I wanted to know why we need to sleep. The answers I got: because resting makes us feel good (no it doesn’t, because I’m not conscious of it); because we need to recharge (fine, but why do we need to recharge? Seems like a bit of a design flaw); because that’s just how it is, now go to bed. I maintain, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Here are just some of the many downsides of sleep:

1. Waste of time

2. Boring

3. Compulsory loss of agency (deeply illiberal)

4. Temporarily demoted to the cognitive tier of a houseplant

5. Unfalsifiable possibility of not waking up

Sleep is one of the first things we do out of pure necessity, not because we chose to, not even because our parents told us to. It’s a bit like breathing or eating. But breathing is automatic, and eating is, well, pretty enjoyable. Sleep is neither. You have to remember to close your eyes. (Unless you’re absolutely exhausted, in which case nature finally steps in and handles it for you, which is condescending.) And you get nothing out of the experience itself, because there is no experience. And yet, not only do we just accept this arrangement, we structure our entire lives around it.

If at this point you’re thinking this is an awful lot of scaffolding for a straw man, you’re right. No serious person actually argues this. Sleep presumably does all the things scientists say it does. It restores the body, consolidates memory, regulates mood, clears out whatever needs clearing out, and generally performs the unglamorous maintenance work required to keep the organism going. I do not dispute any of that.

And yet, the biological answers, however true, do not quite answer the stranger philosophical question. Why are we built in such a way that consciousness must disappear periodically?

I was recently presented with an opportunity to revisit this issue. While working a corporate job, the anti-sleep case made a quiet resurgence in my own life. Snippets of my colleagues’ lives outside the office came up in conversation: an early morning workout class, dinner plans, drinks with friends. The numbers weren’t adding up. They were in early, leaving late, and somehow still living full extracurricular lives. When, exactly, were they sleeping? As I settled into the new job and city, I began to experience it for myself. The number of hours I slept dropped to accommodate my pre- and post-work schedule and I began increasingly to think of sleep as an annoyance I had to work around. Then, coincidentally – though I’m told the Baader-Meinhof effect is to blame – I started seeing the anti-sleep case crop up online. Productivity culture had apparently merged with endurance sport, and people were bragging about surviving on ten minutes of sleep and ten Celsius energy drinks a day.

You have to admit it’s a tempting philosophy until biology shows up, as always, to wag its finger. Sleep is good for us. Drinks that are just a few pH points removed from battery acid are not. But if, hypothetically, the health impact were the same, would the finger wagging still be warranted? Wouldn’t I take the Celsius and the extra eight hours in the day? After all, the pathologically pro-productivity mindset is, I think, just an exaggerated version of a much more ordinary human impulse.

We’re supposed to chart our own paths, build the self we want. Life is like a project of self-authorship and our human bodies and waking hours are the raw material we’ve got to work with. Constraint shows up in this story as an obstacle or a test; the thing a sufficiently determined will could, in principle, overcome. Sleep frustrates that desire in the most literal possible way. It takes a finite life and makes roughly a third of it inaccessible to the person living it. Hence the “finance-bro” idea of sleep as a tax on productivity, refusable by anyone disciplined enough to try. (These are incidentally also the people most likely to own a smart mattress).

The parts of life that we don’t actively choose can generally be absorbed into the self-authorship story in two ways. One strategy is to characterize them as obstacles, overcome by determination. Whatever you don’t choose becomes a source of resistance that your strength gets measured up against. It becomes the thing you overcame. Alternatively, what is unchosen can sometimes be dressed up as choice in disguise, as when taking a break gets reframed as a strategy. You take a power nap to recharge (21 minutes exactly for the best productivity-boosting effects), you eat to refuel, you take a break from the gym and call it active recovery. You don’t just decompress, you invest.

