since the storm has taken away the possibility of saving the goods, it would be foolish to try.’”

The second friend said, “I concede your point. It is a mistake to attempt the impossible: ‘should’ requires ‘can.’ But it seems you have not heard what happened to the very same merchant the very next day.”

The first asked, “And what happened to him?”

So the second told this story:

“...the storm passed, and though his original cargo was lost, the young merchant, hoping to recover his fortune, purchased new wares on debt at the next port. Still angry at the captain, the young merchant sought another ship to take him home and found one, this time piloted by a more foolish and cowardly man. When they set sail, he again stored his goods below.

But once they were on the sea, the foolish captain, having drunk too much, arose in fear, imagining a storm when the waters were calm. In his panic he rushed to cast the merchant’s cargo overboard.

The merchant, made wiser by experience, cried: ‘Stop, you foolish man! You are truly stealing from me now, for here there is no storm, no necessity constraining our choice. You pretend constraint where none exists, and in so doing you do me wrong!’”

Moral: it is as great an error to invent necessity where there is none as to deny it where it presses upon us. Always attend to the context, and choose your captains well.

I. Introduction

The Trolley Problem

Moral dilemmas often force us to confront the limits of principle. Few examples make this clearer than Philippa Foot’s trolley problem (Foot 1967). A runaway trolley hurtles down a track toward five tied-up workers. By pulling a lever, you can divert it onto another track, where one person is tied down. Should you pull the lever?

At first glance, this presents a clash of moral absolutes: the duty not to kill versus the imperative to save lives. The paradox seems intractable—without context, we should not pull the lever (we should not kill), but within context, we seemingly must (to save four net lives). This tension, I will argue, reveals something fundamental about the structure of moral choice under constraint.

The Nature of Moral Constraints

It should be noted that the problem addressed in this paper is not confined to particular dilemmas such as the trolley case, but reflects a deeper and longstanding tension in moral and political philosophy. On one side stand idealist frameworks—most prominently Kantian ethics—which articulate universal moral principles but often fail to account for the constraints imposed by non-ideal conditions. On the other side stand realist traditions, associated with Hobbes and Machiavelli, which take those constraints seriously but risk abandoning the structure of moral norms altogether.

This paper proposes a resolution to this tension. By distinguishing between what is possible in principle (Can₁) and what is feasible under actual conditions (Can₂), we can preserve the insights of both traditions while avoiding their characteristic errors. Idealism correctly identifies the structure of moral goods, but fails when it ignores feasibility. Realism correctly tracks feasibility, but fails when it loses orientation toward genuine goods. The framework developed here—what I will call pragmatic idealism—aims to synthesize these positions into a unified account of constrained moral choice.

II. Mixed Actions and the Storm at Sea

Aristotle’s account of “mixed actions” in Nicomachean Ethics Book III (1110a–1111b) provides our philosophical foundation to the solution of the paradox. Consider his example: sailors in a storm throwing cargo overboard to save their ship. Outside a storm, deliberately destroying someone’s goods is unjust—even criminal. Within the storm, however, the choice transforms. The sailors no longer choose between preserving and discarding goods. They choose between losing the cargo or losing both cargo and lives.

Aristotle calls such actions choice-worthy kata kairon—according to the moment, in context (NE 1110a5-10). They are voluntary in one sense (the sailors choose to throw the goods) but involuntary in another (they would never choose to do this absent the storm). As Aristotle notes, “such actions, then, are mixed, but are more like voluntary actions; for they are worthy of choice at the time when they are done” (NE 1110a11-12). The key insight: context can constrain our options such that what would normally be immoral becomes the most choice-worthy action available, because better options become temporarily impossible to actually choose.

This is not mere relativism. The storm creates what we might call a “constrained choice situation” where the ideal option—save both goods and lives—becomes circumstantially impossible. The actual choice is between two evils: lose the goods (lesser evil) or lose everything (greater evil). In such contexts, choosing the lesser evil is not just permissible but morally required. Moreover, and crucially, in this situation, if one attempts to choose the ideal option of saving both goods and lives, one will be effectively rerouted to the worse of two evils, losing both goods and lives. And this when it was really possible to save lives with courageous sacrifice of the goods.

III. The Structure of Constrained Choice

Let us formalize this structure. In any moral situation, we can identify a possibility space of options ranked by their choiceworthiness:

Diagram 1 represents the basic 3-option moral possibility space. A > B > C where > represents comparative choiceworthiness. Option 1 (labeled “Good”) represents what is choiceworthy in ideal conditions—choiceworthy unconditionally. Options 2 and 3 (labeled “Evil”) represent what is not choiceworthy in ideal conditions, but only conditionally choiceworthy when nonideal conditions prevent choosing the unconditionally good option.

In concrete terms:

• Option 1 = the ideal option (save all lives, keep all goods);

• Option 2 = the constrained good, or lesser evil (save some lives, jettison the cargo);

• Option 3 = the ruinous option, or greater evil (lose all lives, lose all goods).

In ideal conditions, Option 1 is available and morally required. We must choose it. But what happens when a storm constrains our choices?

Diagram 2 represents how moral constraints per accidens (in this case a storm) prevent the agent from choosing the morally good option (1) and force them into a choice where they must select the lesser of two evils (either 2 or 3). But what happens when an agent, confronted with this constrained situation, nonetheless attempts to choose the now-impossible ideal?

Diagram 3 represents toxic idealism: the error of attempting to choose an option that constraints have made impossible. Notwithstanding the moral constraint, the agent attempts to choose the ideal option (1) anyway. However, in this constrained case, attempting to choose the ideal option reroutes into the greater of two evils (3). Hence the toxic idealist chooses the impossible good and gets the greater of two evils, even when the lesser evil (2) was available. Choosing a worse option than is available is definitionally irrational, and reveals the need for at least some pragmatism.

This is precisely what would happen to the merchant in our fable if he refused to let the wise captain jettison his cargo: by attempting to preserve goods that the storm has already made impossible to save, he would lose both the goods and the ship.

IV. Applying the Framework to the Trolley Problem

The trolley problem maps directly onto this structure. As Thomson (1985) elaborates in her development of Foot’s original case, the villain who tied people to the tracks has created a storm-like constraint: someone will die regardless of our choice.

Our solution to this problem is parallel to our solution in the goods-on-a-ship case. In that case, the sailors must accept either that the goods must be thrown overboard or that the goods will go down with the ship. Hence in every case treating “save the goods” as a live option is unrealistic: the goods are lost in either case, and should not enter as a relevant factor in deliberation given the sure existence of the constraining context (the storm). Hence, the decision simplifies:

1. Either save the ship (and lose the goods)

2. Or lose the ship (and lose the goods).

Once the tragic reality of the situation is accepted, the solution to the problem is trivial.

Likewise, in the trolley problem, in either real case, someone will die. It would be nice if this were not the case, and not all cases are constrained in the way the trolley problem is. In such unconstrained cases, to kill an innocent person would be wrong. But in this case, ex hypothesi, the death of at least one is inevitable.1 The villain, in his villainy, has tragically made it so that someone’s life is inevitably forfeit. To pretend otherwise is to fail to appreciate the tragic reality of the situation.

Once we accept this constraint, we can reframe the decision: we cannot save everybody, but we may still choose to minimize harm. Crucially, this is importantly asymmetric from choosing to kill one person rather than five. For in our case, one death is, tragically, inevitable—imposed by the villain’s prior immoral action. Acknowledging this tragic inevitability, our actual choice is:

1. save no additional lives (do nothing)

2. or save some additional lives (pull the lever).

Within this constrained context, pulling the lever becomes choice-worthy kata kairon. It remains tragic—we must do something that, absent the constraint, would be murder. But given the constraint, it becomes the most choice-worthy action available.

V. The Surgeon Problem

One might attempt to collapse the distinction developed above by modifying Foot’s familiar organ harvesting case. Suppose the five dying patients are not victims of natural organ failure, but have instead been intentionally poisoned by a malicious actor. The constraint is now fully external—a “storm” not of the surgeon’s making. The case is thereby brought structurally closer to the trolley problem: a villain has imposed a condition in which multiple deaths are imminent unless some intervention occurs.

Does this transformation now license the surgeon to harvest the organs of one healthy patient to save the five?

Intuitively, it does not. The appeal to lesser-evil reasoning—even when supplemented by a constraint-sensitive principle such as Can₂ (practical feasibility under constraint)—does not yield a general permission to minimize harm by any available means. To see why, we must introduce a structural boundary between (A) redirecting an existing threat with the aim of minimizing harm, and (B) instrumentalizing an independent agent.2 This boundary echoes both Kant’s Formula of Humanity and the traditional Doctrine of Double Effect, but it can be stated more precisely in terms of constraint and feasibility.

Two Kinds of Constraint

We begin by distinguishing two fundamentally different sources of limitation:

1. Natural constraints are not produced by limited agents. These include storms, disease, scarcity, and other features of the world that delimit what is possible without anyone’s choosing them. Natural Constraints “just are,” and as such should be recognized, and taken into account during deliberation without moral condemnation, as this judgement would be entirely ineffective.

2. Artificial constraints are produced by limited agents. These include coercion, violence, deception, or any act that restricts another’s range of action. Artificial constraints, are subject to moral evaluation, and often to condemnation, because they unduly or unfairly limit the agency of another.

Pragmatic Idealism builds on this taxonomy through a commitment to what we may call Constraint Realism (CR):

Agents must deliberate within the feasible set defined by the actual constraint landscape, not an idealized or counterfactual one.

As such, “ought” is indexed to the feasible ideal, not merely to the imagined or theoretically perfect ideal. In the storm case, one cannot save both ship and cargo. The storm has removed that possibility from the space of available options. To deliberate as though it remained available is therefore to abandon fidelity to the real constraints of the situation.

That said, realism about constraints does not license their arbitrary creation, even to “solve” moral problems. The villain who ties innocent victims to the Trolley tracks, or poisons innocent patients, is ex hypothesi villainous.

A second principle is therefore required, the Principle of Non-Manufacture (PNM):

It is impermissible to introduce, or “manufacture” new constraints on others’ agency (or rights) that are not already present in the situation.

The impropriety of manufacturing constraint can be grounded in at least three ways.
Such constraint-creation constitutes a violation of rights, or more precisely, a violation of equitable regard of moral agency as such. In Kantian terms, it treats persons merely as means, subordinating one agent arbitrarily to the external ends of another, and so is intrinsically unjust. It is, further, self-defeating under recursive evaluation: a world in which such constraint-creation is permitted undermines the very conditions of agency it presupposes. All cases point to a fundamental asymmetry in one agent’s treatment of another -- a failure to regard agents as equal in basic dignity and therefore necessarily equitable in status. Thus, while constraints must be accepted once they exist, they must not be manufactured.

There is thus a temporal asymmetry, particularly at play in cases of villainy.

1. ex ante (before the fact), one ought not create unjust constraints; villainy is impermissible by PNM, and should be opposed.

2. ex post (after the fact), we must respond appropriately to the constraints that have already been created, whether naturally or artificially.

This introduces a key insight in cases of artificial villainy: we condemn the introduction of the constraint, but must still deliberate within its consequences. This is a limited kind of “acceptance” required for proper action, and is, we contend, a confounding factor in attempted solutions to the Trolley Problem.

For while we are claiming that a limited kind of acceptance ex post is warranted in order to deliberate properly in the case of the trolley problem, we by no means mean that the villain’s actions should be accepted ex ante, as to do so would justify injustice, and violate PNM.

Two-Stage Structure of Deliberation

Pragmatic Idealism therefore proceeds in two stages.

1. Constraint Assessment: the agent identifies the actual constraint landscape, determines the feasible set of actions given those constraints, and accepts both natural constraints and already-imposed artificial constraints as delimiting the situation.

2. Moral Selection Under Constraint: the agent optimizes within the feasible set subject to PNM, excluding any action that would unduly introduce new constraints on others.

A crucial clarification follows from this two-stage structure. The fact that a constraint exists does not imply that it is justified. We may be required to act within a ex post constraint while simultaneously condemning its origin ex ante.“Should” implies “can,” but “can” alone cannot justify “should.”

In our box-diagrams, this simplifies into a single rule: choose the leftmost available option, or choose the best available option, where best is determined, more or less, by Kant’s Formula of Humanity. How pragmatic idealism differs from Kant’s philosophy or standard rights-based philosophy is that it is a realist about constraints without devolving into mere utilitarianism.

Application of Constraint-Based Reasoning

The contrast is clearest in two canonical cases. In the storm case, the loss of cargo is imposed by nature; the feasible set excludes saving both ship and goods. Throwing cargo overboard is therefore permissible, albeit only in this case, as it respects the structure of the situation. This is a simple case of Constraint Realism (CR).

In the villain case, the constraint is introduced by an agent (the villain), and its introduction is morally impermissible ex ante—but once imposed, agents must still deliberate ex post within its consequences. The origin of the constraint and its violation of PNM determines its moral status, but its presence dictates the structure of proper deliberation according to CR.

Applied to the surgeon and trolley cases, this framework clarifies their intuitive asymmetry. In the standard surgeon case, (A) 5 patients are constrained by disease, but (B) 1 is healthy; killing the healthy patient manufactures a new constraint on an otherwise unconstrained agent, violating the prohibition on manufacturing constraints (PNM).

In the trolley case, all individuals (both the 5 and the 1) are already under constraint (tied to tracks). Redirecting the trolley, therefore, does not violate PNM by introducing a new constraint into the moral situation. Rather, it redistributes harm to a minimum within an already constrained moral set.

VI. Formal Principles

Hence, the governing principle (GP) can be stated directly:

It is impermissible to expand the set of agents subject to artificial constraint. Creating a new victim differs categorically from reallocating harm among those already constrained. Aggregate improvement does not alone justify the introduction of new constraints.

In short, then, Pragmatic Idealism is defined by the conjunction of two commitments: realism—one must act within the constraints that exist—and idealism—one must not become the source of constraints that ought not to exist. Against idealism that ignores feasibility, it insists on constraint-sensitive reasoning; against realism that licenses domination, it imposes strict limits on the creation of constraints.

With this framework in place, the key point may be stated precisely: externally imposed constraints may restrict the set of feasible options, but they do not thereby authorize agents to expand that set by conscripting new victims. We can formulate this as a feasibility condition:

A harm may be permissibly selected only if avoiding it is not physically and practically possible (CR) without introducing a new rights violation or expanding the set of persons subjected to harm (PNM).3

This yields a simple test: if one attempts to ignore the constraint and select the morally preferable outcome (e.g., in the trolley case, that no one be killed, in the ship case, that no cargo be jettisoned), does this succeed? If so, the constraint is not binding in the relevant sense, and lesser-evil reasoning is inapplicable. If not, then the agent must choose among the remaining feasible options.

In the trolley case, the constraint is binding in precisely this way. The threat is already in motion, and all affected parties—the one and the five—are already under duress. The agent (tragically) cannot avoid all harm, but they can minimize it. Given this constrained landscape, the available actions concern only how the existing harm unfolds (and whether it is minimized). When the bystander diverts the trolley, or when a captain throws cargo overboard in a storm, they are not creating a new harm-bearing structure but managing an existing vector of harm. The resulting loss is foreseen, unavoidable, and unintended—a byproduct of interacting with the constraint itself.

Crucially, all affected parties are already within the scope of the relevant external constraint (i.e. being tied to the tracks). As Kamm emphasizes, there is a fundamental difference between accepting a pre-existing constraint and manufacturing one (i.e. putting agents under duress). The sailors do not create the storm; the trolley operator does not bind the victims to the track. They respond to a structure imposed independently of their agency, in the sailor case, this constraining context is natural (and morally neutral), in the trolley case it is imposed by a villainous agent.

What matters, therefore, in this case is not so much the agent’s internal intention as the causal structure of his act. In permissible cases, the agent operates on an existing threat and does not conscript new persons into it, which conscription is implicitly granted in the trolley case to be villainous. In impermissible cases, the agent expands the structure of harm by incorporating an otherwise unthreatened individual.

The surgeon case differs in exactly this respect. Even under the modified scenario, only the five patients are under duress. The healthy individual remains outside the constrained choice landscape. The surgeon is not forced into a choice that includes them, rather, the surgeon must actively choose to involve them into the constrained landscape, against their will. This is wrong for the same reason it is wrong for the villain in the trolley problem to tie his victims to the tracks: he is unnecessarily violating their rights and constraining their options. To harvest their organs is therefore not to select among pre-existing harms, but to improperly expand the set of persons subjected to harm.4

This expansion marks the transition from redirection to instrumentalization. The surgeon does not merely navigate a constrained field of tragic options; he conscripts an unthreatened agent into the causal chain, using them as the mechanism by which others are saved. In doing so, he treats the healthy patient as a mere means—precisely what, for instance, Kant’s Formula of Humanity forbids.

He expands the set of persons under duress, using the healthy patient as the mere means by which the others are saved. In doing so, he violates the healthy patient’s rights.

This distinction can be stated formally as the constraint-origin principle:

Externally imposed constraints may justify selecting among unavoidable harms within a fixed set of already-affected persons. They do not justify introducing new persons into that set in order to improve outcomes.

The “storm” analogy clarifies the point. A storm may force a captain to choose among limited options concerning their own ship, including the loss of cargo. But it does not permit the captain to seize another vessel and sacrifice it as a shield. The constraint governs what may be done within the affected system; it does not authorize the creation of new victims outside it.

This framework preserves the core Kantian prohibition on treating persons as mere means, while refining its application. Standard Kantian formulations tend to evaluate maxims under idealized conditions in which all morally relevant options are equally available. They do not always distinguish between cases in which an agent creates a morally impermissible structure and cases in which an agent is forced into such a structure by external conditions.

Once the constraint landscape is properly recognized, this ambiguity is resolved. When all available options involve harm imposed by an external constraint, selecting the lesser evil need not involve treating anyone as a mere means. But where the agent must introduce a new victim to achieve that outcome, the prohibition remains absolute.

In short, externally imposed necessity can justify the minimization of harm within an already constrained system, but it can never justify the creation of new victims to resolve that constraint.

Cole Whetstone did his undergraduate work in Classics at Harvard University and received an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He taught Ancient Greek at Oxford and co-founded Oxford Latinitas, a society of Oxford academics dedicated to reviving Latin and Greek in scholarly use. He now lives in New York City, where he is a co-organizer for the New York Philosophy Club.

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In the tradition of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, let me begin with an old Jewish joke. There’s an ultra-orthodox rabbi that loves to play golf, obsessed to the point where he plays golf every day — well, every day other than Yom Kippur. As the joke goes, however, one year he decides to have a little “cheat day” and tee off on the holiday. Up in Heaven, God is watching, and Moses is livid.

“Lord,” Moses says, “look at this rabbi playing golf on our holiest day of the year! Surely, you’ve got to do something!”

To which God replies, “Don’t worry, keep watching. I have an idea.”

The rabbi swings for his first drive and, ding, what do you know - hole in one.

The rabbi swings again - ding! Hole in one. Again!

For a third time now, the rabbi drives and the ball goes right in the hole.

As they watch the rabbi walk to the green to get his ball now, Moses, who, mind you, had seen tribes slaughtered and his people lost in the wilderness for decades over lack of fealty to God, is stunned.

He turns to God in disbelief and says, “Now why in the world are you doing that! I thought you were gonna punish him!”, to which God responds, “Who’s he going to tell?”

I love this joke because it’s clever of course, but I think it also highlights an important point about integrity. When people cheat on their values or fail to do the right thing, they often lose that which it is they value most — even, or perhaps especially, as in this case, when no one is watching.

Despite knowing this, it’s often hard for us to really wrap our heads around this principle and how it applies to us. Of course we know in principle that action X is the right thing to do, but because it is difficult to do right now, and there will be no perceived difference if we don’t, we often make the judgment call that it will be okay to let it slide this one time.

Even when that little voice in our head squeaks at us to do the right thing, its grander notions are often seen as, at the very least, ignorable and subservient to our much stronger, ego-driven desires and libidinal impulses. As the sharp-tongued American essayist H. L. Mencken quipped, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking,” underscoring the cynical perspective that the role of our conscience is merely in maintaining our appearances or social cohesion, not in enforcing our actual behavior. This quiet advisor’s warnings, what Freud called the superego and what Plato described as the charioteer’s noble horse in Phaedrus, while ostensibly important, often doesn’t factor into the calculus of our decision-making process and ideas of maximizing self-interest.

If we’re in a situation where we could do the wrong thing, but no one will know… well, then suddenly it’s much easier to shush that little voice, find an excuse for ourselves, and do as we wish.

While not immediately obvious, even in such a situation where we are the sole witnesses of our transgressions, this lack of integrity actually holds significant negative ramifications on your own being too.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where telling a tiny lie could prevent or delay a really undesirable situation? Maybe you had to attend a team meeting at 9 am. You woke up late though, and are definitely going to miss it. Nightmare! As you frantically put on your clothes, you write the boss that you’re on the way, but there’s heavy traffic. The boss writes you back that that’s ok, and no word is mentioned of your tardiness. Phew, right?

Or, maybe someone asks you if you’ve read a certain famous book before, one that you really wish you had already. For me, this is In Search of Lost Time, which, at this point, I may never have the time to start reading. To save face, you fib and say you’ve read it a long time ago and don’t remember it well. The person smiles understandingly, and soon the conversation switches to a new topic, and nobody suspects that you have never read a page of the book.

I’m guilty of having done both of these before, and we’ve all at some point said small lies to get out of an uncomfortable situation, or to make up for one of our deficiencies. Maybe you’re believed this time — people believe that there really was traffic or that you really did read the book — but that isn’t the problem here.

The problem comes later, next time you want to tell someone the truth or convince someone of your view. The problem comes when you’re put to the test and need to prove yourself, later down the line. You may hesitate, soften your statements, or feel a nagging sense that you’re posturing. Suddenly, that little voice we used to ignore has increased a few decibels.

Part of you, through repeated minor violations of integrity, has learned that sometimes — to be frank — you’re a liar. Sometimes, you’re untrustworthy. Sometimes, you pretend. Then, the next time you need to speak with conviction, your own conscience cries out against you.

Even when you go to tell the truth, part of you doubts yourself. “Am I really telling the truth? Is this actually what I believe?” it asks. “Because sometimes I say untrue things, and sometimes I do things I don’t believe in.”

In essence, you lose the capacity to mean what you say and say what you mean, and this tears apart your ability to speak from your soul, and express yourself in earnest with full force. As a consequence, regardless of if your tiny lies or misdeeds were caught before, your future truths will be less believable, and your capacity to influence will be diminished. Your creations and aspirations will flatten and hollow out, and your beliefs will become muddied. Integrity isn’t just moral cleanliness; it’s the proper posture that allows for strength of will, and the epistemic trust in yourself that echoes in everything you do.

There’s a now famous research study by Anders Ericsson that found that mastery requires around 10,000 hours of practice on average. If I had to guess, half of that effort was needed not for directly fine-tuning the associated skills, but indirectly, in order to develop the confidence and self-assurance to deftly employ them so instinctually. This is because only once you’ve repeatedly practiced showing yourself who you are can you learn to believe in your model of the world and yourself.

Which brings up perhaps the most compelling reason to practice integrity. Raising the stakes and putting aside the diminished capability to influence others, having a sense of integrity is the ontological glue that holds your world together. Without it, your entire existence will crumble. Does that sound hyperbolic? Allow me to explain.

In Discourse on the Method, rationalist philosopher Descartes first stated his key idea, “je pense, donc je suis,” translated properly into English as “I am thinking, therefore I exist.”1 Using his method of doubt, he proposed the thought experiment of an evil omnipotent demon who sought to deceive him about the entire nature of reality. With this in mind, Descartes systematically questioned all of his beliefs about the world, from what he saw around him to mathematical principles, until he could arrive at one irrefutable certainty amidst the deception of this demon. This one undeniable truth, that, “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” is concluded by the very act of searching for truth. For Descartes, the act of doubting itself proved the existence of a doubter, therefore establishing being as an essential truth of the one who thinks.

Because of this, the certainty of the thinking self or mind existing became the bedrock behind Descartes’ entire philosophical framework for rebuilding knowledge — all of human certainties were rooted in this core truth.

But what happens when you start to doubt your very own thinking? When you become uncertain of what it even is that you think and do, and if these thoughts and actions are even yours to begin with? When the internal relationship between reality and self-concept are so fractured and misaligned that even you no longer can determine the dissipating border of truth and lie?

I reason that, if thought grounds being, as Descartes proposes, then corrupting thought corrupts being. Integrity, as the trait which allows us to trust in our thinking, is then also the the trait that allows us to trust our very being. Given that thinking establishes existence in Cartesian thought, violations of integrity undermine our trust in our thoughts and therefore the foundation of our existence itself! In order for us to lean on our thinking as the bedrock under which we know our own existence, we must also trust that this thinking itself can be trusted. I believe that without continual integrity, our own thoughts become indistinguishable from one more of Descartes’ demon’s tricks, and this ultimate proof of your existence collapses under the weight of your own unreliability. The damage of lapses in integrity is not just moral, you see, but ontological.

And so there are enormous, life-and-death stakes behind each white lie and every moral misstep, stakes which each of us fail to meet all the time. It is imperative that we begin to do otherwise, however, as the groundedness to actually know the reality we exist in comes from the trust we develop in ourselves as steady self-narrators.

In line with this effort, I will admit that I have still not yet finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, I am aware of a well-known line from the novel, spoken by Father Zosima, that I believe illustrates the significance of this same rule:

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

If I were to add anything to this beautiful quote, I would continue by saying, “And unable to trust himself, he ceases to exist.” Each violation of integrity fragments the soul, and a fragmented self cannot fully think, fully choose, or fully be.

Aleko Brice is a 25-year-old writer and entrepreneur from Los Angeles, living in New York City since 2024. A recent university graduate with degrees in English Literature and Economics, Aleko enjoys thinking and writing about what makes life meaningful.

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I recently had a discussion with a friend centered around our innocent acts of performativity,1 a concept of which criticism is haughtily du jour in modern discourse. Certainly, after the maturation of satirical social trends that ironically glorify performative men (e.g., performative male contests, the rise of performative outfits in our algorithms), the concept of performativity must elicit some emotional reaction in everyone — and ideally, some intellectual perspective. This friend of mine held a strong Jung-esque one: that all performativity resulted from some unresolved childhood issue. In relation to the wave of performative men, my friend likened this fiercely to a generation rife with ‘mommy issues.’

I think it is an interesting idea, if only because it intuitively feels reasonable. Part and parcel of the widespread societal criticism of performativity is a distaste for the performative act — a societal desire to harken back to authenticity in its truest and rawest forms. Gone are the days when we endow the masquerading corporate worker with systemic valor. Rather, it seems we (especially those of my Generation Z) look up to idols who supersede the shackles of this ever-constraining world we inherited from our parents: the influencers, the entrepreneurs, the hustlers, the activists. So it seems inherent that those who seek to purposefully deceive others through their performativity are those who are deficient in some way, at least compared to our idols who uphold the utmost authenticity. My friend’s argument then naturally flows: this deficiency must be one rooted in our very formative childhoods.

Standing on its own feet, the argument has very funny implications: here we talk about a modern society built by the hands of men with undiscovered Oedipus complexes. But of course, as is the fallacy with any over-simplistic generalizations reliant on intuition, this one cannot be wholly true.

I say ‘wholly’ because I believe there is at least some merit to this cynical intuition. For one, I think we are right to feel trusting of those who are authentic and distrusting of those who are inauthentic. Our society stands to benefit by eliminating the influence of conmen and fraudsters. The optimal game-theoretic condition is one in which all parties cooperate in full thrust, punishing those who are caught for lying and cheating. And for another, perhaps it is true that those who perform are deficient — for what could propel performative people to intentionally perform, if not to attain something that could not have been attained without such performativity (e.g., social influence, validation)?

But what is performativity? I think we have taken the conflation of performativity and inauthenticity for granted in much of our intellectual discourse on the topic. But whereas the inauthentic refers to the expression of what is not part of your identity, the performative (especially as we understand it in modernity) refers to expression with the intent of influencing others. That is to say, although the intent of influencing others may permit the existence of some deficiency, it does not necessarily follow that this act results in any inauthenticity.

Surely, there are cases where this is so: the casual observer needs only to look at that first batch of matcha-drinking labubu-wearing Clairo-listening men who—before the discourse on performativity mimetically spread—truly believed that they were the paragons of femininity. But at its core, performativity is an integral part of our society. It is the medium through which all social currency is exchanged, as all forms of social transactions are subject to intentionality. That is to say, any interaction we have with another party will always be filtered through a lens that intentionally curates how we come across: through dress, mannerism, posture, speech, etc. Even (and especially) in cases that lack the gilded performative intention to ‘look better’ in front of others, any social interaction is always encoded with some form of intentionality, whether for love, power, knowledge, or even casual mirth.

II. Performativity Allows us to Survive and Thrive

Let’s consider the multi-round Prisoner’s dilemma. As opposed to the single-round game—whereby two parties have to independently decide whether to cheat or cooperate, then reap either the rewards or punishment coming from that decision—the multi-round game enables both parties to take stock of past decisions. Although one party might cheat in one round to reap an outsized reward, they will be penalized in all future rounds because they have effectively tarnished their reputation as an ‘unreliable cheater.’ Therefore, the optimal strategy for both parties (barring any extraneous circumstances) is to continually cooperate in order to maintain the benefits of cooperation.

This is a very similar argument to the dramaturgical argument that Erving Goffman puts forward in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he states that “when an individual appears before others, his actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have.” In the multi-round Prisoner’s dilemma, a history of continued cooperation between both parties defines a ‘cooperative’ situation, whereas any incursion by either party against this pristine history of cooperation would define a ‘hostile’ situation. But of course, Goffman’s explanation can also be used in complex realms of societal interactions, those in which any combination of thousands of actions can produce some unique situational definition for any given social interaction. Rather than the binary code of cooperate or cheat, the continuous spectrum of actions within our world signifies different variations of cooperation or cheating. For example, in a more ‘realistic’ multi-round Prisoner’s dilemma, you can have actions that yield different degrees of cooperation (e.g., staying silent vs. actively telling false information that would remove any suspicion from the other party) or cheating (e.g., confessing partially vs wholly). In any case, actions that help define cooperation can boost cooperative tendencies from the other party, and vice versa. Therefore, despite any intuitive urges for cheating, one would do well to perform actions that herald cooperation.

At its core, however, is the ‘reputation’ of cooperation, rather than the actual acts of cooperation. What is of utmost importance is the security of future cooperation from the other party (or parties in more complex social interactions), whereby you have built credibility for cooperativeness through your previous actions. This can be done through actions that aren’t explicitly cooperative. One clear example is deception: someone who confesses only minimally (enough to not cast suspicion on themselves) yet communicates a cooperative intention can effectively engineer a ‘cooperative’ situation while individually reaping the benefits of cheating.

III. Taste, or Performance-Maxxing

The field of appearances presents another interesting set of actions that can be enacted to engender cooperation without necessarily participating in cooperative activities. On a surface level, our appearance could be used to communicate identity with a particular group, with the aim of encouraging participation from that group through familiarity. For example, wearing a suit signifies involvement in ‘business’ through association, which could elicit trust from other businessmen due to familiarity (i.e., businessmen have known other businessmen to be cooperative in the field of business, and thus are more inclined to trust other businessmen based on association). This concept of familiarity is a crucial one — it is a short-circuited way of evaluating a stranger without any recorded history of past actions. In his essay Dandyism and Fashion, Roland Barthes argues that for a large part of human history, “To change clothes was to change both one’s being and one’s social class, since they were part and parcel of the same thing.” That is to say, our appearance played a pivotal role in communicating association with class, a pivotal piece of information to dictate the ‘situational definition’ of any social interaction in pre-modern history.

More interestingly for me, however, is what our clothes can imply in regards to taste—the concept that is all the rage in Gen Z discourse—and how it ultimately conveys cooperative intent. In the same essay, Barthes discusses the democratization of clothes after the French Revolution. Due to the disappearance of the rigid hierarchy of class in society, everyone began to have access to clothes that were previously ‘off-limits’ to people of their status. Due to this democratization, “the superiority of status, which for democratic reasons could no longer be advertised, was hidden and sublimated beneath a new value: taste, or better still, as the word is appropriately ambiguous, distinction.” By taste, Barthes talks about one’s ability to differentiate one’s outfits from the mass through discreet detail, despite wearing similar outfits (e.g., the way your cuffs are worn). But of course, this extends in today’s terminology not only to discreet detail, but perhaps any point of differentiation — color and proportions theory, knowledge of couture, familiarity with foreign indie brands, etc.

There are several reasons why taste can convey much of the same cooperative messages conveyed by ‘associative’ fashion. Barthes discusses taste as a unique differentiator for one’s peers — one is only able to recognize taste if one possesses taste. These peers, then, form a de facto group of tasteful people, with which association through fashion enables a similar cooperative intent from the group. But perhaps beyond the associative power, taste also conveys seriousness in craft. It is something that requires deliberate intention and curation, and thus a fashionable outfit is a marker of one’s high taste. Much like how admiration is naturally bestowed upon those who excel in traits valued by society (e.g., competitiveness in sports, charisma in speech), admiration is bestowed on one who exceeds in taste for the implication of their great work in acquiring such taste. This extends beyond the in-group — just as anyone is able to celebrate winners of a race without prior knowledge of track and field, one can recognize individuals who are much more fashionably dressed than their peers. Of course, there are limitations to this — just as it might be difficult for the uninitiated to understand the winners of a foreign sport (e.g., an American trying to watch cricket), it might be difficult for one to differentiate on certain elements of taste (e.g., Balenciaga conceptual pieces). However, it is generally the case that taste is discernible through beauty — one who has placed greater successful intent and effort into curating one’s look should provide greater artistic coherence, so as to convey beauty.

And what better way to convey taste than through one’s fashion, a manifest performance of one’s knowledge of what is fashionable and what is not. Of course, performance here harkens back to our ultimate initial concept: a form of intentional impression management. In fact, taste is one of the highest forms of performance, in that it represents a higher order of associative fashion. Whereas one can choose to wear a suit to curry favor among businessmen, one’s ability to select the right suit brands and effortlessly match one’s suit with other pieces (e.g., watch) requires a higher order of curatorial intentionality. Therefore, whereas one who wishes to associate with a group can simply wear a suit, one who wishes to gain the highest level of trust should select the right suit, given the country and season, and pair it with the right watch.

Of course, one’s intentionality in taste-making could differ. Taste goes beyond performance, in that one strives for beauty, too. Nonetheless, taste possesses a potent performative power in its ability to build credibility and trust. Whether one is or is not concerned with this performative power in social interactions will not change one’s ability to influence situational definitions in social interactions. And to be sure, those who are concerned with this performative power can wield it to ensure maximum cooperative intent from all parties.

There is so much more that I would love to say regarding performativity (e.g., Foucault’s concept of discourse as applied to fashion). However, the primary point that I have defended here is that performativity is integral to society, for it is through performativity that we learn to trust one another to cooperate. Fashion provides the most perceptible manifestation of performativity, as it dominates our strongest sense of vision. Therefore, one’s ability to curate fashion tastefully is of utmost importance to influencing social interactions, enabling taste to take an important stage in power in modern society.

I must note that the implication that I think to be important here is not that of the necessity of performativity in society — this is more a metaphysical point, as all societal interactions must be conducted through performance. The more monumental implication is that performativity plays a pivotal role in society regardless of its metaphysical nature. Because of its prowess, it has evolved into a role beyond one of mere definition, but one of influence. That is, people are able to convey all variations of cooperative intent through all variations of performance, the extent of which is controlled by taste (in fashion). Whether such performance is in conflict with one’s authenticity is a discussion for another time.

Bibliography

• Barthes, Roland. Dandyism and Fashion. Translated work. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

• Barthes, Roland. The Language of Fashion. Translated by Andy Stafford. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

• Riley, John G. “Multi-Round Games.” University of California, Los Angeles. Accessed January 29, 2026. http://www.econ.ucla.edu/riley/106P/GAMES/Multi-roundGames.pdf.

• Rocamora, Agnès. Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Evan Bimaputra is particularly fascinated by the intersection of philosophy and culture. With a formal education in philosophy, a sideline as a fledgling disc-jockey, and a childhood steeped in the Internet, he is preoccupied with tracing the cultural currents of his Gen Z peers against the long shadow of classical philosophical thought. Offline, you can find him playing at chess clubs or munching at NYC’s many KBBQ joints.

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In an overgrown meadow, off the pockmarked road, a mile north of the village of Žmoniai, Samogitia region, Lithuania, rests a lonely pile of stones. The steely sky is its only witness and chill breeze its only visitor. Even the local youth who occupy unused spaces at night to escape their parents for a secret drink steer clear of that particular meadow. If you ask them why, they will give different answers, products of active minds and limited knowledge. But those few bedridden elderly who in demented daydreams still remember the days of the Activists and the Partisans — the oldest and most decrepit villagers — know what that meadow is. Before its stones were harvested to pave the road that passes by it, and before no one remained to upkeep it, that meadow was the site of the Žmoniai Jewish Cemetery.

There are no Jews living in Žmoniai today. The last ones met their leaden fate in a nearby forest in September 1941 and never made it to a proper burial. But since the days of the hospitable Duke Gediminas, until his warmth was revoked by his descendants, there had been. And so, for hundreds of years, any Jew who died in that small town would come to occupy that cemetery. Saints and sinners, tailors and blacksmiths, infants who never received names and even the great Rabbi Sleyma, author of a Talmudic commentary, are resting there awaiting the final Redemption. Their souls long whisked off to the Next World, their bodies remain beneath the swaying grasses as the last remnant of Jacob in Žmoniai.

Since no one was left who would have complained, shortly after the War ended and long-coated commissars plundered the wounded land, the inscribed stones that marked the names and locations of the cemetery’s inhabitants were repurposed for proletarian ends. Today cars limp and sputter between Žmoniai and Pašvitinys and, in some of the potholes where the asphalt has weathered off, a reader of Hebrew can spot a name or a date or a prayer that someone’s soul be bound up in the bundle of life.

But some souls do not merit such prayers or intricately carved and polished stones. Thieves and murderers, suicides and the scandalous are not buried with the community’s upstanding members. Their graves are not embellished and, but for a reluctant obligation to bury them by Moses’ law, their bodies would have been left out for the dogs and the birds of prey. The stones in the outcast section, some yards away from the graves of the respected, were too small and fragile to pave a road with. So Žmoniai’s occupiers had left them in a messy pile in the cemetery, which was then abandoned and left to overgrow.

No one has bothered to inspect the pile since then, but if someone had, they would find some stones blank and nameless, some with a name and little else, and one with the Biblical inscription “And I find the woman more bitter than death.” Her name is not recorded, nor how she earned such a stone, but she is why the townspeople avoid that meadow, whether they realize it or not.

Nechama-Reyzl was a beggar. Her life was short and marked by privation and disease. She had grown up an orphan and been widowed soon after her marriage to a consumptive. He had left her little in the way of money and she lived in a homemade shack on community funds. Since those were insufficient, she often found herself sitting in front of the synagogue asking for donations. Few gave. But she had one joy in life, her son Zalman. While she would be outside begging, nine year old Zalman would be inside the synagogue poring over holy books that men many times his age struggled to read. She would send him to Yeshiva and he would become a scholar. Lacking this world, she and her son would at least claim the next.

But one day Zalman disappeared. He was supposed to return home for their meager dinner after evening prayers, but he was not seen in the crowd of men leaving the synagogue and, in fact, had not even shown up. She ran through the streets shouting his name frantically, knocking on every door and asking for him from everyone who crossed her path. Some townspeople avoided her pleading eyes and looked away, while some gazed on her with pity, because even though they had not witnessed it, they knew what had happened to him and that he would not be returning.