But sleep resists this logic. It is not an obstacle to be overcome, because no degree of disciplined willing eliminates the need. Nor can it be framed as a strategic choice, because biological necessity will override our decision should we choose to abstain from it. Every night, for roughly a third of our lives, we are returned to a state we did not choose and cannot refuse. There’s nothing strategic about it. And unlike power naps, we don’t choose to press the pause button on consciousness every night, we come into the world pre-programmed to do so. If selfhood is about self-authorship, the sleeping subject barely qualifies as a self at all.

Nor will it do to say that sleep is just one bodily process among many. Digestion is also unchosen and unavoidable, but it runs quietly beneath the authoring self while the authoring goes on. Sleep does not operate under the self; it suspends it. And it takes its payment in the only currency the self-authorship story counts, claiming a third of the hours the author was planning to use.

The question remains, does this reveal a defect in sleep or in the self-authorship story? Aside from the fact that it feels strange to treat a third of our existence as a design flaw to be minimized, I think there are good reasons to see sleep as being more than just a biological oddity. Considered together, they suggest that the self-authorship story is incomplete.

The first has to do with the universality of the experience. Sleep is one of the few things we all have in common, which makes it a fundamental, unifying feature of what it means to be a human being. Every person who has ever lived has done it. At the end of each day, almost without fail, we lie down and surrender the thread of our own existence. That is, until we wake up and do it all over again.

Sleep is also an equalizer, and for a simple reason: sleep begins precisely where conscious effort ends. That is why none of us can do it better than anyone else, or opt out, or turn it into an achievement. Of course, the wearable health tech industry would like to disagree on that last point. But the idea that sleep is a skill that can be trained or scored hardly makes sense. A skill is something you exercise, and in sleep there is no one there to do the exercising. You wouldn’t say that someone is skilled at digesting.

I digest. I mean, digress. My point is that sleep is, or should be, one of the few things we do that is untouched by the heroic efforts we direct at differentiating ourselves and curating our lives. It is fundamentally non-volitional and non-performative. When we sleep we are temporarily stripped of all of our waking worries, ambitions, and the social or professional identities we cultivate and wear. The sleeper is the subject with all performance and artifice removed and, in that sense, sleep offers the clearest look at what the self-authoring self actually is at its core. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, the condition in which conscious agency is entirely absent is also the one that exposes our most irreducible, shared human baseline.

But now connect these two features to a third, the fact that sleep is also fundamentally a limit. Indeed, as I have been belabouring for some time now, that is perhaps its most central, and strangest feature. Sleep is one of the most constant and powerful reminders that we are creatures with certain inescapable limitations; that we are only human. We are not machines. In an era of unprecedented longevity and medical advancement, it is easy to forget that we don’t have complete dominion over our bodies. And yet, every night, in full possession of our faculties, we lose possession of them. Not because we really want to, but because biology ordains it.

Taken together, these features show that what makes sleep so fundamental to human existence is also what makes it so strange. Sleep is at once a universal, deeply human experience and a constraint. What lies at the core of our common humanity when everything else is stripped away is not a capacity but a limit. The mistake the self-authorship story makes is in imagining human beings as selves first and constrained creatures second.

Of course, none of this explains why we are programmed to sleep, or why nature could not have designed us to perform the same maintenance while awake. Sleep may simply be a fact of nature, something we do not because it is philosophically elegant or personally convenient, but because this just is the kind of creature we happen to be. Still, even if sleep is a brute biological fact, the fact that is both profoundly unproductive and absolutely indispensable is instructive. It shows us that any description of ourselves or life in general that is purely in terms of our productivity leaves out something fundamental about the kind of creatures we are.

The self-authorship story cannot account for sleep because it assumes that anything we didn’t choose must be either an obstacle or a choice in disguise. But sleep is a third thing: a constraint that is partly constitutive of the self it appears to constrain. Indeed, there is no version of you that exists prior to the need for sleep and is merely inconvenienced by it. The constraint is not an intrusion on the self, it is a feature of it. In this sense, sleep is the daily rehearsal of a fact we otherwise spend enormous energy denying, that surrendering to something we cannot control is not a failure of the self but a condition of having one.