In those days, the Russian Czar ruled over Lithuania and her Jews. He did not like that there was a large minority who did not worship the same god as he and whose loyalty was questionable. So he resolved to make good Russians out of them. He demanded a quota from the Jewish communities in his realm of young boys to be sent off to military barracks deep inside the empire to be re-educated in the ways of Russianness and Christianity. Upon reaching adulthood, those children would be conscripted to serve in the military for decades. Since no Jewish parent would volunteer their child for this risky and hostile endeavor, Jewish communities responded by hiring kidnappers to steal them. Rich families could bribe their way out of being targeted, but Nechama-Reyzl was anything but rich. Her youthful scholar would be fed swine and preached the Gospel and beaten if he refused to accept it. She would never see him again. And once she realized it herself, her fear turned to rage.

She knew who the kidnapper was. Everyone in town did. She had watched Avrom, always an undisciplined and rowdy youth, grow from street thug and petty criminal to enforcer of the community’s decree. Not that he was ever a pious, community-oriented man. He was unmarried, but a regular stream of peasant girls flowed in and out of his house. For anyone else that would have been an unforgivable scandal, but Avrom was a source of loathsome fear to the Jews of Žmoniai. His violent nature and connections to the authorities meant anyone who crossed him could end up imprisoned or worse. The townspeople treated him with a distant and begrudging respect, and someone with corrupt business to achieve might secretly pay him to facilitate it.

But Nechama-Reyzl was not afraid of him or anything he could do. He had already taken the thing she valued most in life and, as far as she was concerned, nothing worse could happen to her. A few nights later, she snuck into Avrom’s house while he was sleeping and ended his life with a kitchen knife. She fled into the woods outside of town and hid out, wrapped in blankets.

When morning dawned and Avrom’s fate was noticed, the town was abuzz. Everyone had hated him; he had been responsible for much communal misfortune and grief. But due to his connections, despite his lifestyle and deeds, Avrom was given a stately funeral, funded by the wealthier members of the community. Men prayed and women wailed as they accompanied him to his final resting place. Community leaders vowed to find the culprit for his murder, but he had had so many enemies it was unclear who exactly that was.

A few had noticed Nechama-Reyzl’s absence from her usual begging spot in front of the synagogue, but the rumor mill had decided she had run away to look for her son, and anyway that frail woman would be the last person they would pin a murder on. Every so often, a chicken or a few potatoes would go missing from one household or another in the village, but she was not caught and her forest hideout remained undisturbed.

But her anger did not subside. After all, Avrom had merely acted on orders from the community leaders, frightened that their own children might be demanded instead. Is the true villain the spear or its wielders? When, in the days of the Prophets, the Almighty poured out His wrath on the sinners of Israel, did He limit His punishment to one or two offenders or did He upend the entire society? And so, Nechama-Reyzl resolved to remove anyone and everyone who would have Jewish children be taken and shipped off to uncertain and dangerous fates.

She could not touch the heavily armed Russian officials who had implemented those policies, so she focused on the community leaders who carried them out. The first to fall was Zkharyeh, the head of the Kahal. It was he that had given the dirty money to Avrom in exchange for her child’s future. One morning, his wife woke up drenched in his blood and her screams rang out from one end of the village to the other. Townsfolk gathered and gawked. They rushed to her aid and whispered to each other their theories of who and how.

They remembered what had happened to Avrom. But Avrom had been a thug with many enemies, while Zkharyeh was a beloved societal pillar. He had probably run afoul of the authorities for his selfless devotion to the Jewish community and they had sent an assassin after him. Yes, that was it! Clearly Vanya was trying to stick his hand in their pockets by removing their leader and protector. What a holy martyr!

Nechama-Reyzl watched the funeral from afar and took note of who attended. All those good Jews who could not spare a kopeck for her in her begging days but had gleefully allowed her only child to be taken instead of their own. She hated every one of them and their false innocence. Their families and lives that came at the cost of hers. Their new clothes while she wore rags. Their future while she had none. She watched them lower Zkharyeh into the ground and resolved to have them join him.

A few more incidents and the community noticed a trend. Someone was hunting them. Heavy locks sprouted on doors and prayers in the synagogue became more heartfelt. The larger men among them stayed out all night looking for offenders and watched the entrances to the town. Two Lithuanians, Joris and Evaldas, were hired to comb the surrounding fields and forests with rifles looking for anything amiss. Three days later they brought back a small woman’s emaciated body and a long knife.

Nechama-Reyzl was buried the next day without much fanfare. The mystery was solved and the curse had been lifted. The poor woman had clearly been driven mad by the loss of her son and the townsfolk discussed her with more pity than anger. Over time, her memory faded, save for the occasional warning from a parent to a child to behave or “the beggar will get you” and a newfound fear among the Lithuanians to enter her resting place, lest her restless spirit take revenge for Joris and Evaldas. Besides that, all that remained of her was a stone in the cemetery the community had erected to condemn her deeds, inscribed “And I find the woman more bitter than death.”

Author’s Afterword

1.) To what degree is the collective obligated to consider the needs of the individual? Nechama-Reyzl was a recipient of the charity of the community and considered the community obligated to help and support her. This meshes with traditional Jewish values surrounding charity that she expected the community to uphold, an obligation they fell short of, in her view.

2.) To what degree should the collective sacrifice the individual for its own sake? When faced with the threat of having their own children conscripted, the leaders of the community decided to sacrifice someone they viewed as less important. While this is an understandable human impulse, it led historically to much discontent and strife within the communities where the conscription of so-called “cantonists” was imposed and undermined trust in the communal authorities (the “Kahal”) as legitimate political bodies. They were mostly abolished after 1844.

3.) To what degree should the individual assert himself over the collective that considers its needs over his? Although the community viewed her and her son as disposable, Nechama-Reyzl herself was highly sensitive to the injustice that had been performed on her and decided to take the law into her own hands. At first she targeted the specific people endangering the children of the community, but eventually became more indiscriminate as resentment took over. What should she have done?

4.) To what degree should nations attempt to assimilate minorities and how? While, to a modern eye, the idea of conscripting children by kidnapping seems heavy-handed, to say the least, it stemmed from an anxiety on the part of the governmental authorities that still exists in some form today with various subjects. To what degree should minorities and immigrants be expected to assimilate into the mainstream culture? Is some degree of assimilation necessary for a nation’s social cohesion? How much? And by what methods should that assimilation be encouraged, if any?

5.) To what degree should minority communities assimilate into the mainstream? To most of the Jewish community of the early 19th century Russian Empire where the story takes place, the idea of assimilating into the Russian culture was viewed as sacrilegious and catastrophic, due surely in no small part to some of the unpopular methods used by the authorities to encourage that. In the German lands, meanwhile, many local Jews, influenced by Enlightenment ideas, viewed assimilation into German culture as desirable. Later on, various approaches would develop in various places regarding to what degree it is desirable to join other cultures and to what degree to keep one’s own, a debate that continues to this day, both in Jewish and in other communities.

6.) Does respect for the memory of people who are no longer around trump practical concerns of the present day? After the widespread destruction of World War Two had finished, many gravestones across Eastern Europe were repurposed as building materials. Was that the right thing to do?

7.) How should a community treat scandalous behavior? The scathing rebuke etched into Nechama-Reyzl’s headstone is based on a real epitaph in the Jewish cemetery of Gibraltar. Until very recently, it was a widely accepted custom that society needed to make an example of scandalous people even after death. This typically included cases of suicide, a behavior that many nowadays consider a guiltless expression of uncontrollable mental illness or despair, but back then was viewed as a crime akin to murder. Were the people of previous eras too harsh or are we too soft? Do we encourage problematic behavior by deproblematizing it or is empathy always the solution?

Ben G. is a frequent Philosophy Club attendee and native New Yorker. This story was inspired by a recent trip to Lithuania.

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Facets of Science

It’s difficult to overstate how much more we now know about the natural world compared to people living just a few hundred years ago. At our fingertips everyday we unthinkingly harness what to our not-too-distant ancestors would be considered extraordinary wizardry.

For example, if you gave a Renaissance-era engineer the complete schematics for an air conditioner, they would still be amazed at the result. The reason is because modern air conditioners rely on the fact that when a gas is compressed, its pressure and temperature rise, and when it’s allowed to expand, its pressure and temperature drop. By controlling where in the process gasses are pressurized, air conditioners are able to blow cool air into your room. However, it was only in the late 18th century that we discovered this lawful relationship between pressure and temperature, which is now taken as a given in air conditioner manufacturing.

This is but one of thousands of discoveries whose effects have filtered into our daily lives. We live as kings, not recognizing what precious luxuries we’ve been afforded. With phones, we can instantaneously communicate with people on the other side of the planet. With vaccines, we’re able to prevent illnesses that historically decimated entire societies. With lightbulbs, we can banish the darkness for less than one five thousandth of what it cost just 300 years ago.

How has all this been possible? In a word, science.

It was not beseeching divine revelation. Not politicking. Not war and conquest. Not shaking a magic eight ball. All this we’ve been doing, mostly to no avail, for hundreds of thousands of years. (Well, maybe not the last one.) No, the revolution in our understanding of the natural world comes down to something more recent. It was a change in how we ask and answer questions, what we now call “science.”

There is, of course, no consensus definition of “science,” but we can make headway in describing its contours nonetheless. There is a set of values that scientists collectively embody that helps to explain the remarkable strides we’ve made in revealing nature’s secrets. Here, I’ll describe three of these values: curiosity, skepticism of authority, and responsiveness to evidence. I will also describe examples of scientists failing to live up to these values and explain how they threaten to undermine the progress we’ve enjoyed so far.

1. Curiosity

Curiosity is the desire to better understand the world. Where there is a blank spot on our map, curiosity is what propels us to explore. When a gap in our understanding appears, the curious seek an explanation.

However, this is not the only way a person could arrive at their beliefs. We might, for example, be motivated to believe something simply because it makes us feel good. A person who’s just been given a grim medical prognosis might feel some resistance towards the results of their test and continue believing they’re perfectly healthy. Alternatively, we might be motivated to believe something merely because it paints the group we belong to in a positive light (or our enemies in a negative one).

A Case Study:

It’s commonly thought that liberals and conservatives have One Big Thing from which they derive their political beliefs. Perhaps its equality vs hierarchy, change vs preservation, big vs small government, or idealism vs realism.

However, one group of psychologists argues that this is all misguided.The hodgepodge of views that political parties have had across cultures and across history is too heterogeneous to be explained by any single dimension. No, the content of any political group’s beliefs is highly contingent, and most individuals’ political beliefs are highly inconsistent. Moreover, psychological experiments find that individuals’ evaluations of social policies are highly malleable depending on the political group supporting them.

All this is because our political beliefs are best explained, not as deductions from abstract principles, but rather as a means of fitting in with and mobilizing support from potential allies. So for example, feminists today often have views that are congenial to ethnic minorities, but there was nothing inevitable about this. Indeed, feminists of the early 20th century sometimes explicitly excluded African Americans from the suffrage movement.

So it is with political beliefs more broadly. On this Alliance Theory of political beliefs, we should expect people to indulge in biases that flatter their allies and belittle their opponents. The better to recruit people to your side and repulse people from the other.

These tendencies to allow our personal and groupish biases to distort our thinking were what Francis Bacon called the “idol of the cave” and the “idol of the tribe,” respectively. As Bacon put it, the lies we come to as a result of these idols are like candlelight, warm and comforting, yet they pale as substitutes for the search for and knowledge of the truth, that is, the (sometimes unflattering) daylight of reality. When we engage our curiosity, that is what we are motivated by.

Science (when practiced well) channels this curiosity towards advancing our understanding of the natural world. It is in part what led Darwin to voyage on the HMS Beagle and, ultimately, to discover the process of evolution by natural selection. More recently, it was what led Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó, despite decades of obscurity and a threat of deportation, to pioneer the mRNA technology that allowed for the rapid development of COVID vaccines.

However, not everyone has such admirable courage to explore the unknown. Some, in fact, wish to actively discourage certain types of research. For example, on the subject of racial differences in intelligence, philosophers Ned Block and Gerald Dworkin have written:

What we are saying is that at this time, in this country, in this political climate, individual scientists should voluntarily refrain from the investigation of genotypic racial differences in performance on IQ tests.

Indeed, some scholars have been threatened or physically attacked for their views on this subject, and many take Block and Dworkin’s advice for fear of ostracism or retaliation.

Ostensibly, the rationale for these calls for censorship is a concern that the research might be used to justify the oppression of minority groups. However, as researcher Noah Carl argues, this neglects at least two problems.

One is that this censorship may inadvertently reinforce the odious moral views that the censors were fighting in the first place. Now, it’s true that those who wish to oppress minority groups do indeed wish to find genetic differences between the races. But to fight back against such views, it is not necessary to deny genetic differences or stifle research on these differences. Rather, one can instead argue that such differences are not relevant to how we ought to treat one another—the equality of persons and a respect for rights do not depend on people’s genetics. Indeed, those who fear research on genetic differences in abilities are, in effect, holding their morals hostage to the empirical facts. They are implicitly suggesting that oppression would be warranted if differences in mental abilities turned out to have a genetic origin, thus reinforcing the very views they were fighting against.

A second problem Carl notes is that stifling research may lead scholars to misunderstand salient phenomena, thereby leading to material harms. For example, it is now known that there are significant racial differences in the effectiveness and side-effect profiles of clinically important drugs. If, out of concern for minority groups, we deny that races exist or that there are genetic differences between them, we risk providing people with suboptimal medical care, potentially at the cost of people’s lives.

So it goes with censorship more broadly: when people seek to limit the frontiers of knowledge, they often fail to foresee the negative effects of their actions. They may unintentionally bring about the very harms they were concerned about, and they may engender further harms as a result of the ignorance they cultivated. And so even if we might find some line of research personally repugnant, we should be wary of those who would seek to curtail it. As the saying goes, “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” We may yet be surprised by what’s to be discovered by those with opposing views.

And what is it about curiosity that makes it an effective engine of progress? Why can’t we just believe what we (or our tribe) want to believe?

Simply put, we are more likely to find the truth when we actively search for it. When we set ourselves to some other goal, like satisfying the idols of the cave or the tribe, we follow a path that makes true discoveries merely a matter of happenstance, and so it should be no surprise when this path leads us astray. Even worse if we actively shun the truth or punish others who blaspheme our idols.

An analogy: To drive from NYC to LA, it is very useful to actually try to drive to LA. Driving to some other random spot on the map or closing our eyes entirely is unlikely to get us to LA, since the large majority of other paths do not pass through that destination.

So it is with scientific discoveries as well. To better understand the natural world, it is incredibly useful to actually try to understand it. You have the option of shaking a magic eight ball if it makes you feel good, but then you should not expect to be the next Darwin or Karikó. To create a good map of the world, you must explore the terrain, not draw whatever you wish in the blank spaces.

2. Skepticism of Authority

The motto for the Royal Society, the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world, is “Nullius in verba,” meaning “Take nobody’s word for it.” It embodies an attitude of skepticism towards authority that makes science distinct from other ways of learning about the world.

Of course, it does not mean that scientists never rely on others. Scientists are not solipsists. They collaborate with each other and cite each others’ work all the time. Science is, after all, fundamentally a social enterprise. As Isaac Newton put it, he was only able to see further than others “by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And so it is with every scientist.

Yet there is still an important sense in which scientists engage in a skepticism that goes beyond what might be ordinarily practiced. For example, for thousands of years it was common for scholars to cite Aristotle as the definitive authority on how the world works. He was so central a figure in the academy that the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas cited him simply as “The Philosopher.” It was precisely this attitude that Galileo mocked when he described one scholar as staying “so closely tied to every phrase of Aristotle’s as to hold it sacrilege to depart from a single one of them.”

More broadly, the impulse to sacralize certain ideas has been a common one throughout history, especially in religious contexts. Catholics, for example, trust the Pope to be infallible on matters of doctrine. Muslims take the Quran to be free of error, and Hindus treat the Vedas similarly. This is not a scientific attitude.

Science (when practiced well) treats all claims as worthy of critical scrutiny. No inquiry is to be taken as sacrilegious. No authority is to be taken as infallible. In many ways, skepticism is the norm:

1. Empirical testing: Scientists are not in the habit of merely making pronouncements about the world. In the ordinary course of their work, scientists must present data or arguments to support their claims, else they lose the esteem of their peers. And when a scientist sticks their neck out and conducts an experiment that has a high chance of ruling out false hypotheses, this is seen as especially valuable. To pass through a “severe” test with one’s neck unscathed is considered a great feat in science.

2. Peer review: Scientists submit their work to journals, and this work is then critically evaluated by their peers. In the most prestigious journals, it is extremely common for a paper to be rejected. For example, the rejection rate for Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals, is about 92%.

3. Replication: Even after a study has been conducted, passed through peer-review, and published in a journal, scientists might nonetheless express skepticism. They might be so skeptical that they attempt to redo the entire study themselves just to make sure the results were correct. In science, this effort is to be welcomed, not scorned.

By way of contrast, consider an exchange between psychologists Scott Lilienfeld and Derald Wing Sue. In a 2017 article Lilienfeld argued that research on “microaggressions” was beset with a number of conceptual and methodological problems, and as such its application in real-world contexts like diversity and cultural sensitivity trainings was premature. In response, Sue did not challenge the merit of any of Lilienfeld’s arguments. Rather, he challenged the value of science more broadly:

In essence, Lilienfeld is applying the accepted scientific principle of skepticism to the study of microaggressions, which may unintentionally dilute, dismiss, and negate the lived experience of marginalized groups in our society.

In effect, Sue was treating the testimony of these marginalized groups as beyond skepticism. To do otherwise, would be “problematic.”

However, Sue’s response does not appear to demonstrate an understanding of why skepticism of authority is such an important part of science.

It’s because humans—including members of marginalized groups—are fallible, finite beings!

When we attach our own beliefs so thoroughly to a particular individual or group, we risk adopting the exact same mistakes they made in the course of their investigations. And it is inevitable that they made mistakes; no one is so wise and so rational that they can avoid all humanity’s biases. Even the great Aristotle made mistakes, for example, believing that there was a hierarchy of nature with humans at the top and other life forms below. It was not until Darwin’s time that we learned to view life rather as a branching tree (or perhaps bush), with no species inhabiting a privileged position at the top.

Moreover, even the most perspicuous humans live finite lives. This fundamental limitation prevents any individual from discovering the secrets to everything; all investigations must at some point end. So it is upon us, the living, to take their work and build on it (or perhaps demolish it) with the new information we gather about the natural world. Collectively, humanity does not have to put down the scientific instruments after 60 or so years. We can continue to make progress in understanding the world far after the end of any individual’s career.

3. Responsiveness to Evidence

The final distinctive characteristic of science is responsiveness to evidence. Just as a good thermometer’s reading will rise or fall in response to the temperature around it, so too, a good scientist’s confidence in their hypothesis will rise or fall in response to the evidence they encounter. Two points are worth emphasizing here.

The first is responsiveness. Humans often have a tendency to act defensive about their beliefs. When encountering contradictory evidence we flinch away as though it would hurt us. Scientists are trained (albeit imperfectly) to make the opposite motion, to embrace the results of their experiments whatever they may be. Charles Darwin neatly expressed this sentiment in his autobiography: “I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

Relinquishing one’s old beliefs, however, can be difficult. There is always the temptation to massage one’s data in a way that leads to congenial conclusions, which is why many scientists have sought a way of ensuring that they respond appropriately to the evidence. Thus, many scientific journals have begun accepting “registered reports.”

The idea is simple: Scientists submit their study rationale, design, and proposed analyses for peer review prior to conducting their study. Once approved, journals commit to publishing the study regardless of the results, so long as the scientists follow their submitted protocol. As a consequence, scientists can rest easy knowing that they’ll be recognized for their contributions, thus mitigating the incentive to engage in selective reporting of their data. Moreover, by requiring that scientists follow their protocols, registered reports act as a formal safeguard against this selective reporting. Scientists cannot fish around for the one analysis among dozens that favors their hypothesis; rather, they must call it as they see it (or as they saw it in their initial protocol).

The second point to emphasize is evidence. Evidence is not the only thing that might change a person’s beliefs. We might instead adhere to beliefs because we think they’re the kind of beliefs good people hold. Consider, for example, the case of Howard Gardner, the originator of the concept of multiple intelligences. In a lecture explaining his perspective Gardner says:

Even if...the bad guys [who emphasize the importance of IQ] turn out to be more correct scientifically than I am, life is short, and we have to make choices about how we spend our time. And that’s where I think the multiple intelligences way of thinking about things will continue to be useful even if the scientific evidence doesn’t support it.

He is, in essence, admitting that he will continue to champion multiple intelligences come what may, regardless of the scientific evidence. What’s more, he casts his colleagues, those who don’t believe in his theory, as “the bad guys.”

This is the voice of an ideologue, so committed to his theory that he’s given up on science. A good scientist, by contrast, follows the evidence wherever it leads. When the truth happens to contradict their beliefs, so much the worse for their beliefs; it’s time to change them.

An analogy: If you’re driving with a GPS and it tells you a bridge is closed, it behooves you to change directions. You should not continue on towards the bridge heedless of the new evidence you’ve received.

So, too, in science it is immensely important to respond to the evidence. To do otherwise risks driving off a metaphorical bridge, i.e. dedicating your life championing a false theory. If we instead update our beliefs accordingly, we are much more likely to converge towards theories that reliably stand up to scrutiny. And from this foundation, we might build vast edifices that ultimately benefit mankind. We can, for example, build literal bridges that span 100+ miles by combining together our understanding of materials science, geology, hydrology, physics, and more.

A Caveat:

The above discussion presents a somewhat idealized view of science. It is true that scientists will tend to value curiosity, skepticism of authority, and responsiveness to evidence. In practice, however, scientists also frequently fail to live up to these values.

For example, in an infamous leaked draft of a 2016 essay, Susan Fiske—prior president of the Association for Psychological Science—described those who had criticized her friends’ research as “destructo-critics” and “methodological terrorists.” Needless to say, this is not a welcoming attitude towards those pointing out errors in science.

More broadly, many fields show signs of bias in their evaluation of research, for example, selectively publishing findings that seemingly support hypotheses but not those that falsify them. And there are yet many ways that scientists could improve in detecting and disincentivizing negligence, hype, or outright fraud.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that science, with all its warts, has been an amazing engine of human progress. And so the appropriate prescription when a scientist fails to live up to the scientific values is not to give up on the values, but rather to reaffirm them and find ways to make them an even more central part of the scientific enterprise.

Conclusion

It is said that the birth of philosophy in Europe started when people eschewed the mytho-religious explanations they were taught. They instead noticed that there was order in the universe and that this order could be explained without recourse to a divinity. As one historian put it, this new beginning “consisted in the abandonment, at the level of conscious thought, of mythological solutions to problems concerning the origin and nature of the universe and the processes that go on within it.” The first generation of philosophers were those brave enough to leave the idols of the cave and tribe and seek the truth for themselves. With their curiosity and skepticism of received wisdom, we might also say they were early harbingers of science too.

It should be no surprise, then, that an earlier name for science was “natural philosophy.” The two fields, science and philosophy, to this day share many of the same values. Where they differ is more a matter of emphasis than substance. Scientists often focus more on empirical observations rather than the analysis of concepts. And whereas many philosophers can do their work from the armchair, many scientists use specialized equipment to take measurements of the natural world.

What’s essential to science though, and what’s made it so beneficial to humanity, has been the values that scientists collectively embody—curiosity, skepticism of authority, and responsiveness to evidence. Curiosity has motivated scientists to explore the unknown, pushing the frontiers of knowledge into regions that would have otherwise been ignored. Skepticism of authority has led scientists to double check those regions that were thought to be certain. Often, this confidence has been unearned, with authorities simply preaching what’s in their own interests, heedless of the truth. Where curiosity generates hypotheses, skepticism tests them. Finally, a good scientist takes the results of these tests to heart. When scientists are responsive to the evidence they ensure that the map reflects the territory, so that the lines they draw are precise and undistorted by personal bias.

These are not the only values scientists hold, but together, they are instrumental to explaining the remarkable progress we’ve made as a species in understanding the natural world.

By Nathan Nguyen

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Existentialism?

What do I know about existentialism?

I’m not some guy who sits around philosophizing in my spare time: thinking about thinking, and so on. I’m an adult! I’ve got serious things to take care of, as well as a cat. So please, don’t bother me with questions of existentialism, or what it all means. I just don’t have the time.

And you... you’re still here?

Incredible!

Look, I’ve gotta go to work, like five minutes ago. But first, a quick coffee stop! And second, the train: which may, if I’m lucky, spark another episode of psychopathic rage as the hellish grind and halting of the MTA parks me somewhere deep underground and surrounded by concrete, alongside my fellow eukaryotes, who (just like me) would rather be anywhere else.

Look at us now: real, bona fide human beans. Packed inside these aluminum tins on electrified rails, like some fucked up Rube Goldburg machine.

I can’t avoid a sense of deja vu. And then it hits me: I’ve once more been caught in the most devious trap imaginable. These bastards have robbed me of my wireless connection to the Internet. Yet again! And I keep letting them get away with it. Now I can’t even listen to music to take my mind off of things. This dull state of frustration has become my life.

Trapped! In the interstitial realm of: ads for shit I don’t need, but now may dream of later; the unintelligible conductor, who sounds like Skrillex, live at Gitmo; followed by the robot’s dulcet tones, whose placid nonexistence just makes it all better, somehow.

I’ve got to get out of here. There’s been a mistake. I’m not meant to be here, now, at this juncture in space and time. Let me out!

Sometimes I see with perfect clarity why folks decide to “make the news”.

The sudden mechanical lurching back to life occurs. Lurch. Stuck...

Times like these, I consider carrying a book. But reading, honestly? Who has the time? And to voluntarily encumber myself with such an egg-headed accoutrement seems... unseemly. Still, among my present company, the ones who seem to be surviving best in our current climate (sans Internet), are those eggheads over there, with their four-eyes and their paperbacks, and - oh, my word - one of them even has a pencil out, taking notes on whatever esoterica his eyes are soaking up.

Curiosity’s got me, now: what’s this book that has him so absorbed? Come on, lift that sucker up a couple inches, so the class can see. And there it is! Just some light reading for the morning ride - good old Durkheim, with his isolation, anomie, and alienation. Now my question becomes: why’s this guy need a book to see what he can live and breathe, just existing in the most affluent city in the world?

Nonetheless, he’s positively riveted. Just look at him: one with the book, one with the train; somebody ought to - I don’t know, yell in his ear about “how much bullshit it is that the goddamn train don’t work like it should”. Oh wait, here we go... it’s happening, right on queue. And he doesn’t even blink! No startle response, no reaction, at all. Incredible. He just turned the page and kept right on... reading. He can’t keep getting away with it!

Upon reflection, (contemplating my image in the dark glass opposite,) I realize it’s probably unrealistic, not to mention unhealthy, to continually ascribe these conspiratorial intentions to the MTA, strangers on the train, etc. Better to take stock of things I can control, rather than getting all wound up by stuff I can’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t be in this position to ruminate if I had my way. Previously, I would have taken my trusty ebike to get to work. But that old routine ended completely one dreary autumn afternoon last year. I got T-boned right off that bike by a lovely little Subaru whose brakes didn’t quite stick the landing on the slick pavement after the day’s rain.

It happened, no kidding, like this: “Oh, shit,” - bonk - hey, that’s me: laying there in the intersection, gray sky and strangers’ faces in view. “That could have been worse,” was my first thought, on coming back to consciousness. Hurt to breathe in. Wow, what the fuck? At least my skull was intact.

Here’s the part that I actually find interesting, though:

Where had “I” gone for those few moments in between getting hit, and then suddenly “coming back” into existence? It’s curious to me that one moment I was “here,” as an active perceiver of the world we share, and the next I was “gone” without even realizing my departure had taken place. Only upon “returning” was I able to put together a narrative regarding this brief jaunt into and out of the darkness. And with time, reflect on it.

Something like one in seven people who come close to death see the bright light, chit-chat with a dead family member, have their life flash before them, or float around in an out-of-body experience, etc. I didn’t get any of that; but my incident, for reasons that will become clear below, was sufficient on its own. In short, what I gathered from it was that you’re either here or you’re not, and it’s just a light switch away from clicking your brain off without any epilogue, denouement, or otherwise long goodbye.

So, that’s the rub. I got caught out rushing home to better myself professionally, to hit the books after another day of dragging my carcass through one more shift at the old dead-end job. And - wham-bam - would you believe it: laid out cold, with a short stint at the ICU, major rib surgery, and all that jazz, as you can imagine. (They gave me four titanium plates, so that’s fun.)

Like most people who come close to dying (“You’re lucky to be alive,” said the doc,) I have found that I’m actually quite happy to still be here (“And you’re going to make a full recovery”).

Which is still funny to me, about a year later. Because for a long time I didn’t really want to do it anymore. Go on with the whole “being alive” thing, I mean. You see, I’ve had the distinct displeasure to develop and retain chronic back pain since the age of twenty-four (that’s nearly ten years, as of writing); it even radiates in all kinds of fun ways throughout my lower body most days.

So, I’m not just bullshitting you when I say “Oh wow, it’s nice not to have died!” I can absolutely contextualize what it means to enjoy life; the present moment; and a notion of the future, after not having the physical capacity to relax, be at ease in the “now,” and look forward to anything. It all seemed like a dark tunnel without end.

So many times, I flirted with just throwing it all away: most visibly, with speed. That antithesis of the dead-stop which finally got me to take stock of things.

Zipping along crazily, hazarding life in another brain-dead weave through a red light, looking both ways just enough to yell “fuck you” to whoever was crossing my way, before laughing hysterically at whatever response they gave. Probably pissed because I’d cut clear cross their path, made them scared and snap back to the road instead of their phone. I just didn’t care. It hurt to exist, if you can grasp that. Never at ease. Unable to relate. Physically in pain in so many ways, and just expected to accept it and manage it and move on as best as one can.

It could always be worse though, right? To drag in Sisyphus and his myth: one could glamorize the pain, mythologizing how it’s played out over time, and say “Oh, you know, it’s my cross to bear”, and so on. But long-suffering is itself insufferable. It’s bad enough to have the pain. Why make a show of it? This only distorts the space between you and others more. To identify with the symptom rather than the struggle is anathema. And if you aren’t pushing back against the problem, well then, “lie down and die?” You can thank Camus for that one. But just to see what happened next, I thought I’d stick it out.

Still, I was terrified of living the rest of my life this way, and saw no hope in connecting with human beings ever again. It’s not like I didn’t try everything under the sun, either. I had. And it sucked beyond words to have all that not be enough. So, I found some sublimation through aggressively riding my bike to and from work in the most dangerous ways. It hurt to ride, too, which just spiked every kind of negativity in me. Somewhat masochistically, I referred to my bike as “the pain machine”.

Which is how I reached the conclusion that purchasing a 70-pound ebike with fat tires, cruiser bars, and a split-cheek seat would be just the thing for me. Ergonomics, baby! Inescapable; a lifestyle, even. And it was a glorious ride - for about a year, until the accident happened.

The ebike is still fine, don’t worry. But I never have a reason to ride anymore. I’m not traumatised, I swear! I’ve even ridden a citibike (unfortunately) twice since then. It’s just that my work sites these days are either near enough to walk, or far enough to require the train. Which is another thing that changed, since getting hit: my line of work. I don’t feel such crushing despair due to working a dead-end job anymore.

Something else different: these days my chronic back pain, remarkably untouched by that Subaru or wet concrete, feels manageable, though never fully absent. Perhaps nothing changed physically under the skin (save a little titanium, however that’s out of the way, in the ribs), but my outlook on “now,” and “the future” has certainly shifted, to the point where I know I can sustain this forward momentum I seem to have fallen into.

Living in the moment no longer feels impossible; nor do I find it inconceivable to imagine the future as something worth living for. And I find it easier to laugh off inconveniences: the alternative to being here, dealing with this annoying, quotidian surprise (pick one) is to not be here at all! And that makes me laugh. It’s a relief to experience this point of view, after the preceding long, dark tunnel of despair.

All this to say: the eggheads would go on about “the dark night of the soul.” For my part, sometimes I brush up against other people who have been through something which marked them indelibly, which they’ve since absorbed, processed, and sublimated - whatever “it” was they went through during that night, or in that tunnel, it no longer weighs them down, but rather buoys them up whenever the lights go out or the train gets stuck somewhere deep underground.

Because “it could always be worse,” right?

To attempt to wind this diatribe down: it’s not enough to just go through something arduous. People have all kinds of responses to trauma, whether it’s long and drawn out, or short and sharply acute. In my experience, Viktor Frankl is right in saying the two things that help most of all in passing through great difficulties are: 1) meaningful interpersonal relationships, and 2) personal goals as of yet unfulfilled.

The latter is why I laugh at the thought of (alternatively) just not being here, in lieu of having to deal with bullshit: it’s because I get the chance to fulfill my own goals still, that I am incidentally dealing with some annoyances along the way.

And the former is the real reason why my pain decreased: I found love! Is it any wonder why they write all those songs, shows, and poems about it? As a chemical cocktail released and exchanged between the brain and the (rest of the) body, love soothes all aches from a system otherwise chronically in fight-or-flight; it’s the best medicine. No kidding; who knew? It’s the most damnable thing, but true.

These things (forms of love) require no explanation. It is wonderful to be cared for, and it is equally wonderful to sincerely give care. People who love you do this little thing called “showing up” when you’re in need, and sometimes you can’t help but do the same thing for somebody else.

That’s the part that got me, on the far end of my fall; afterwards, I would keep showing up for somebody I had discovered I loved. Because hey, the sensation made me feel good. More than good, actually: great! I mean, my chronic back pain went away. Disappeared: gone. Which obviously, was huge for me. Life-changing.

We two were inseparable: it was the best feeling, to be truly seen and heard; to deeply understand one another with bilateral trust that ran through each day and hour; this subconscious rhythm we had developed in tandem. It was the greatest expansion of my understanding of what it means to be truly alive during our limited time here.

A few months later, while moving out of New York, this individual left me with the words: “I just liked playing with your heart.”

Now, in classic egghead fashion, Marcus Aurelius, that Stoic of yore, advises us that an individual’s most critical mission is not to fall into a state of such alienation from one’s fellow humans that connecting with others feels impossible.

Through loving another, I had overcome the most terrible aspect of my chronic pain, which was the inhuman condition of isolation I felt it imposed upon me. And though ultimately love in this instance wasn’t enduring (or, actually, bilateral), it was enough to expand my horizon beyond the myopic worldview that chronic pain can create over time, hemming one in and blinding one to all that is good and attainable beyond just getting through this unpleasant moment.

Because there is physical pain that persists; then there is the emotional pain of knowing the missed opportunities this creates; and finally there is the mental anguish of projecting both of these states into the future indefinitely, seeing only these barriers again and again across every possible fork in the road.

So I will take your time, here at the end, to invoke the age-old, hackneyed answer of love. Though one can’t wake up in the morning and decide “today, I’m going to walk out that door, perhaps get stuck on the morning train, but definitely, certainly, find love in the afternoon, or the evening, at latest.”

Still, if you can find it...

Stephen Campbell holds a degree in History from the University of Mary Washington. He enjoys car culture, advertising, and the MTA. His favorite pastimes are magical thinking and shower singing, particularly “Jesus Take the Wheel”.

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I. Introduction

The profound impact of artificial intelligence, and particularly the meteoric rise of generative AI, is undeniable. The immense potential and poignant drawbacks have sparked intense debate. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT offer anyone an instant consultant, brainstorming partner, translator, creative assistant, or even technical expertise. Similarly, image and video generation models accelerate concept creation and democratize graphic design. Yet, despite these clear advantages, a deep skepticism persists around the technology. This is, in part, due to the many well-founded ethical, economic, and political concerns. However, there exists a more fundamental aversion that lies beneath these practical objections: a core human preference for reality and resistance to simulation.

The fault of AI lies in its fundamental separation from reality, in its lack of experience, conscious intent, and human authorship. An AI-generated poem, though grammatically flawless, is not produced from a history of suffering, joy, or memories, but from statistical correlations in human language. An aesthetically pleasing AI image is not the result of an artist’s encounter with the world but of a system recombining patterns it can never experience firsthand. These models do not participate in reality, they operate on representations of it, generating new symbols from prior symbols. By simulating a reality they cannot inhabit, AI systems lack something fundamental to that reality. This loss exists in spite of, not because of, the technology’s practical shortcomings.

AI provides us with a distinct, modern example of the preference we have against simulation or toward reality. However, there exist many other areas of modern life, from consumer habits to interpersonal relationships, which can be similarly described as simulation. This article argues that the unease surrounding generative AI is analogous to a deeper human preference for reality, and that comparing AI within Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra shows why our scrutiny of this new technology must extend beyond AI systems to the many other forms of simulations that mediate everyday life.

II. Preference Toward Reality / Aversion to the Unreal:

The human inclination towards ‘the real’ is not unique to the domain of AI. This phenomenon is evident in our consumer habits, social attitudes, and is explored in works of popular fiction and philosophy. Food companies, for instance, use phrases like “made with real fruit” to distinguish their product from products that may use artificial flavors. There are strict rules that govern such labels because of the allure this ‘realness’ has on consumers. In Japan, for example, manufacturers cannot depict realistic fruit on their packaging unless the percentage of fruit juice is above a certain level. This illustrates that even the suggestion of a real fruit can meaningfully influence a buyer.

The diamond market isolates the quality of ‘realness’ from other desirable traits, like nutrition in the case of food items. Lab-grown diamonds typically fetch dramatically lower prices than similar natural ones, despite being chemically and structurally identical. What, then, gives the natural diamond its added value? In this case, it is nothing but the knowledge of its authenticity. There is no experiential difference to the unaided senses, only an understanding of the origin and that it formed through natural processes. This information does not manifest physically in any obvious way; it takes a trained eye and special tools to discern the difference. It is this perceived “realness,” that is grounded in knowledge rather than experience, that grants the natural diamond its elevated worth.

This preference for the real, even at the expense of other desires, is explored through major philosophical and fictional narratives. The Experience Machine is a thought experiment introduced by Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia.1 He imagines a machine that can allow humans to exist in a perfect and absolute state of pleasure. He then asks, if given the choice, would anyone willingly subject themselves to this machine? A similar idea is explored in Aldous Huxley’s book A Brave New World.2 In this novel, Huxley writes of a society that is kept perpetually content through a drug called soma. While the Experience Machine was originally an argument against hedonism and A Brave New World is a cautionary tale about the sacrifice of freedom, they both also confront the conflict between reality and simulation. On the surface, the simulated lives they offer are enticing, but the idea that this happiness is only a simulation must be grappled with. In both cases, the simulated existence is, by definition, more pleasurable than reality, yet something is still missing. When the choice is between perfect pleasure and the real world, many hesitate to abandon the real in favor of the simulation. We are drawn to whatever it is that the simulation lacks and would prefer a less pleasurable existence if it meant a real existence.

This idea of choice between reality and simulation is perfectly encapsulated in the 1999 film The Matrix.3 In this movie, the main character, Neo, discovers that the world he and all other humans inhabit is an elaborate computer simulation being run in their minds. The humans still exist in the real world as inert power sources for the machines which now dominate it. The Earth is depicted as a post-apocalyptic hellscape where the sun has been blocked out and the land is now covered in a mechanical network entirely hostile to human life. Despite this, when given the choice to return to blissful ignorance and live in the relatively pleasant simulation or escape into the brutal hell that is the real world, Neo chooses the real.