This is, I’ll admit, a more generous conclusion than six-year-old me would have accepted. She would have pointed out, correctly, that I still haven’t really answered her question. What I have offered is an interpretation, and a somewhat fanciful one at that. Unfortunately for her, she did not grow up to be a STEM person with access to those kinds of answers.

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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But Camus, brilliant as he was, lacked the imagination to foresee the ultimate evolution of this myth. He failed to imagine what would happen if Sisyphus was handed a corporate ladder, a smartphone, access to a high-speed internet connection, and a premium account on LinkedIn.

If Sisyphus existed today, he would be opening his laptop or phone to draft a LinkedIn post that perfectly paints his punishment as some form of meaningful accomplishment. It would go something like this:

“I am thrilled to announce that I have just completed my 10,000th consecutive incline ascent! Huge shoutout to the Olympic Gods for the ongoing mentorship and for providing this incredible high-impact growth opportunity. Pushing this boulder has taught me so much about resilience, friction optimization, and ownership mentality. Comment RESILIENCE below and I will send you a link to my upcoming FREE Masterclass on Building Resilience. #Grit #CareerGrowth #AgileSisyphus #YouTooCanBeResilient”

The Absurd

This is the exhausting and absurd landscape of the modern achievement society. We are no longer a workforce controlled by external tyrants or explicit chains. Instead, as Byung-Chul Han notes in The Burnout Society, we have transitioned into a culture of voluntary self-exploitation. We are no longer “obedience subjects” fighting against a master; we are “achievement subjects” who willingly amp up the treadmill faster in a bid to gamify our own repetitive exhaustion into key performance indicators.

We do not accept the absurdity of pushing the corporate boulder; instead, we brand it as something that is far from absurd.

The Void

Let’s think about this ritual of performative productivity that dominates the modern white-collar landscape. In any given corporate structure, there is an immense amount of daily energy dedicated to what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” These are roles that consist entirely of tasks that even the person executing them secretly believes are entirely pointless. We spend hours optimizing spreadsheets that no one will read, sync-meeting about upcoming sync-meetings, and engineering complex workflows designed purely to justify headcounts.

Under “standard” classical definitions of labor, this so-called corporate structure should result in alienation and rebellion. Yet, the opposite is happening. These meaningless tasks are somehow branded as existential fulfillment. We do not look at a backlog of unread emails and see an absurd pile of digital boulders; instead, we see a metric of personal worth. We log back on at 9:00 PM to clear the inbox and experience a fleeting wave of dopamine as we clear it out, all the while knowing fully well that by 8:00 AM tomorrow the boulder will have rolled back to the bottom of the hill.

This is where the modern worker parts ways with Camus’s absurd man. Camus argued that Sisyphus’s power was in his lucidity. The moment he walked back down the mountain to retrieve the boulder, he was fully awake to the tragic meaninglessness of his condition. That awareness was his liberation.

The modern professional, however, trades lucidity for a metric. To cope with the existential vacuum of the corporate hierarchy, we manufacture artificial meaning out of pure velocity. If the goal itself is meaningless, e.g., if the corporate project does not actually improve the world by ending world hunger or curing a disease, then we shift our focus entirely to the efficiency of the process. It no longer matters why we are pushing the boulder; what matters is that our velocity metrics are up 15% every quarter. We use data to shield ourselves from the terrifying realization that if we stopped pushing, quite frankly, the universe wouldn’t notice the difference.

The Fiction

This internalization of metrics represents a profound shift in political and personal agency. When an individual ties their existential value to a corporate metric, the capacity for critical reflection is effectively neutralized. You cannot question the ethical or philosophical validity of the system when you are entirely consumed by the frantic necessity of optimizing your place within it. It is simply impossible.