III. Baudrillard’s Hyperreal: The Precession of Simulacra

The Matrix was inspired by the book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard,4 a French sociologist and philosopher. Through this book and many of his other works, he explores the idea of reality and specifically how our modern world differs from it. He claims that the media-centric world we live in has become composed mostly, if not entirely, of simulations and that almost all of the signs and symbols we interact with are mere simulacra: copies of something which do not, or no longer, exist.

This idea stems from the fact that all media are, by nature, representational. When trying to capture or recreate a real event, the creator will inevitably have to make judgments or interpretations. A photo is always taken at a certain angle, a news story must always summarize details, and an author always has a bias. The creator, even when attempting to be genuine, can do no more than simulate their experience. In a media‑saturated society, these simulations increasingly mediate our contact with the world, so that our worldview is formed more by representations than by direct encounters. Over time, the media, symbols, and culture we create rest on layers of prior representations instead of on any stable underlying reality. For Baudrillard, this is the crucial shift. The copy no longer follows the real but precedes it, so that simulations come to define what counts as reality in the first place. In this state of “hyperreality,” the representations do not just reflect the world, they become more real for us than whatever they were supposed to depict.

Society is built upon these layers of interpretation. Our ideas, products, desires, and cultural norms result from this precession of simulating the simulated. In a modern sense, this can be seen through social media. A young person might build their personality and interests to imitate their favorite online influencer. The influencer, of course, carefully curates their online image to represent themselves exactly as they want, often driven by a desire to maximize engagement which itself is guided by recommendation algorithms. The young person imitates the distorted image of the real person, who themselves distorts their image to conform to algorithms driven by a simulation of the consumer’s desire. Each layer symbolizes the next. This, however, becomes the young person’s reality. Through this imitation, they have become a simulacrum, a copy of that which does not exist.

Baudrillard describes this precession of simulation into simulacra as consisting of four stages:

1. Copy (The Sacramental Order): A faithful symbol of the real.

2. Distortion (The Order of Malefice): A symbol that masks or interprets reality.

3. Deception (The Order of Sorcery): A symbol that conceals the absence of reality.

4. Pure Simulacra (The Order of Simulation): A symbol that refers to no reality at all.

He illustrates this idea through a version of ‘Borges’ Fable’ [4, p. 1-2] in which a mad cartographer is obsessed with making a map that is a perfect representation of a kingdom. This pursuit evolves to a point in which the map, laid over the land, conceals and eventually replaces the actual kingdom. A regular map is an example of the first stage of simulation. It is a copy of an original which is obviously a symbol and makes no attempt to hide this fact. The next stage comes when the cartographer builds a map that is so detailed it mimics the land almost exactly. Now, any accidental or purposeful differences may be taken as truth, allowing the map to begin to distort reality. The cartographer continues to build a map that is so ‘perfect’ it physically spans the entirety of the territory, point to point. The inhabitants now reside on top of the map as it is laid over the land and conceals the real world beneath it. They may begin to forget, or not realize, that the environment they interact with was once meant to be a copy of the real state. It now conceals the absence of the territory it was meant to symbolize. This is deception. Finally, we reach pure simulacra as the citizens, now living on and within the map, begin to create representations of the world they now inhabit. A map of this world is a symbol representing the cartographer’s creation, which itself was meant to be a copy of the real world that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists as it has been buried and forgotten beneath its own recreation.

IV. AI as the Epitome of the Hyperreal

The precession of simulation to pure simulacra is compellingly analogous to the rise of generative AI models we see today. Simple AI programs can simulate ‘intelligence’ in useful ways without pretending to actually be intelligent. This is in stark contrast to how software like ChatGPT is designed to make you feel as though you are communicating with an intelligent partner. Within this enormous range of capabilities, we are able to distinctly pick out the characteristics of the four stages of simulation.

1. Copy

The term artificial intelligence is often conflated with machine learning when, in fact, artificial intelligence refers to the “use of technologies to build machines and computers that have the ability to mimic cognitive functions associated with human intelligence.”5 The key word here being ‘mimic’. Artificially intelligent systems complete tasks not necessarily by copying the mechanisms of natural intelligence, but by producing similar outcomes within a set of constraints. In this sense, simple AI algorithms are symbolic of human intelligence but by no means hide the fact that they are not truly intelligent. One example is the A* (pronounced A-star) search algorithm which is used to find the shortest path to a target. It is a relatively simple set of rules and heuristics that simulates an intelligent task (finding an optimal path) by following a straightforward set of instructions. It symbolizes an intelligent creature finding its way through a maze, but it would be difficult to mistake this for anything but a simulation.

2. Distortion

Machine learning refers to a subset of artificial intelligence which is “focused on algorithms that can ‘learn’ the patterns of training data” in order to “make decisions or predictions without [explicit instructions].”6 With machine learning algorithms, one can begin to see the distortion of what they are meant to represent. One of the simplest examples is the linear regression model. What this model does, in simple terms, is try to fit a trend line to a set of data points. It can then use this trend line to make predictions on new input it has not seen before. Even these simplest models distort reality in two ways. First, by their very name, they are described as learning. This allows us to anthropomorphize what is in reality a statistical model. It presents a level of familiarity that obscures the actual mechanism of the simulation. Second, they can never make perfect predictions, yet their results are taken and acted upon in many ways. Linear regression and other similar models are used in fields like business forecasting and insurance portfolios. Though they are very useful, these models create a slightly distorted image of the world and their predictions are then taken as representative of and used to influence that same world. In this sense, these simulations become real, and foreshadow the hyperreality of AI.

3. Deception

Modern AI algorithms are amazingly deceptive. The release of ChatGPT signified a dramatic shift in the power of AI to conceal the absence of reality. This is in part due to both technical advancements and the form factor in which it was released. The chat window that users most commonly interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) is specifically designed to mimic the experience of messaging another person. In other words, it is designed to conceal the fact that you are not. The conversational flow and complex responses create a powerful sense of an intelligent partner which masks the reality that there is not one. Non-text-based generative models are also becoming increasingly deceptive. This is evidenced by online communities like the ‘isThisAI’ subreddit, which is a forum dedicated to discussing “whether or not a picture, video or anything is AI-generated.”7 Apart from the ability to actually trick the viewer about its origin, AI-generated art and media are inherently deceptive. The inception of generative AI marks the first time in history that media does not, by default, imply an intentional creator. For the first time ever, the question “was this art created by someone?” is a relevant one. To whatever degree, it does have the capacity to conceal the lack of a real author. It can simulate the art and eliminate the artist; it can simulate the result and eliminate the origin; it can simulate the real and eliminate the real.

4. Pure Simulacra

The ultimate stage is reached when the replica refers to no reality at all. We currently find ourselves on the precipice of this era with generative AI. Despite how one might feel about it, AI permeates all corners of society and especially the internet. The “dead internet“ theory has gained more credence than ever, as the web becomes dominated by content that has lost its human referent.8 A major concern for the continued advancement of AI is data contamination or model collapse.9 Almost all of the accessible, original, human-created data has already been collected and used to train the current most powerful models. Therefore, future datasets used to train subsequent models will increasingly contain data that was generated by those models in the first place. This circular, self-referential training loop means that AI is no longer learning from human reality, but from a growing corpus of its own output. Even if the content is created by a human, it will become increasingly unlikely that that person has not been influenced by other AI sources (through AI-powered marketing, recommendation algorithms, or consuming AI-generated content). Therefore, even if we could filter out all of the data directly generated by AI, the next age of AI models will be trained on a body of data which represents a world already dominated by the influence of its predecessors. It will be, and has already become, a simulation feeding a simulation.

As AI continues to advance both technologically and in its influence, we will become just like the citizens living on the mad cartographer’s map. What was once supposed to simulate reality will become so fundamental that it will replace reality itself. In this stage, the resulting image, text, or piece of media is a symbol of nothing but the patterns within the data pool. It entirely lacks the original human referent, the artist’s inspiration, the genuine event, the maker’s conscious choice. Despite this, these algorithms continue to drive so many of the digital processes which pervade our lives. As we become more and more reliant on, and influenced by these simulations, they risk becoming reality itself. AI is transforming our environment into hyperreality. At this stage, AI is the culmination of Baudrillard’s ideas, transforming the original symbols of human expression (like art and text) into nothing more than symbols of a simulation of those things. This is pure simulacra: a copy that no longer references an original truth but rather the copy that preceded itself.

V. The Wider World of Simulacra

AI makes the judgment of non-reality easy because it is so obviously a simulation. We understand that, by its very nature, when we interact with AI we are interacting with something artificial. As we have seen, this elicits a loss, a movement away from what is typically desirable. However, we live in a world filled with simulation. Especially in the digital age, almost everything we see, interact with, learn from, and respond to can be seen as representative of something more ‘real’. The ways we communicate with each other, learn about the world, and navigate our consumerist society are all simulated experiences, yet they are so fundamental in our lives that it is often easy to forget this fact.

Take any text-based communication like email, instant messaging, and texting for example. Much, if not most, of our modern communication happens through these media. These forms of communication are ubiquitous in our daily lives, yet they are simulations of ‘real’ conversation. As with all simulations, aspects of the real experience are lost. You cannot read facial expressions or hear tone through text, and you miss numerous other subtle cues present in a face-to-face interaction. Yet, this form of communication is so omnipresent that we hardly ever consider this difference. The personal interactions which would have been necessary for typically daily tasks, like conducting business or catching up with loved ones, are simulated through the rapid transfer of text. On the surface, this is excellent, allowing for more efficient business and frequent connection with friends and family. However, in practice, we see that the convenience of this simulation allows it to replace its real counterpart. Business has less of a need for in-person meetings, and we may feel less of a desire to meet up with a friend if we have been texting them all week long. While this shift is not necessarily negative, it is a considerable change to our society that is driven by a simulation. It is, therefore, worth considering.

Other parts of our daily life are similarly mediated. Consider the frictionless entertainment ecosystem created by recommendation algorithms, or the pervasive nature of targeted marketing and advertising, where we, as individuals and as part of broader consumer trends, are simulated and then shown a reflection of that simulation. Media companies, whether news outlets or social platforms, profit by maximizing engagement rather than accuracy or depth. As the saying goes, in many of these environments we are not the customer but the product, offered as bits of attention to advertisers. In this attention economy, the primary goal is not to inform or enrich us but to hold our gaze for as long as possible. Companies build detailed models of our behavior, what we click on, pause over, or share, and then feed that simulated version of “us” back as an endless stream of tailored content. What may feel like frictionless convenience is really the removal of choice and surprise. Instead of searching, browsing, or risking boredom, we are continuously presented with whatever is most likely to keep us engaged. Over time, this has a profound effect on both ourselves and our culture. Initially, these systems approximate what we already like, but eventually the recommendations narrow and stabilize around whatever proves most effective at capturing our attention. What we consume because it is pushed to us gradually becomes what we experience as our genuine interests. In Baudrillard’s terms, the algorithmic profile of our desire and attention begins to precede the real, defining what we encounter and, in turn, who we become. The simulation of our attention does not merely reflect our wants; it trains them, until the hyperreal feed stands in for an open-ended, self-directed engagement with the world.

This phenomenon is not contained to the 20th century. One of Baudrillard’s famous articles, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,10 illustrates that hyperreality can stem from much simpler forms of media. While he does not deny that this conflict occurred, he asks whether the events of what has been called The Gulf War unfolded exactly as they were presented. For the typical western audience, this conflict did not take place before their eyes. They did not witness the undoubted violence and tragedies, nor did they listen in on the countless meetings between leaders. They did not hear the bombs, smell the burning oil, or feel the fear. Rather, they read about these things in the newspaper, listened to the stories on the radio, and watched reporters explain what was going on. These representations of the conflict may or may not have been created with the intent of accuracy and information but are still just that: representations, symbols of the actual events translated into various forms of media. This is what Baudrillard means when he said this war did not happen. What we understand to be the Gulf War is what we learn and interpret from these representations of the events. Our experience is that which is created in our mind while reading words on a page or listening to someone else’s abridged explanation. These experiences shape our understanding of the world, and in this way, these simulations become our reality.

The point Baudrillard emphasizes is that we interact with simulacra every day, all of the time. He thought this in 1981, and since then, the progression of technology, the internet, and now AI seems to almost caricature his ideas. As a society, we increasingly interact with our fundamental world through simulations of what one might consider real. We work remotely through computers and interact with our coworkers and bosses through text for money that will most likely never have a physical form, all to buy things which make us feel like the idealized and curated images of people we see on social media. These layers of representation have become so ubiquitous that we do not even realize they are there. Through slow integration, they have become our reality.

VI. Return to the Real: Making a Choice

We currently stand at a unique crossroads of technological advancement, marked by the rapid rise of generative AI, and find ourselves confronted with profound questions about reality and its simulation. AI is more than a mere productivity tool, it is a showcase of our deep, collective unease about the loss of authenticity in an increasingly mediated world. The layers of simulation that we interact with whether through the lens of AI, social media, or even our everyday consumer choices, are not new. Humans have been creating representations to symbolize their world for all of recorded history. However, the stakes are higher now, as the simulations of today are more complex, pervasive, and influential than ever before.

In this moment of rapid change, we are faced with a fundamental question, what is lost when we substitute the real for the simulated? The appeal of generative AI lies in its ability to replicate human productivity and creativity, but in doing so, it strips away a vital essence of the final result. This loss is not unique to AI, but rather makes visible a broader condition of the world we are creating, one in which symbols increasingly replace the very substance they were meant to represent. In this sense, Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality is no longer an abstract philosophical idea, it has become our everyday reality. What were once tools for representation have increasingly become the dominant framework through which we understand and interact with the world.

The discomfort we feel toward AI, then, is not solely a reaction to the technology itself, but an expression of a deeper anxiety about what is being lost through this shift. As Baudrillard warns, when simulations replace reality, we risk losing touch with the fundamental human truths that ground us: authentic connections, genuine creativity, the richness of lived experience, and even truth itself. For this reason, the same skepticism that we reserve for AI should be applied to the countless other forms of simulation that permeate our lives. Whether it’s through the curated images on social media, the algorithms shaping our wants and desires, or even the way we communicate through text rather than speaking to one another, we are continuously navigating a world that blurs the line between the real and the artificial.

In this age of hyperreality, the challenge is not to reject the digital world or the conveniences it offers but to cultivate a deeper awareness of what is being lost as we immerse ourselves in these simulations. Just as we scrutinize AI for its lack of authenticity, we must also question the other layers of representation that dominate our lives. The conversation about AI is not just about technology, it is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality itself. It allows us to consider what it means to be human, what makes art genuine, and what is lost through simulation. This technology has not only delivered the efficiencies advertised on the surface, but has also handed us a powerful lens for noticing which aspects of life we would rather keep real. It opens a window onto the other simulations that shape our world, from mediated relationships to algorithmically curated desires. Are we, like the inhabitants of the cartographer’s map, losing sight of the real world beneath the simulacra, or can we find a way to preserve the essence of reality while embracing the benefits of a digitally augmented existence? If we can cultivate this awareness and practice making these distinctions, we can gain the freedom to decide what we allow to fade into simulation and what must remain grounded in reality, rather than sitting back and quietly letting those decisions be made for us.

Mikail Krochta holds a degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and minored in Mathematics. He is passionate about life long learning, philosophy, social responsibility, and a commitment to life beyond a 9 to 5. You can often find him playing board games, exploring used book stores, and arguing about philosophy with his fiance.

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Love in Light of the Universe’s Heat Death

I lost my faith seven years ago in a silver Elantra parked in an overgrown gravel driveway. Truthfully, the process took a few years to complete, but that day stands out to me especially. I’d been secretly reading and listening to forbidden thinkers (Hitchens, obviously), and finally, I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t sure if I could force myself to believe the tenets of my faith anymore. I’d lost the ability to believe. What ensued was a cascade of realization. That each fundamental action I would take from that point on would be terrifyingly, horrifyingly, devoid of true meaning. I was inconsolable. Surely, I’d lose hope in life and cease to find motivation to live, right?

Seven years later, an actively deconverting Mormon friend asked me a question on the back patio of a rent-stabilized apartment. We’d been talking about rebuilding after blowing up what you had assumed to be the fundamental principles of how you lived.

“I don’t know if this is too personal a question, but what did you do? If there is no God, nothing matters. If it’s all matter, just things in the brain firing, why does it matter?”

I looked at my BYU grad friend and saw myself. I sympathized in a way that I think only someone who’s felt the pain of destroying the neural pathways they spent a childhood building can fully understand. It is genuinely painful and like turning a part of your mind into a ghost that you can visit but never be again. I also smiled. I would never claim to have the answers to life, but I was happy to provide him my personal framework for meaning. After an hour of talking, I saw a glimmer of a smile appear for him, too.

From Matter to Matter(ers)

What snappy one-liner did I tell him to assuage his fears that everything wasn’t meaningless, the universe wasn’t coldly indifferent, and that he did, in fact, have a divinely appointed cosmic purpose to motivate him when life seems hopeless? What did I say when he asked if there was meaning in the universe after a loss of faith? I told him what I’ve been telling myself for years now. There probably isn’t.

There probably isn’t. An objective meaning to the universe, that is. At least as far as I can tell. Seven years ago in my Elantra, this was the pill that I had to swallow, and from what I gather, a rather sticky pill. It isn’t satisfying, it doesn’t go down easy, and it doesn’t land anything actionable in your lap. So how do you build a scaffolding of belief in what seems like an abyss of nothingness? You ask the second part of the question. Nothing matters to the cold, dark objective universe, but does anything matter to you?

Now that I mention it, there are some things that matter to me. My wife. Vanilla ice cream. The memory of my childhood dog. But do these things matter? I force the question again. To whom? To the universe? Almost certainly not. To me? As a matter of fact, they mean everything. Objectively, even. The key to the puzzle of purpose isn’t finally finding the picture on the box. It’s the realization that there is no puzzle, just a paintbrush, and it’s been squarely placed in your hand.

Three months later, I found myself once again speaking to a different set of acquaintances on the topic of meaning and purpose. This group was religious, however. Conversation started after someone sent a viral YouTube debate between three prominent voices in the online philosophy space. An atheist, a spiritualist, and a Christian. After three hours of arguing, quotes, memes, and rhetorical slam dunks, I finally got it out of me:

“For anything to matter, there needs to be a matterer!”

Ahh, yes, I’d done it. I’d simplified my ideas into a witty one-liner. Even more, I felt it was pretty novel. I started to imagine how I could package my little idea and deliver it to the masses. I’d stumbled into something that everyone who dabbles in philosophy dreams of—saying something new.

You Matter

Today, I woke up to a message. A screenshot from my friends. It was an article from the Oxford Academic, titled “Nothing “Really” Matters, but That’s Not What Matters” by Sharon Street, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. I’d been beaten to the punch.

My pride at saying something new, anything new, hissed out of me like a popped balloon. Begrudgingly, I read further. To my dismay, she was brilliant and said things better than I ever could.

“Does anything really matter? The answer depends on what one means by “really.” If the question is whether anything really matters in Derek Parfit’s robustly attitude-independent sense, then I believe the answer is no, nothing really matters in that sense. Nothing matters, ultimately, independently of the attitudes of beings who take things to matter. To matter is to matter from the point of view of someone.” —Sharon Street, Oxford Academic

Her position seems to be similar to mine. While I was initially excited to think I was saying something novel, I found myself glad to at least be in good company with what I was saying. Does anything really matter? I’m not sure. What I can tell you is that things really matter to me. And my guess is that some things really matter to you.

Here’s a helpful distinction I’ve found when someone tries to force their lowly view of atoms on you: Do you really like ice cream or is it just a frozen dairy treat? It feels silly when you put it that way, comparing the material state of something with the reality of its purpose in your life. I find that stating the material reality of something doesn’t seem to take away from a good matterer.

How about another one with bigger stakes: Do you really love her, or is it just a chemical reaction in your brain? I accept both. In the face of meaninglessness, I take back some silly sense of objectivity, a term oft levied by the theists and deists among us, and use it as my own. I can’t make the universe value you. But I can say that purpose can be objectively real if I’ve decided that something gives me purpose. The answer to meaning and purpose is as real as the answer to the question of if I love my wife. Yes, I really do.

Some Caveats

As I’ve stated, my framework is not free from critique. One of the most valid, I think, is that your sense of meaning is predicated on your mental state. This is addressed in Street’s paper.

“The causal threat of ceasing to think things matter never goes away, and there’s a kind of vertigo involved in recognizing that value is there only as long as you think it is and that you could slip into a state in which you stop thinking there is.” —Sharon Street, Oxford Academic

My prescription here is the same as Street’s. I can provide mechanism for avoiding these states of mind. Namely, getting sleep, maintaining close relationships, and cultivating varied interests and pursuits.

Alternatively, aside from fixing one’s “mental state,” I believe there is a secondary point that is potentially more motivating: you matter to someone else. Unfortunately, I can’t ground the purpose for your existence in something divinely beyond us. But I can tell you that people matter to me, and you matter to some people. In true days of despair when our routines and mental tricks have failed us, we can take some comfort in the fact that someone, somewhere, probably loves us. And to them, in their world, you objectively matter a great deal.

Finding Meaning and Why It Matters

My goal here isn’t to challenge anyone’s existing frameworks for meaning. It’s to provide a framework that helped me scaffold my beliefs during a time that I found personally challenging in the hopes that someone else in the rare position of leaving a religion would have it.

During that period of my life, my beliefs and my relationships were coming apart at the seams. The bedrock for objective existence in any capacity was taken from me. I needed a genuine framework for consistent belief, if only to justify my own actions to myself. For many of us who enjoy philosophy as a hobby, we roll ideas between the fingers of our mind like a piece of pocket sand soon flicked away. I contend we must be willing to take seriously a mandate to help people and view these questions as essential for fulfilling life, not purely stimulating discussion.

In the face of a crisis of meaning, I don’t have the answer, but I have an answer. Nothing matters except from the point of view of someone. When confronted by the question “Does any of this really matter?” I take some comfort in the fact that I can respond with “To who? To me? Of course it really matters.” and then live a life that provides me the richest, fullest answer possible.

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Bibliography

Street, S. (2017). Nothing “really” matters, but that’s not what matters. Does Anything Really Matter?, 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0006

I. Introduction: Τaraché as Modal Misrecognition

Human suffering admits of many kinds. Some suffering tracks reality accurately: the pain of loss, grief following death, fear of genuine danger. Such suffering, while painful, serves a function—it orients us to the world as it is, motivating responses appropriate to genuine threats and genuine goods. But there exists another species of suffering, what the ancient philosophers called taraché (ταραχή), that differs fundamentally in origin. This essay argues that taraché arises not from fear, desire, or grief themselves, but from a specific cognitive error: misrecognizing the modal nature of their objects.

Taraché requires precise definition. It is not merely suffering, nor merely intense affect. It is self-generated disturbance arising from cognitive error about the nature of things—especially errors concerning necessity and contingency. More precisely: taraché is painful, function-inhibiting disturbance produced by misrecognition of reality, such that the suffering lacks a sound basis in the thing feared or desired. The disturbance is “baseless” in the strict sense that it corresponds to no real opportunity for action, does not track its object’s nature, and does not serve the function the underlying affect evolved to serve.

The two fundamental forms of this error are fearing what is necessary and desiring permanence from what is contingent.

Both represent reality as other than it is. Fear of the necessary is futile because necessity cannot be averted; demanding permanence from the contingent is futile because contingency cannot be converted into stability by wishing. In both cases, affect is directed at an object incapable of responding to that affect, producing disturbance without utility.

This commits us to a crucial distinction: not all suffering is pathological or to be eliminated. Pain can be informative, morally appropriate, motivational, and reality-tracking. Grief at loss, when proportionate, honors the good lost; fear of evitable danger motivates protective action. The target of this essay is not suffering as such, but suffering grounded in error—suffering that neither corresponds to reality nor serves any functional purpose. What makes ταραχή (taraché) distinctively problematic is not its intensity but its groundlessness.

II. Conceptual Framework: Necessity, Contingency, and Degree

The terms “necessity” and “contingency” admit of degrees and kinds. At one extreme lies absolute necessity—what cannot be otherwise under any circumstances. Death as such is absolutely necessary for composite beings; this follows from what it means to be constituted of parts that can come apart. At the other extreme lies radical contingency—events whose occurrence depends on factors so numerous and sensitive to initial conditions that no prediction or control is possible.

Between these extremes lies a continuum. Conditional necessity describes outcomes inevitable given certain conditions but avoidable if those conditions can be altered. Defeasible stability characterizes goods that, while impermanent, possess sufficient durability to reward cultivation and stewardship. The argument therefore rejects crude binaries. We claim not that everything is either absolutely necessary or radically contingent, but that fear and desire must be scaled to the degree and kind of responsiveness their objects actually possess.

This yields what we may call the Proportional Principle: to the extent something is necessary, it is not the proper object of fear; to the extent something is contingent and impermanent, it cannot be the proper object of a desire for permanence. The proportionality here is genuine. If a harm is ninety percent necessary given present conditions but ten percent avertable through effort, some fear may be appropriate—but far less than if the harm were largely contingent. Similarly, if a good possesses substantial stability over the relevant time horizon, attachment to that good is more warranted than attachment to something radically ephemeral.

Accurate modal cognition is therefore essential, not optional, for appropriate affective response. One must know—or make reasonable estimates about—the degree to which feared outcomes can be averted and desired goods secured or sustained. Errors in either direction produce dysfunction. Overestimating necessity produces fatalism and passivity where action could make a difference; underestimating necessity produces futile struggle against the inevitable. Overestimating permanence leads to devastating collapse when contingent goods are withdrawn; underestimating stability leads to failure to cultivate goods that could genuinely flourish.

III. Fear: Function, Proper Use, and Misapplication

Nature and Function

Fear is, in classical terminology, pain in the imagination of future evil. This definition captures something important: fear is anticipatory, oriented toward what has not yet occurred but might. This temporal structure gives fear its distinctive function. Unlike grief, which responds to accomplished loss, fear responds to potential loss—and can therefore motivate action to prevent that loss from occurring. Fear is evolutionarily adaptive precisely because it is instrumentally oriented toward avoidance. The creature that fears predators takes evasive action; the creature that does not becomes prey.

Fear is useful when and only when its object is evitable—when action responsive to the fear can avert or mitigate the feared outcome. This is fear’s proper domain: harms that are contingent upon conditions that can be altered. Fear of accidents motivates caution; fear of illness motivates hygiene and medical attention; fear of immediate danger motivates flight or defensive action. In each case, fear mobilizes attention, energy, and behavior toward outcomes that genuinely depend on that mobilization.

Misapplication

Fear becomes pathological when directed at what is necessary rather than contingent. Death as such is the paradigm case. Every composite being will cease to exist; this is not a contingent fact that might be otherwise but a necessary consequence of composite nature. To fear death as such—not this or that manner of dying, which may indeed be evitable, but the bare fact of mortality—is to direct fear at an object incapable of responding to that fear. The same analysis applies to loss as such and finitude as such. That we will lose what we love, that our capacities and opportunities are bounded—these are not contingent misfortunes but structural features of finite existence.

Why does fear of necessity produce taraché? The answer lies in the conjunction of four factors. First, fear of necessity is ineffectual: it cannot accomplish what fear exists to accomplish, namely the aversion of its object. Second, fear is intrinsically painful, a form of suffering. When fear serves its function, this pain is instrumental—a price paid for genuine protection. When fear cannot serve its function, the pain is pure cost with no compensating benefit. Third, sustained fear drains agency. The energy and attention devoted to fearing the inevitable are energy and attention unavailable for engaging with what can be changed. Fourth, fear of necessity involves cognitive error, a representation of reality as other than it is. The combination generates disturbance—pain without protection, expenditure without return, misrepresentation without correction.

Reframing

If fear of death is neither useful nor rationally grounded, what is its proper interpretation? Fear of death is best understood as love of life improperly expressed. The person who fears death intensely typically does so because life is precious to them, because they have goods they cherish and activities they find meaningful. This love of life is not the problem; it is the expression of that love as fear of the inevitable that produces disturbance.

The correction, therefore, is not the elimination of love but its redirection. Accept necessity—not as resignation but as accurate cognition of what is. Redirect the energy formerly devoted to fearing death toward living well within the time available. Retain fear only where it can function, where it can motivate action that genuinely protects the goods one loves. This reframing preserves what is valuable in the original fear—the attachment to life and its goods—while eliminating what is pathological: the futile resistance to what cannot be resisted.

IV. Desire and Love: Function, Proper Use, and Misapplication

Nature and Function

Desire and love bind us to goods. They motivate care, stewardship, and sustained engagement with what matters. Without desire, there would be no attachment; without attachment, no meaning. A life devoid of desire would not be a life of tranquility but a life of emptiness—if it could be called a life at all. The Stoic and Epicurean traditions have sometimes been interpreted as recommending the elimination of desire. This interpretation is mistaken, or at least incomplete. What the therapeutic traditions target is not desire as such but desire improperly calibrated to its object.

The proper domain of desire encompasses goods that can be secured, cultivated, or sustained—where “can be” is understood in proportion to the actual stability of the good in question. Friendship, knowledge, craft, care of loved ones: these are goods of sufficient durability to reward investment, even though they are not permanent. One can deepen a friendship, extend one’s knowledge, refine a craft, provide genuine care. Desire for such goods motivates the effort that makes their cultivation possible.

Misapplication

Desire becomes pathological not when it attaches to contingent goods—for all worldly goods are contingent—but when it demands permanence from what is impermanent. The error is not loving what can be lost; everything can be lost. The error is making permanence a condition of love, such that the love cannot survive the loss of its object. This includes even the most cherished goods: beloved persons, meaningful projects, one’s own capacities. All of these are contingent. To demand that they be otherwise is to demand what reality cannot provide.

Why does the demand for permanence produce ταραχή (taraché)? Again, four factors converge. First, desire cannot secure permanence from contingent goods; the demand is structurally incapable of fulfillment. Second, loss is inevitable; therefore grief escalates beyond its natural bounds when the underlying assumption was that loss should not occur. Third, when identity becomes load-bearing—when one’s sense of self depends on the permanence of contingent goods—the loss of those goods produces not merely grief but collapse. Fourth, the contingent nature of goods is denied rather than acknowledged, producing cognitive error analogous to treating necessity as contingent in the case of fear. This is the desire-analogue of fear of death.

Corrective Reframing

To love rightly is to love fully while acknowledging contingency, without demanding permanence as a condition of love. This is not detachment in the sense of caring less; it is detachment only from the impossible demand that contingent goods be permanent. The love itself can be as deep, as devoted, as intense as before. What changes is the implicit metaphysical assumption. One no longer assumes that the beloved—whether person, project, or capacity—will endure forever, and one’s love is not conditioned on that assumption.

This reframing preserves love while avoiding collapse. When loss comes—as it inevitably will—the person who has loved without demanding permanence can grieve the loss without being destroyed by it. The grief is genuine, proportionate to the good that was lost. But it is not compounded by the sense that something has gone wrong, that the universe has violated an implicit contract. Nothing has gone wrong; contingent goods are contingent. This is not news, but a truth that can be acknowledged in advance and that, when truly acknowledged, transforms the experience of loss.

V. Structural Symmetry

The parallel between pathological fear and pathological desire is now explicit. Fear has evitable harms as its proper object; when misapplied to necessities, it produces taraché. Desire has securable goods as its proper object (where “securable” is understood proportionally); when it demands permanence from what is contingent, it produces taraché. The structure is identical: an affect directed at an object incapable of responding to that affect, yielding disturbance without function.

This yields a general rule: an affect misapplied to an object that cannot respond produces disturbance. The formulation is deliberately abstract because it captures a pattern that recurs across many specific cases. Fear, desire, anger, hope—any affect that is instrumentally oriented, that exists to motivate action toward or away from its object—becomes pathological when directed at objects beyond the reach of action. The specific content varies; the formal structure remains constant.

The recognition of this symmetry has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, it reveals that what might appear to be distinct problems—fear of death, attachment to impermanent goods, anxiety about the uncontrollable—are manifestations of a single underlying error: the failure to calibrate affect to the modal status of its object. Practically, it suggests that the therapeutic strategies effective for one manifestation should be effective for others, mutatis mutandis. The person who has learned to accept necessity in the case of death has learned something applicable to other necessities; the person who has learned to love without demanding permanence has learned something applicable to all contingent goods.

VI. Aristotelian Synthesis: Measure and Modal Cognition

The framework developed thus far integrates with Aristotelian virtue ethics more deeply than mere analogy. For Aristotle, virtue in the sphere of affect consists in the mean between excess and deficiency. Fear admits of both: the excess is cowardice, the deficiency is recklessness. What determines the mean is appropriateness to the situation—fearing what ought to be feared, to the degree it ought to be feared, at the time it ought to be feared. Similarly for anger, for confidence, for the various forms of love and desire.

What determines “ought” in these contexts? The present analysis provides the answer: modal cognition. Aristotle’s “appropriateness to the situation” just is modal cognition, properly understood. To fear “the right things” requires distinguishing what can be faced from what cannot, what is evitable from what is inevitable. To fear “at the right time” requires recognizing when action remains possible and when it does not. The phronimos—the person of practical wisdom—calibrates fear to the structure of the situation, and that structure is fundamentally modal.

Excess fear thus arises from treating necessity as avoidable, or from overestimating the probability or severity of contingent harms. Deficient fear arises from underestimating genuine contingent dangers, from treating what is genuinely risky as though it were safe. Excess desire arises from demanding permanence from contingent goods, or from treating goods as more stable than they actually are. Modal misrecognition, not emotion itself, produces vice.

The virtuous agent, on this account, is one who fears where fear can help, loves where love can sustain, accepts what cannot be altered, and does not make contingent goods metaphysically load-bearing.

This is not a life devoid of strong emotion but a life in which strong emotion tracks reality. Such a person can love deeply because they do not make their love conditional on impossible guarantees. They can face danger with courage because they accurately assess what is at stake and what can be done. They can grieve loss without being destroyed by it because they knew in advance that loss was possible.

VII. Philosophy as Modal Training

If the analysis thus far is correct, a question arises: how does one develop the capacity for accurate modal cognition? The boundary between necessity and contingency is not always obvious. Reasonable people can disagree about whether a particular outcome is inevitable or avertable, whether a particular good is stable enough to warrant investment or too fragile to bear the weight of attachment. The spectrum is real, and reading it accurately requires a trained faculty of discrimination.

This is where philosophy enters—not as abstract speculation, not as word games, not as moralizing, but as the systematic training of our capacity to recognize necessity and contingency, especially with regard to human goods.

Philosophy, on this account, is modal training.

It develops a mental faculty: the power to subtly distinguish degrees of necessity and contingency in the situations we face, and to calibrate our affective responses accordingly. Without this training, even a person who intellectually assents to the framework developed here will remain vulnerable to ταραχή (taraché) through simple misclassification of reality.

Why is such training necessary? Because human beings are, by default, remarkably bad at modal estimation. We systematically overestimate the controllability of what cannot be controlled, and we systematically demand permanence from what is inherently transient. We fear inevitabilities as though vigilance could avert them. We treat fragile goods as though they were guaranteed. These are not occasional errors but pervasive tendencies, built into the structure of human cognition and reinforced by cultures that promise control and permanence they cannot deliver.

The ancient philosophical schools understood this. Epicurus, the Stoics, and later the cognitive-behavioral tradition all target false modal beliefs as the root of unnecessary suffering. What unites these otherwise diverse traditions is a shared diagnosis: we suffer because we misperceive the modal structure of our situation, and we can reduce suffering by correcting that misperception. Philosophy, on this view, is not primarily about constructing theories but about sharpening perception, correcting misclassification, and retraining expectation. This is why philosophy has always claimed to be therapeutic—not as a metaphor, but as a literal description of its function.

Modal cognition, however, is not merely propositional. It is not enough to assent to the proposition “death is necessary” or “relationships are contingent.” The cognition must become habitual, must sink below the level of explicit reasoning into the automatic responses that govern our moment-to-moment experience. This is why philosophy, properly understood, has always included practices and not merely doctrines: exercises, meditations, reminders, dialogues. These are not supplements to philosophical understanding but its necessary vehicles. The Stoic who meditates each morning on what might be lost, the Epicurean who memorizes the tetrapharmakos, the Buddhist who contemplates impermanence—all are engaged in the same project: training perception until accurate modal cognition becomes second nature.

The upshot is that philosophy is indispensable for securing ataraxia because it refines the very faculty on which freedom from disturbance depends. While the boundary between necessity and contingency may initially appear blurred, philosophical inquiry—conducted not as idle speculation but as disciplined practice—allows the agent to distinguish structural constraints from alterable conditions with increasing precision. Without this ongoing study, the agent remains vulnerable to taraché through the simple misclassification of reality. Philosophy is both the diagnostic that identifies modal error and the training that corrects it. Reason guides practice; practice trains perception.

VIII. Consolation, Community, and Equality

There is a further dimension to this analysis that deserves attention: its implications for human solidarity. Necessity and loss are shared. Every human being faces the same fundamental constraints: mortality, vulnerability, the contingency of goods, the impossibility of permanent security. This commonality, far from being merely a source of private consolation, grounds genuine solidarity. We are all in the same situation with respect to what is most fundamental.

The mechanism here is worth spelling out. When a person has not accepted their own mortality and vulnerability, they experience these facts as threats—and by extension, they experience others who remind them of these facts as threatening. The sick, the dying, the bereaved, the visibly aging: all serve as unwelcome reminders of what the person is trying not to acknowledge. The natural response is aversion, avoidance, even resentment. Why must they force me to confront what I wish to deny?

Acceptance of limitation dissolves this dynamic. The person who has genuinely acknowledged their own contingency no longer experiences reminders of contingency as threats. The sick person is not an accusation but a fellow traveler. The bereaved person is not an unwelcome prophet but someone whose suffering is intelligible from within one’s own acknowledged vulnerability. What was aversion can become compassion; what was alienation can become connection. Shared finitude, once accepted, becomes a bond rather than a barrier.

This transformation has ethical significance beyond its psychological benefits. The community of the finite is a genuine community, grounded in shared facts about what it is to be a bounded, mortal, composite being. Recognizing this community does not eliminate difference—we remain distinct individuals with distinct circumstances, capacities, and goods. But it establishes an underlying equality that cuts beneath social hierarchies and contingent distinctions of fortune. Before the fundamental necessities, we are equals. The emperor and the slave both die; the billionaire and the pauper both lose what they love. This equality is not a leveling but a grounding—a recognition of shared condition that makes genuine compassion possible.

IX. Therapeutic Implications

What practical consequences follow from this analysis? The therapeutic tradition that runs from Epicurus through the Stoics to contemporary cognitive therapy suggests a broad outline. The fundamental intervention is cognitive: identify modal errors, correct misclassification, and thereby reduce affective escalation. If taraché is produced by cognitive error, then correcting the error should dissolve the disturbance.

This does not mean that reasoning alone is sufficient. Cognitive insight must be integrated with practice, with habituation, with the gradual reshaping of automatic responses that have been conditioned over a lifetime. The traditions that have taken this project seriously—Stoicism, Buddhism, cognitive-behavioral therapy, various forms of contemplative practice—all recognize that intellectual understanding is necessary but not sufficient. One must not only understand that death is necessary; one must come to feel, in one’s bones, that this is so, such that the fear of death no longer possesses its former grip.

It is important to stipulate that “correcting the belief” is not always a matter of simple syllogism. The neural pathways of fear are ancient and stubborn. However, accurate modal cognition is what allows us to select the correct tool for the job. If we believe our despair is caused by the world being “wrong,” we will try to fix the world—an often impossible task that compounds frustration. If we recognize our despair is caused by a modal error in our own expectation, we turn our efforts inward, utilizing therapy, community, and meditative practice to slowly align our gut feelings with our rational understanding.