In his critique of late-capitalist hyper-reality, Jean Baudrillard argued that we have replaced the real world with signs and symbols of the real. In the modern workplace, we see the triumph of this simulation. The “performance review” is not an evaluation of actual human contribution; it is simply corporate theater. We use phrases like “circle back”, “put a pin in it” and “touch base” to obscure the reality that we are simply moving digital pixels from one side of a screen to the other.

This simulation prevents us from feeling the weight of our own alienation. Because the truth is, if we allow ourselves to see the boulder for what it truly is (a heavy piece of stone), the psychological tax becomes unbearable. And so, we brand it as something it is not. We frame the endless cycle of corporate repetition as a journey of personal development instead of an existential prison sentence, which is what it is.

The Boulder

To reclaim our humanity within this metric-driven landscape, we must perform a radical act of philosophical recalibration. We must recover the capacity to look at the boulder and call it what it is: a boulder!

This does not require us to quit our jobs or stage an unfeasible exit from the modern economy. No! Instead, it requires a reclamation of the Stoic practice of building an inner fortress. This requires establishing a hard boundary between our economic utility and our existential worth. It means recognizing that a Key Performance Indicator is a metric of optimization and not a measure of your human soul or value.

The next time you find yourself staring at an endless list of corporate tasks or the next time you feel the performative urge to post an update about your latest professional sojourn on LinkedIn, pause. Allow yourself to feel the heavy weight of the boulder against your hands and enjoy the liberating luxury of admitting that the task set before you is completely absurd.

Only then can we genuinely imagine Sisyphus free or happy, as Camus put it.

Unwana Johnson is a lawyer, writer and law tutor. Her work sits at the intersection of psychology, existentialism and the paradox of Being. Offline, you can find her watching the birds and the trees or attempting to converse with the full moon; “I am a lover of nature, she is my habitat.”

Bibliography

• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Dublin: Penguin Books, 1975.

• Daily Stoic. Building an Inner Fortress: Stoic Anxiety Management Techniques. https://dailystoic.com/building-an-inner-fortress-stoic-anxiety-management-techniques/.

• Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

• Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

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I want to take that thinness seriously, partly because it strikes me as one of the characteristic complaints of our moment, and partly because the help on offer has a way of deepening the condition it is meant to treat. Tell a friend you feel hollow, and you will be handed a protocol. There is a morning routine for it, a breathwork sequence, a cold plunge at dawn, a book with a one-word title in confident capitals. Underneath all this advice sits a single assumption, that your problem is one of management. Your life is a system that has begun to underperform, and what it needs is a better operator at the controls.

That assumption has become so natural that it is easy to forget it was not always available to people. To optimise something is to tune it toward a goal you are already holding fixed, the quickest route between two cities, or the training block that shaves four minutes off a marathon. Optimisation is a genuinely powerful way of thinking, and within its proper territory, I would not dream of talking anyone out of it. The trouble begins when we extend it, quietly and without ever quite deciding to, from the parts of life that have settled goals to the whole of a life, whose goal is exactly the thing in question. You cannot optimise a journey before you have worked out where you are going, and the peculiar ache of the thin life is that it has mistaken motion for direction. The spreadsheet can confirm that she read forty books. It has nothing whatever to say about whether they were worth reading, or about who she became in the reading of them, or about the conversations that never happened because the evenings were spent hitting the number.

The Mystery We Keep Trying to Solve

There is a distinction here that I find useful, drawn by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, between a problem and a mystery. A problem is something you stand in front of and solve, a puzzle outside you, like a seized engine or a route across a strange city, and once it is solved, it stays solved, and you can walk away from it. A mystery, in Marcel’s sense, is something you are inside of, something in which you are yourself so caught up that you cannot step back and lay it on the bench as an object. Your own life is a mystery in just this sense, and so is love, and so is the question of what any of it is for. The mistake of our age is not that it solves problems, which is a fine thing to be good at, but that it has started treating mysteries as though they were merely problems no one has yet been clever enough to crack.

The move beneath all of this, and one we seem to have made almost without noticing, is to regard the self as a project. We talk now about working on ourselves, upgrading our habits, levelling up, building a personal brand, becoming the best version of who we are, as though a person were a small business that might reach profitability if only the founder would stop sleeping. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who has written about this more mercilessly than most, describes ours as an ‘achievement society’, and his unsettling observation is that we have become at once the labourer and the boss, driving ourselves with a thoroughness no external master could ever have got away with, and calling the result freedom. The cleverness of the arrangement is that it leaves no one to rebel against. The voice informing you that you are not yet enough is your own, which makes it very hard to walk out on.

What this does, gradually, is bleed the instrumental into everything. Rest stops being rest and turns into the thing you do so that you can work harder afterwards. A walk in the woods, which used to be permitted to be nothing more useful than a walk in the woods, becomes a step count and a measured dose of what the wellness literature calls ‘nature exposure’. I catch myself at this on the coastal paths near where I live, the small reflex to reach for the phone and certify that the walk took place, to convert an hour of wind and waves into evidence that I was looking after myself. Friendship slides toward networking, reading toward self-development, and even boredom and grief get conscripted as raw material for the next phase of growth. No single one of these translations is monstrous. Taken together, they produce a life in which almost nothing is allowed to be simply what it is, because everything has been enrolled in the project of becoming someone better.

I do not want to be unfair to the impulse, because at its best, it is not vanity at all. A great deal of self-improvement is the honest work of people hauling themselves out of chaos, and I have lived through enough disorder of my own to know that a routine can be an act of mercy. The man going under may be genuinely rescued by a structure to his day. The shattered parent may need the early night far more urgently than they need a theory of meaning. If your life is actually coming apart at the seams, the last thing you want from me is a sermon on the poverty of optimisation, and you would be right not to want it. So the case against it is not that discipline is empty or ambition a trap. The case is narrower than that, and harder to slip out of. Optimisation is a tool that has forgotten it is a tool, and has begun offering itself as the answer to a question it is not even equipped to hear.

The Examined Life Is Not the Optimised Life

That question is the old one about what makes a life worth living, and it is here that the optimising frame seizes up. We tend to imagine meaning as a reward stored behind achievement, a prize handed over once we are finally successful enough, secure enough, healed enough, lean enough. Yet almost none of the experiences people actually name as meaningful arrive in that fashion. Sitting up through the night with a dying parent is not pleasant and cannot be hacked, and still the people who have done it will tell you it was among the most meaningful things they ever lived through. Raising a child is the same. So is standing beside someone whose world has fallen in, telling a truth that costs you something, starting again after a loss that levelled you. What all of these share is that they refuse to be controlled in the way optimisation needs its objects to behave. Love shrinks into something lesser the instant you try to engineer it. Grief, rushed, sours into something false. The experiences that give a life its weight tend to be precisely the ones that happen to us, that we undergo rather than arrange, and a frame built entirely around tightening our grip will keep sliding straight off them.

This is usually the point at which an old line gets quoted, and generally a little too comfortably. Socrates, on trial for his life and offered his freedom on condition that he give up philosophising, refused, and told the court that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. We have flattened that into a fridge magnet, a mild encouragement toward a bit more reflection. He meant something a great deal less soothing. He was claiming that a life run entirely on borrowed assumptions, never once questioned, never brought up hard against the matter of what is actually good, has forfeited the very thing that would have made it a human life rather than a well-managed animal one. And the examined life he had in view is not the optimised life in a toga. The optimised life asks how to perform better against goals it has swallowed whole and never inspected. The examined life turns round and inspects the goals, which is a far riskier undertaking, since the inspection may well cost you the goals you have built everything on.