The argument of this essay is therefore primarily directive: it proves that fear of death—and by extension, all taraché—is irrational, thereby justifying the labor required to remove it by other means. While the argument functions as a form of cognitive therapy, which is efficacious in resolving distorted feelings around loss, it also serves to validate and coordinate more intensive practices. Meditation, exposure therapy, pharmacological intervention where appropriate—these are not alternatives to philosophical understanding but its proper complements. The philosophical argument transforms what might appear to be futile resistance into a reasoned deployment of therapeutic resources. Reasoning guides therapy; it does not replace it.

The person seeking freedom from ταραχή (taraché) must engage in practices that reinforce cognitive correction: meditation that cultivates equanimity, exposure that weakens conditioned fear, reflection that deepens understanding, community that supports the difficult work of transformation. The philosophical analysis provides the map; the journey must be walked.

There are two independent grounds for undertaking this work. The first is intellectual: taraché is based on false belief, on a misclassification of reality. The person who fears necessity believes, implicitly, that necessity is contingent; the person who demands permanence believes, implicitly, that contingency can be converted to stability. These beliefs are false. One ought not to believe what is false. The second ground is practical: taraché is painful, function-inhibiting, and counterproductive. It undermines love, courage, and stewardship rather than supporting them. One ought not to suffer needlessly, especially when the suffering actively impedes the goods one cares about. This dual grounding—truth and function—is important. It means that the rejection of taraché is not merely therapeutic but also rational.

X. Conclusion

The argument of this essay can be summarized in a final principle: fear and love belong to what can be shaped; peace belongs to what cannot. The domain of fear is genuine danger, harm that can be averted through vigilance and action. The domain of love is genuine good, goods that can be cultivated, deepened, and sustained within their natural limits. The domain of peace is necessity—what is, what must be, what cannot be otherwise regardless of our wishes or efforts.

Fear of necessaries and desire for permanence are, at bottom, the same error. Both deny reality. Both direct affect at objects incapable of responding. Both generate taraché—painful, function-inhibiting disturbance that lacks rational foundation. And both are correctable through clarity. The correction requires not the elimination of affect but its proper calibration, not detachment from goods but attachment without impossible demands, not resignation to fate but accurate cognition of what fate is.

Philosophy, on this account, is the discipline that develops the capacity to correctly perceive necessities and contingencies with regard to human goods, and to act accordingly. It is both the diagnostic that identifies where we have misread reality and the training regimen that corrects our perception over time. Without philosophy—understood not as academic exercise but as sustained practice of modal discrimination—we remain vulnerable to the errors that generate needless suffering.

To obey necessity and contingency is not to abandon life but to free love and action from futile resistance. The person who has made this adjustment loves no less; indeed, they may love more, having removed the distorting lens of impossible expectation. They act no less; indeed, they may act more effectively, having removed the paralysis of fear directed at the inevitable. What they have abandoned is taraché and in its place they have gained something that deserves a name.

That name is ἀταραξία—ataraxia, freedom from modal ignorance that causes unnecessary suffering.

The term is not accidental; it is the alpha-privative of taraché itself, and means literally “the state of non-taraché). If the analysis of this essay is correct, ataraxia is not mere absence of feeling, not numbness or indifference, but the positive condition of affective accuracy: feeling what reality warrants, no more and no less. It is a state we have robust reason to pursue—on intellectual grounds, because it accords with truth; on practical grounds, because it enables flourishing. This is the modal therapy: not extirpation of affect but its education, not denial of reality but its acceptance, not rejection of love but its liberation from unmeetable conditions.

Taraché (ταραχή) is self-inflicted, function-inhibiting suffering generated by a misunderstanding of the modal nature of things. It is therefore rejectable—both in reason, by correcting belief, and in practice, by the disciplined habituation that makes correction effective. The goal is not the absence of feeling but the presence of wisdom: to fear what can be averted, to love what can be cultivated, and to accept what cannot be changed—each in its proper measure, each in its proper domain.

Cole Whetstone did his undergraduate work in Classics at Harvard University and received an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He taught Ancient Greek at Oxford and co-founded Oxford Latinitas, a society of Oxford academics dedicated to reviving Latin and Greek in scholarly use. He now lives in New York City, where he is a co-organizer for the New York Philosophy Club.

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In this Journal’s pilot issue from last March, we mentioned that contemporary culture is facing huge transitions globally. And the practice of philosophy is facing a transition as well. Until sometime in the 20^th century, one thing was pretty clear to its students: understanding the natural world and the nature of “man” was the enterprise of Philosophy, even though philosophers might not agree on which theory would be best. Even when the authority of Plato and Aristotle weakened as the modern era approached (just after the late medieval period), these students could at least be assured as to what the philosophical problems were. By the late 17^th century, “natural philosophy” was seeking to allocate the natural science of the day towards answering these so-called (and still called) “Big Questions” of philosophy.

But these “Big Questions” are modern questions for modern ears, and today many would insist that the era we are now in is no longer modern. Our present era is supposedly “postmodern” – though there is no exact consensus as to what that means. (And as a sign of the confusing times we’re in, there are even those today who want to restore natural philosophy to its venerable former status, and claim that science is doing exactly that – as if the postmodern moment were over before we even began to understand what it was!)

This journal issue follows up on two aspects of this transition.

(1) The first is the revisionary trend we see happening among today’s philosophers, as old views once generally discarded have been brought to new life in the present moment. As an illustration, we provide here three essays which, in rather different ways, assess the philosophical prospects for that most ancient of “sciences” – astrology.

Kilaya Ciriello is a practicing astrologer and staunch advocate of Platonism. In his article he presents us with a distinction within astrology that may help explain its modern disrepute. Most of us probably think of astrology as the entertaining pastime (or trusty consultant?) supplied in one’s daily horoscope – conveniently assisted by a teeming industry of (paid) consultants to help us “find happiness with astrology!” Kilaya begins to lay out for our consideration how a rather different astrological approach might prove much more promising.

D.Seiple, on the other hand, begins from his own skeptical attitude towards astrology, but suspends these suspicions with the intention of better understanding and assessing astrology’s prospects for regaining philosophical respectability. This turns out to be a more complicated project than its dismissive critics may have imagined, and raises other matters related to the philosophy of science. (On this, look forward to future issues of this journal.)

Cole Whetstone is a convinced proponent of astrology, but in a unique and surprising way. Cole’s intention is to revive the practice of divination. (Yes, you read that right.) Not however as one might naturally guess: through supernatural or occult means -- but rather by analogy with recent advances in computational efficiency. A.I. programs have recently shown spectacular progress based on large language models (LLMs) that are trained on vast sets of data, and when applied to natural language are able to predict and generate texts better (some say) than humans themselves. Cole applies this to what he takes to be the semiotic relation between celestial configurations and the well-being of humans. He has also outlined an ambitious empirical test to assess his theory.

(2) The second aspect we have chosen to pursue in this issue is the changing self-portrait we see emerging within philosophy itself. This is not by any means new to the postmodern era: since ancient times schools of philosophy have been defined by the subject matters and procedures that these traditions have expounded. But these days there is a deep disquiet within some precincts of the discipline itself, as some of its practitioners have exerted considerable philosophical skill towards questioning the very usefulness of philosophy. (You might notice a remarkable irony in this…)

Logan Zelk has channeled both the aphoristic style of Nietzsche and the substance of Martin Heidegger’s later work, to present a challenge not only to philosophy but to the equanimity of those who seek to practice it. Beginning from Socratic assumptions, his discussion proceeds somewhat in the skeptical spirit of Plato’s eventual successors, though with Heidegger’s emphasis on the primal origins of language and with Logan’s own vivid sense of philosophical tragedy.

Grayson McDowell offers us a very different picture of philosophy, which serves to remind us that not everyone has jumped aboard the deconstructionist bandwagon. Grayson retains the traditional faith in philosophy as a progressive discipline – that is, as one in which progress can be made and charted. In such world, it would be a matter of both rationality and commonsense to build upon the achievements of previous experts rather than always reinventing the philosophical wheel.

D. Seiple offers a brief reading of the Socratic project, especially as this might relate to the activities of our Philosophy Club, and invites readers to reflect on their own interest in having the conversations that our weekly sessions make possible. He sees the promise of philosophy not as endless questioning, but as a cleansing exercise in the service of one’s own wellbeing, and not just through our weekly meetings but through the pages of this journal as well.

(3) And finally, in this issue we have continued our tradition of welcoming literary submissions. Weiyang Gao has given us a fictionalized biography (but “based on a true story,” and perhaps we can guess whose it might be). It portrays the early years of Gantin, a Chinese student whose only solace in life has been his love of truth and his work as a visual artist. His encounter with philosophical texts promises a respite from the indignities of adolescent suffering, as he eventually embarks on his new life in America. We can look forward to following his continuing story in subsequent issues.

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Artwork: Jacques Villon, The Philosopher (1930)

D. Seiple is the Chief Editor of the NY Journal of Philosophy. He especially enjoys symphony concerts and pre-postmodern art museums. He has a master’s degree in theology (Drew) and a doctorate in philosophy (Columbia), and his publications can be found on PhilPapers.

Know Thyself is a central teaching within Plato’s dialogues. Socrates consistently recommended introspection in order to determine the best way of making decisions. Unless one knows oneself, he argued, one cannot possibly know what is best for oneself.

Plato’s dialogues contain not just this simple exhortation, however. They also contain suggestions for how to pursue it. Overall within Plato’s writings, all suggestions for knowledge of any sort converge on virtue. Virtue is considered to be one’s greatest wealth because its practice increases the clarity and strength of the mind. With a strong mind we could come to know ourselves and through that knowledge, come to know what is good for us. More specifically however, in the Republic and Laws Plato outlined a progression of subjects that must be studied and mastered in order to obtain the ultimate perfect knowledge of the Good, in itself. “Knowing the Good in itself” is short-hand for the knowledge of what is best for oneself in every situation. In Plato, this training, starts with mathematics, progresses to geometry, then to solid geometry and finally, to astrology.

“And isn’t he also a master of astronomy [astrology] and arithmetic and music—of all that an educated man should know?” (Theaetetus, 145a, cf. Republic 528d-e).

And it is in the description of astrology that we see the circle closed; that is, astrology is the science that brings the scientist to study him or herself most directly. The prior disciplines give the philosopher the tools which he or she then brings to astrology in order to see oneself most clearly.

The Greek word used within the dialogues is not a specific word for astrology but rather the Greek word we tend to translate as astronomy. This causes confusion in many readers when they are unable to understand how astronomy could be used as a device for self-inquiry. But the description given for what is called “astronomy” is not astronomy as we know it today but is rather actually astrology as it has developed in the West. Astronomy, as it is known and practiced today, was closer to what is called the natural philosophy of pre-Socratic Greece. In the following quote we can understand the reference to Hesiod as a reference to natural philosophy; that is, philosophy concerned with physical objects.

“Its name is astronomy, an answer no one would ever expect through unfamiliarity with the subject. People do not know that the true astronomer must be the wisest person. I do not mean anyone practicing astronomy the way Hesiod did and everyone else of that sort . . . but the one who has observed seven of the eight circuits, each of them completing its own orbit in a way no one can easily contemplate who is not endowed with an extraordinary nature” (Epinomis, 990a, emphasis mine).

This is not a description of astronomy. The field of astronomy discovers, names and describes the physical characteristics of the stars and planets while the field of astrology interprets these discoveries as metaphorically significant to our daily lives. In other words, astrology looks at the night sky as if there were a meaningful intelligence behind their placements, movements, appearance, etc. It is this meaningful design that differentiates astronomy from astrology, in the main. Astrology assumes that there is a meaningful correspondence between what we see in the sky above and in our very lives on earth. Astrology therefore looks at moving objects in nature and studies that movement in order to make better decisions in life in general.

A lot of confusion about this comes from the fact that astrology can be and has been used for different purposes; i.e., purposes that Plato did not endorse. Plato’s is not an astrology that predicts the future based on the movements of the planets and stars. The predictive way of using astrology is, to the best of our knowledge today, how astrology originally developed in Babylon and Sumeria. But Plato pointed to some other way of practicing astrology—to study oneself and the circumstances of one’s life through the orbits of the planets. This is the use of astrology that Plato recommended and may have even invented.

Regardless of who first developed this type of astrology, today called natal astrology, it has developed and grown in popularity from Plato’s time continually, up to and including today. Ptolemy summarized this Plato-inspired science of astrology in his Tetrabiblos (2nd century AD). Quite differently, astronomy, as a modern science, denies that there is any rational reason for looking at the planets in the way Plato suggested. Astronomy is only interested in studying observable characteristics—as if the planets and stars were only physical bodies, not designed and ruled by intelligence.

Socrates, however, rejected this type of materialistic science as the mere analysis of shadows. He taught that ontological reason and purpose must be the foundation behind any study of what moves and changes. Thus, astronomy serves utilitarian purposes of survival, security, comfort and pleasure while natal astrology serves self-inquiry. Although predictive astrology claims to serve the same utilitarian purposes that astronomy does (giving tools in order to win wars, for example), natal astrology is interested only in the movement of the soul from ignorance to wisdom, from imbalance to balance, from disharmony to harmony, from sickness to health.

“It signifies moving together (homou polēsis), whether the moving together of the heavens around what we call the poles (poloi), or the harmonious moving together in music which we call ‘being in concert’ (symphonia); for, as those who are clever in astronomy [astrology] and music say, all these things move together simultaneously by a kind of harmony. Apollo is the god who directs the harmony and makes all things move together (homopolõn), whether for gods or human beings” (Cratylus, 405c).

“It’s likely that, as the eyes fasten on astronomical motions, so the ears fasten on harmonic ones, and that the science of astronomy [astrology] and harmonics are closely akin” (Republic, 530d).

“The love felt by good people . . . must be encouraged and protected.. This is the honorable heavenly species of Love, produced by the melodies of Urania, the heavenly muse. The other . . .is common and vulgar. . . .when the sort of Love that is crude and impulsive controls the seasons, he brings death and destruction. He spreads the plague and many other diseases. . . All these are the effects of the immodest and disordered species of Love on the movements of the stars and the seasons of the year, that is, on the objects studied by the science called astronomy [astrology]” (Symposium, 187c-188b).

“A soul or souls—and perfectly virtuous souls at that—have been shown to be the cause of all these phenomena [of the stars and planets]” (Laws, 899a).

I am not claiming Plato’s words directly created the way in which astrology is practiced today. He only recommended a way of contemplating the planets and the stars in pursuit of self-knowledge. Western astrology developed out of this suggestion. Plato’s ultimate goal for astrology was to see the Good, in itself, as represented by the sun. His astrologer, after a long period of contemplation,

“Finally, I suppose, he’d be able to see the sun, not images of it in water or some alien place, but the Sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it. . . . And at this point he would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see” (Republic, 516a-c).

This causation however is easily misunderstood.

When Socrates stated that the astrologer would eventually realize that the Sun is the cause of all changing phenomena he was describing the awakening of one who has left the cave (from the Republic’s famous Allegory of the Cave). This is the realization that intelligence precedes material forms: seeing the Sun as the cause of all phenomena then leads to seeing light as the cause of all phenomena and seeing light as the cause of all phenomena then leads to seeing our capacity to perceive as the cause of all phenomena. So when the astrologer recognizes that the Sun is the cause of all things, he or she is verifying the premise of astrology; i.e., that intelligence is behind our perception of all objects and their motions. This is also the perception of the possibility for permanent happiness through the recognition of an intimate connection between our internal and external worlds.

Socrates’ astrology also engages the virtue of piety (eusebeia) because on face value it is concerned with the gods. For Socrates, astrology begins when one (at least, hypothetically) accepts that the planets and stars are intelligent gods who are actually our controllers, managers, judges, directors, advisors and even owners/puppeteers. This piety is, of course, largely absent from modern astrology. But nevertheless it is quite stridently described in Plato’s dialogues:

“I declare that God is the cause and that it could never be otherwise. . . . Unless a soul is attached to each of them or even in each [of them], earth, heaven and all the stars and all the masses made of these things cannot move with such precision. . . . making all that takes place turn out good for us all” (Epinomis 983b-c, emphasis mine).

So Plato’s astrology automatically includes and supports piety while modern astrology doesn’t require this idea of divine agency within a divine plan in order for it to be practiced. For Plato, astrology is presented as a vehicle for piety in that it gives a tangible way to picture, envision and listen to the gods. This divine form of communication naturally requires an intense effort on our part to decipher. Our intelligence naturally expands in our efforts to decipher the movements of the planets and stars in order to understand what the gods are saying.

The astrological interpretations of the astronomical observations thus serve a spiritual purpose and not a material one. The message in the sky, Socrates reported in the Republic, has nothing to do with physics in the modern sense:

“We should consider the decorations in the sky to be the most beautiful and most exact of visible things. We should consider their motions to fall far short of the true ones. . . . [the astrologer] won’t try to grasp the truth about them [their motions, etc.] in any sort of way since they’re connected to body and visible [like the shadows of the cave]. . . . It is by means of problems then, as in the study of geometry [or measurement], that we will pursue astronomy and we will let be the things in the heavens if we are to have a part in the true science of astronomy and so, convert to right use from uselessness that natural indwelling intelligence of the soul. . . . [And so, we should prevent our students] from attempting to learn anything that does not conduce to the end we have in view . . . the [spiritual] goal of everything” (Republic, 529c-531a emphasis mine).

“Let be the things of the heavens” is the key phrase here indicating a rejection of the scientific study of objects for utilitarian purposes. “The [spiritual] goal of everything” refers to reason. We are told to Know Thyself in order to find the Good, in itself. How can we recognize what is good for us if we don’t know who we are? And the Good, in itself, is what we want for its capacity to make us permanently happy. We gain that knowledge through virtue, through the power of virtue to clear our minds of all lies. So astrology is a means of developing that difficult to develop virtue, piety—looking up at the planets and stars to see our place within the theater of the gods—for the help it gives us purifying our minds. Needing a clear mind to know ourselves and see the Good, astrology has the ultimate goal of everything, always in mind.

Interestingly, Socrates presented astrology, in this very specific way, as the highest of philosophical practices. It is through the contemplation of celestial appearances and motions that we learn the most important lesson the gods have to offer: math, measurement and proportion. Measurement is a skill, utilized and developed through contemplation of the heavens, giving structure to the dialogues as a whole. Measurement utilizes the discovery of the single defining principle of what is real and true and so begins the journey of building wisdom along an absolute path. Measurement is therefore a repudiation of relativism and so its development is crucial in any attempt to give philosophical support to morality and ethics in society. Thus, the beginning, practice and end of “star-gazing” is what allows for measurement to exist in the absolute sense—the realization that reason or intelligence has ordered and is controlling all things. And the sky, Socrates said, is the easiest place in which to verify that for ourselves:

“The only account that can do justice to the wonderful spectacle presented by the cosmic order of sun, moon and stars and the revolution of the whole heaven is that reason arranges it all” (Philebus, 28d).

“Such was the reason, then, such the god’s design for the coming to be of time, that he brought into being the Sun, the Moon and five other stars, for the begetting of time” (Timaeus, 38c).

The astral bodies, then, through a depiction of order, depict the intelligent stage upon which we have been placed and the intelligent script which we are then to read.

Astrology as loosely sketched within the dialogues is a practice that leads to a deeper spiritual understanding of ourselves and our lives. This is astrology in its purest form. Through it, we study the movement of the stars in order to determine how best we should move.

“Now there is but one way to care for anything, and that is to provide for it the nourishment and the motions that are proper to it. And the motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These, surely, are the ones which each of us should follow. We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth, by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe [in the night sky], and so, bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition. And when this conformity is complete, we shall have achieved our goal: that most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods, both now and forevermore” (Timaeus, 90c-d, emphasis mine).

In other words, we study the night sky to study ourselves, our capacity for harmony and disharmony, in order to learn how to live the best of all possible lives. That this quote comes from Timaeus is significant, as this dialogue was the most influential of all of Plato’s dialogues until the Age of the Enlightenment (just after Marsilio Ficino and others reintroduced ancient Greek texts to Europe).

Astrology for Plato was also used to provide a proof for the existence of gods in the first place, all in support of developing virtue:

“...two arguments in particular which encourage belief in the gods. . . . One is . . .[that] the soul . . . is far older and far more divine than all . . . things . . . Another argument was based on the systematic motion of the heavenly bodies and the other objects under the control of reason, which is responsible for the order in the universe” (Laws, 966d-e, emphasis mine).

In other words, the heavenly bodies show a mathematical harmony that proves intelligent creation or the primacy of intelligence over matter. And so, astrology is used to refute “scientists [who] assert that these things are simply earth and stone, incapable of paying heed to human affairs” (Laws, 886e).

In proving for intelligent design, Socrates sought to prove the soul as both its object and its agent and as the faculty within us capable of following the instructions conveyed by it on how to do best in life and achieve the happiness that we want. This places astrology in a very highly esteemed position within Socrates’ instructions, since everything depends on our ability to successfully transfer our identity from the body to the soul — from something changing to something unchanging, from something fleeting to something durable. The soul, Plato taught, is the landing strip for the practice of Know Thyself. We need a knowledge of the soul in order to come on board with and acquire virtue and thereby make our communities better for it:

“What about the soul? Will it be a good one if it gets to be disorganized or if it gets to have a certain organization and order? The name for the states of organization of the body is ‘healthy,’ as a result of which health and the rest of bodily excellence comes into being in it. . . .And the name for the states of organization and order of the soul is ‘lawful’ and ‘law’ which lead people to become law-abiding and orderly and these are justice and self-control” (Gorgias, 504b-d).

This is the same way that Socrates connected virtue — as the health of the soul — with obeying the law in the Republic. And it is the soul that astrology studies and helps to prove — all in the service of virtue and making the best of all possible choices in life:

“Soul, by virtue of its own motions, stirs into movement everything in the heavens and on Earth and in the sea. The names of the motions of soul are: wish, reflection, diligence, council, opinion, true and false, joy and grief, cheerfulness and fear, love and hate. All those qualities which soul employs when in conjunction with reason it runs aright and always governs things rightly and happily. And when, in converse, with unreason, it produces results that are in all respects opposite” (Laws, 897 a-b emphasis mine).

And so, in Plato’s astrology there are eight gods that come to be revered when piety is developed: the Sun, the Moon, five planets and the sky itself. The “heavens,” the sky itself, or Uranus, is the place in which not only the stars and planets dwell but the earth as well. It also represents the practice of astrology as Plato described it. So, for Socrates the night sky referred to the known universe. And these heavens are considered, as a whole, the god Uranus. Socrates placed special importance on this god (as the patron of astrology itself) in the power that this god has within our lives and also the importance of the lessons he teaches. This is most likely why modern astrology considers the planet Uranus to be the god of astrology.

“How can we keep from believing that what causes all things that are good for us is also the cause of the good that is by far the greatest, namely, wisdom? So, Megillus and Clinias, what god am I speaking of with such solemnity? Uranus, the god whom above all others it is most just to pray to and to honor, as all the other divinities and gods do. We will unanimously agree that he has been the cause of all other good things for us. But we declare that he is really the one who gave us number too [i.e., measurement], and he will continue to give it, supposing that we are willing to follow him closely [to practice astrology — I suggest]. If we come to contemplate him in the right way — whether we prefer to call him Cosmos or Olympus or Heaven [Uranus] — let us call him as we like, but let us notice carefully how by decorating himself and making the stars revolve in himself through all their orbits, he brings about the seasons and provides nourishment for all. Together with the entirety of number, he also furnishes, we would insist, everything else that involves intelligence and everything that is good. But this is the greatest thing, for a person to receive from him the gift of numbers and go on to examine fully the entire revolution of the heavens” (Epinomis, 977a-b, emphasis mine).

This quote, in its entirety, is actually an instruction in astrology as an expression of piety. That “intelligence and everything that is good” is furnished by the god is not given as a statement to be considered for its factual basis. It is given instead to those who have already accepted Socrates’ suggestion that virtue must be developed. Accepting that, this speech recommends piety related to the sky as divine. It tells us how and why to be pious and how that must exclude any impulse to utilize empirical observations non-reverentially.

So, this quote instructs us that the god of the sky is the god of astrology who teaches the lesson of number by giving us a model of it to look at. So the lesson of number not only teaches the metaphysics of absolutism (how to judge things absolutely; i.e., measure them precisely for good and bad) but it also teaches us the cyclical or periodic nature of all motions in the world. The planets move forward and they also move backward with regularity. This and other types of celestial motions give us periodicity or time, itself. As Socrates proclaimed in the Republic,

“For everything that has come into being destruction is appointed. . . There is a cycle of bearing and barrenness for soul and body as often as the revolution of their orbs come full circle” (546a).

An understanding of cycles is thus a very practical aspect of wisdom as a whole. Therefore, astrology is the branch of wisdom that concerns not only measurement but also timing. Both are aspects of order and harmony. We observe the periodicity of the motions of the planets and introspect about the presence of similar cycles within. If both show an underlying intelligence then a bridge appears between our inner and outer worlds giving us hope for some type of lasting fulfillment.

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Artwork by Emily Kruse

Kilaya is an independent scholar & self-published author (SOCRATES GURU, the latest), Stanford alumni ('93 in Modern Thought & Literature, studied philosophy with Stuart Hampshire) and native New Yorker, who maintains TheFundamentalistPlato.substack.com .

In his article for the current issue of the NY Journal of Philosophy, Kilaya Ciriello offers us a perspective on astrology that may be new to many of us. However, his opening point is more familiar. The Socratic injunction “Know Thyself” is the well-known exhortation to virtue and the long-standing marker for the origin of Western philosophy. Soon after the death of Socrates, this term “virtue” came to cover the positive character traits encompassed by the Platonic notion of the Good. The everyday world, as we familiarly know it, is said to be less real than the unseen unity underlying it, and this somehow connects our character traits to a unifying Whole. This is a view that had actually been rather widely accepted until only the last few centuries. Kilaya still accepts this view, as his article makes clear.

This ancient, all-embracing concept of the Good continues to puzzle many modern minds, who instead regard the virtues as separate functions, nothing more than mundane dispositions explaining why we perform well whatever tasks we should. To fix your badly leaking sink you call in the kind of person who has been trained in the skills of plumbing. In quaint language, you could say that such a person possesses “the virtues of a plumber” – and that’s that. But if we believe in astrology, there’s much more to it.

Personally, I have long been among the most skeptical when it comes to astrology, which has always struck me as one of the least reputable of human endeavors, except perhaps as innocent entertainment for Halloween parlor games.

Other readers may disagree with me. So here may be our chance to think this through a little more. However, that means applying the Principle of Charity and starting with as sympathetic a view towards astrology as our imagination allows. Then we can proceed to testing it out in thought, and with evidence if we can muster it. There are other ways of doing philosophy, but this general strategy pretty much captures how professionalized philosophy has developed, and it bears the same general features of logic that the scientific method displays – what is called “testability.” And we can expand this to include testing out the conceptual as well as the empirical implications. Yet despite this, we also face some limitations when it comes to astrology, which my discussion here should make clear.

**

People tend to be opinionated towards astrology, including some in our philosophy club. I’d bet that at least a few of us think it’s pure nonsense. Kilaya’s article is particularly interesting because although Kilaya himself is a practicing astrologer, he acknowledges that the more pop versions of astrology simply cannot be rescued from the status of a pseudoscience. So we actually start from a shared point of view on this, even if we tend to be skeptical.

“Pseudoscience” is a term that gained currency among skeptics in the 19^th century. Today that same term is intended to distinguish theories and methods that claim to be as good as the recognized sciences but whose procedures are at variance with scientific method. Phrenology is a good example. It claimed to predict character traits of a person (including intelligence and moral virtue) by measuring bumps on the skull, which were supposed to reflect effective use of the brain’s “muscles.” The more mental competencies were “exercised,” the more space they would need in the expanding skull, just as the more push-ups a guy does, the more his expended masculinity should pop out through his expanding tank top.

Phrenology has been discredited,1 but it had remained vibrant in some quarters through the early twentieth century. Likewise, pseudoscientific applications of astrology flourish in some quarters even today, and your daily horoscope would be an example of this, insofar as it might aim to promote specific predictions and advice concerning upcoming events in your own life. This is commonly referred to as horary astrology, which is now generally rejected even among the “more cautious” defenders2 of what Kilaya calls natal astrology.

I have always assumed that something like horary astrology was just what astrology is all about. But I like to keep an open mind, and so when Kilaya announced that he was giving a workshop on natal astrology, I decided to give it a try. That required me to get my birth chart drawn up – easy to do online. Having done that, however, I was quite surprised when it gave me some definitive personal information that it should not have been able to produce just from the data I entered.

And this made me seriously wonder, at least for a moment, whether astrology shouldn’t be rescued from its banishment as a pseudoscience. So how might we decide this? Let’s see.

**

People who check their daily horoscope for guidance often reflect back on their immediate past and actually do find meaning in what they read. But is this because (this version of) astrology is a science?

Let’s take a related example. Some Saturday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I might pause before a lovely Grecian urn, get enraptured by those ancient figures, and suddenly recall familiar words from my freshman English-lit class – “Thou still unravished bride of quietness!” Those words certainly do “make sense” of what I am observing, to me anyway. But in finding aesthetic meaning in a piece of pottery, have I just made a scientific discovery?

Of course not. But why not? We might say that for this, my mental image must meet the criteria of genuine science. What makes intuitive sense to me personally might not make scientific sense simply because it would not be testable by “objective” criteria. Simply being inspired by my love of John Keats’ poetry doesn’t cut it. Similarly, any conviction that I (as a Gemini3) might take away from horary astrology is nothing more than an index of my own particular sensibility (my own personal “lens”), which tough-minded empiricists could care less about. On the other hand, if those same astrological findings could be scientifically confirmed, then even the empiricists would have to care quite a bit more.

Testability is supposed to assure us that a successful prediction is not just a lucky guess, by allowing even skeptics to see if a horoscope’s readings can get scientifically confirmed. But believers in astrology should want to confirm such a prediction as well, by relying on more than the mere feeling they have about it, and more than a few coincidental predictions that happen to come true. Would anyone really want to say that a broken clock can tell time just because it happens to be right twice a day? Likewise for any retrospective confidence in felt “synchronicity” between the readings of my horoscope and the facts of my real life. Is there any reason to trust that the horoscope can “tell” my future in that way? Most thinking people these days would say no.

**

But that’s just for pop astrology. What about natal astrology? Can its findings be confirmed? Deciding this turns out to be more complicated than it might at first seem.

Nonetheless, many knowledgeable people think the issue is already decided. Just look at some of the expert internet resources. If you consult the Wikipedia entry for “Western Astrology,” for example, you’ll find a decent overview of the topic, but it begins with a definitive-sounding pronouncement: “Astrology is a pseudoscience and has consistently failed experimental and theoretical verification.“ (Notice that no distinction is made between horary and natal astrology.) One of the supporting citations is the article on science and pseudoscience in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is commonly taken to be the most comprehensive one-stop summary for a vast number of philosophical topics. Many young scholars in particular, having once landed there, feel no need to stop off anywhere else. And in this case they might not need to, if astrology is really no better than phrenology (or phlogiston, to take another example).

Kilaya’s project, on the other hand, wants to make us skeptical towards this common view. Natal astrology, as he describes it, seeks to tell us less about our future destiny and more about our underlying character. This is not to say it has no relation to the later events – its relation is roughly the same as the relation between “virtue” and the future. I may be a generous type of person (I might have the “virtue of generosity”), but that would not imply that I’m going to be offering $10 to absolutely every needy person I mean. Would it actually have any specific predictive implications at all? Astrologically derived “information” (if you can really call it that) is said to be more subtle than such predictions, which (again) are more like pop horoscope readings.

Actually though, what natal astrology conveys does seem to have something in common those poetic words about the Grecian urn at the Met. As we’ll see, natal astrology (like romantic poetry) is an invitation to draw upon our subjectivity rather than just the empirical evidence. But in contrast to that Keats moment in the museum, this also presents us with a decisive contrast with horary astrology.

This is very important to see. Natal astrological is an invitation to self-interpretation and not just sentimental revery, and this serves “a spiritual purpose and not a material one”4 -- less about the stars than about the self.

Natal astrology then offers itself as one path to self-knowledge, but we need to be careful when we say this. (1) First – as I understand it, natal astrology at its best does not hazard specific predictions, nor does it stop at rather vague formulations of a person’s character (“You are an extrovert!”). Any specification about details like this would not be a final result. It would be an opening for self-reflection, to see how (if at all) a particular reading actually applies – and it allows for other factors to override such an application. Missing this would be missing the whole point, by treating the outputs of the calculations as a substitute for the person herself. This would place someone in the same position as the sophomore who turns in a philosophy paper authored by ChatGPT – in Kilaya’s language, we could regard it as substituting a material purpose (getting the needed grade) for a spiritual one (self-growth in one’s intellectual virtues).

(2) Secondly, we need to be careful about how we understand “self-knowledge.” That’s a topic for another discussion entirely, but let’s see if an example can help here. If I learn somehow (maybe from the stars and planets?) that I have a tendency to be extroverted, then I might want to consider this when I am offered a job opportunity with no likely chance to interact with my co-workers. (And I might be surprised at what this consideration might open up.) I might feel seduced by its prestige and promised pay, but this would be a job that isolates me from human contact. So I need to decide if it’s a decent fit for me nonetheless (since I may have heavy debts to pay off, perhaps). On the other hand, a tough job might get even tougher if I fail to give enough weight to the sort of person I am.5 Here I would be facing a moral dilemma, and moral dilemmas are always invitations for self-assessment. Whenever we address moral dilemmas in real life, we are hazarding out into uncertain territory, with or without astrology to help.

Of course to a skeptic, the empirical leniency that natal astrology exhibits – leaving us with only interpretive suggestions rather than clear decision procedures -- might seem suspiciously convenient given the lack of more solid evidence for astrology’s efficacy. How is astrology’s vagueness anything more than an escape hatch (what philosophers of science call an “ad hoc hypothesis”), designed to save a bad theory from discredit? That (allegedly) would make astrology the pseudoscience its skeptics claim. That is what we’re trying to decide here. If we really need a definitive decision procedure for astrology to survive its discreditors, we’ve reached our conclusion. Astrology can’t provide this. So -- end of story?

But things may not be quite this simple. It is certainly true that an extrovert horoscopic reading, say, might not cough up rigorously testable predictions. But there turns out to be a plausible reason for this. An elaborate system of further stellar and planetary indicators, which are said to pick out additional factors (once again, other tendencies of character), might either support or mitigate any isolated character trait. At least that’s what any astrologist might tell me on the days I don’t “feel” like the extrovert the stars discern me to be.

Admittedly this entire story though feels like a black hole to skeptics. But here we may notice a surprising fact. This elaborate conceptual machinery produces calculations rather comparable to a meteorological model6 -- one that “predicts” but might not absolutely promise fair weather for this Saturday’s planned pool party. So I listen to the weather report and have to do a little soul-searching so see if I really am going to go. I can’t get a definitive prediction from the weatherman to help me! Instead, I need to consider the risks inherent in the uncertain situation. Once I know the risks, I then need to know myself well enough to make a wise decision. (What do I really want? How risk averse am I?)

So here is what we see at this point: astrology, with its vast conceptual network of categories and calculations, embodies a comprehensive systematic framework for producing probabilistic models (and A.I. works in the same general way.) And this provide us our first clue as to how astrology might be rescued from the pseudosciences. We have applied the Principle of Charity, to discover that natal astrology is very similar to normal science -- at least in its repertoire of rather exact calculations, and this makes it possible to apply the model to anyone with a complete birth chart. These conditions (the exact placement of the stars and planets relative to the earth) are not generally addressed in the same manner by normal science, but appear to be every bit as empirical as many of the conditions commonly recognized by social psychology (for example), and perhaps more empirically rigorous than psychoanalytic explanations.7

**

Even so, by itself this isn’t enough to effect a rescue from pseudoscientific exile. For one thing, it still may not be clear how astrology differs in this way from Ptolemaic astronomy, which offered its own structural machinery for a host of specific predictions.8 And secondly: just because a model may yield a consistent range of results (reliability), that does not mean that the results are true (valid) – as a number of our group members have pointed out in the banter after our Wednesday evening meetings. Even advocates of phrenology might appeal to a consistent set of scull configurations for their teenage subjects, without any eventual predictive success.

So again, how would we decide the status of astrology? The obvious proviso is the same we have been considering already – that it needs to make predictions that turn out empirically true, at least at a rate better than pure chance alone would suggest.

But this means we cannot consider traits of character in isolation. Let’s take another example: let’s say I “know” that I am an outgoing and gregarious person (a true extrovert), and I have also heard that my birth sign is Gemini. My friendly astrologer is not at all surprised at this since persons with a so-called “positive” sun sign (Gemini’s are included here) are correlated with extrovertism. He even announces some carefully designed empirical studies appearing to confirm this – not by showing how any one predictive trait turns out true, but how an entire range of such predictions show a statistical tendency to do so. And lo and behold, yes! My due diligence uncovers at least one such confirming study from highly reputable researchers.9 This is exactly the kind of empirical study the skeptics should be interested in, no? This would seem to indicate that astrology can do what it claims: even someone who did not already know their sign (which happened to be Gemini) and never thought about whether or not they were extroverted, might learn from their birth chart that they are “likely” to be so. There, a true prediction!

Alas. Problems remain for the astrologers even here. For one thing, these results appear to show a rather weak relationship. Even this begs for an explanation, though. Perhaps, as Kilaya suggests, there is after all a deeper metaphysical reason, having to do with the Platonic Good. That might be an explanation for the statistical significance of the findings on this. But there might be less ethereal reasons -- the study design might have been faulty, or the statistical calculations erroneous. This has been suggested even by some who report having confirmed those extroversion findings.10 The most convincing of these caveats might be the possibility that subjects in these studies already know their sun sign. Thus they succumb to confirmation bias, without recalling the many occasions in their lives when the behavioral opposite trait occurred instead.

Is it possible to determine this? Here is a question that only a statistician could love, so I won’t belabor it any further. (Here is the limitation I have already mentioned). But it’s worth noting that those who do believe in astrology are not worried about such questions. They typically come to their beliefs because they think astrology “works.” This is hard to refute (as we have seen), and this is not because the evidence is so overwhelming (as we have also seen). As one vocal critic has indicated, the appearance of efficacy for astrology does not depend upon the demonstrable truth of the theory, but only upon the subjective resonance someone feels for the news that astrology brings them. And that brings us back to where we started, in the Museum and in front of the Grecian urn. To say astrology “works” is something like saying that a placebo works – which it very often does, and perhaps even when a tested subject knows it’s only a placebo!11 “Astrology is thus made nonfalsifiable…”12

**

This mention of “falsifiability” is import here. Just as long as we accept the falsifiability as the foundation for scientific credibility, we seem unable to rescue astrology from disrepute. Falsifiability was the “demarcation criterion” for philosophers of science as recently as the late 1970s, and it still seems to be gospel throughout much of the skeptical literature.

Of course, most thinking astrologers do not accept this starting point,13 arguing instead that “no factor in a birth chart shall be judged in isolation.” Again, this would be the reason that even the most specific predictions of character end up only weakly reflected in the empirical studies: there are too many confounding factors, so that we should not take apparent refutations of a theory as the final word.

So then this might be where the discussion needs to go. Is the falsifiability criterion itself defensible?

But this will have to await another discussion.

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Artwork by Carin Yoo

D. Seiple is the Chief Editor of the NY Journal of Philosophy. He especially enjoys symphony concerts and pre-postmodern art museums. He has a master’s degree in theology (Drew) and a doctorate in philosophy (Columbia), and his publications can be found on PhilPapers.

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