Philosophy as a Way of Life

Here it helps to remember something we have half forgotten about what philosophy used to be. Pierre Hadot, who spent a lifetime reading the ancient schools at close range, argued that for the Greeks and Romans philosophy was not in the first place a body of doctrine to be mastered but a way of life to be practised, a set of exercises designed to work a change in the person performing them. The Stoic rehearsed misfortune before it came and trained himself to separate what lay in his power from what did not. The Epicurean cultivated friendship and gratitude and a sober delight in small and ordinary things. Socrates turned conversation itself into an instrument for dismantling false certainty and walking people back to the question they had been busily avoiding. None of this was self-improvement as we mean it. The old exercises were not breeding a more impressive specimen; they were forming a person who saw the world truly and moved through it freely, a wholly different target, and not one any metric has ever managed to register.

At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.

The Life We Are Not Present For

I suspect this is why so much striving leaves people feeling thinned out rather than filled. The logic of becoming has no finishing line written into it. Whatever you reach, the horizon obligingly steps back, and there is always a further level to reach or a fresh defect to address, so that the self becomes a building site with no completion date anywhere in the contract. You can be enormously capable and still never once be permitted to arrive in your own life, forever living a little ahead of yourself in a future where you will at last be enough. Meaning, on these terms, is permanently deferred. It waits just beyond the next achievement, the next stone of bodyweight, and because there is always a next, it never has to be met today. The examined life interrupts that deferral, and not gently. It insists on the life that is here, in this body, on this unremarkable morning, among these particular and unchosen people, rather than the cleaner and more creditable life that is forever about to begin once the present one has been fixed.

What gives the interruption its bite is the plain fact that we are going to die, which optimisation labours to keep us too occupied to remember. We are not issued an unlimited supply of mornings in which to get round to living. I do not say this morbidly, and I say it as someone who left a martial arts career behind in part because the body that had carried me through it finally forced the matter and would not let me go on pretending. Holding your own mortality steadily in front of you does not make you gloomy so much as honest, and honesty about how little time there really is tends to rearrange what you do with it more quickly than any productivity system ever has.

Growth That Serves a Life

So I find I want to say something to the woman lying awake at three in the morning with her disappointing sleep score, though she has not asked me and would very likely file whatever I said under further self-improvement, which is the trap closing over again. It would not be to throw away discipline, because the alternative to optimisation is not idleness, and it is certainly not a cabin in the woods with the responsibilities left behind. It would be something smaller and a good deal harder: learning the difference between growth that serves a life and growth that has taken the place of one, between a discipline that grows out of caring for yourself and one that grows out of not being able to bear yourself as you are. Philosophy will not sell her a protocol for telling those two apart, and anyone who does is selling her the illness wrapped up as the cure. What it offers instead is older and stranger, the practice of stopping for long enough to ask what all the improving is actually in service of, and the nerve to stay with the question on the days when the easy answer fails to come.

The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. Our own age has produced a remarkable substitute for it, the optimised life, busy and measured and impressive and somehow still thin. Between the warning and the substitute lies that small and unfashionable stretch of ground where philosophy still earns its keep, not as an ornament for people with time to spare, but as the practice of asking, honestly and while it still matters, what a life is for.

Bibliography

“Doing Philosophy as Knowing Ourselves.” New York Journal of Philosophy, June 25, 2025. https://journal.nyphilosophy.org/p/doing-philosophy-as-knowing-ourselves.

Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Marcel, Gabriel. Being and Having. Translated by Katharine Farrer. Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949.

Plato. Apology. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Dr Rodney King is a philosophical coach and practitioner, currently completing his second doctorate, in Applied Philosophy at Rhodes University, on philosophical counselling and the contemporary meaning crisis. He lives and walks on the Isle of Man.

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I. Introduction

In 1960, physicists and military strategists predicted that thirty countries would possess thermonuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century. Luckily, they were incorrect. Today, only nine nations have nuclear arsenals, fewer than in 1970. So what explains this dramatic underproliferation?

I’m going to argue that it is attributable to something admittedly less edifying than the power of non-violent resistance or any triumphs of international law. Rather, I think peace arose from fear. That fear was enforced by the credible threat of consequences and was sustained by a deterrence architecture built on threats of retaliation, economic sanctions, verification regimes, and (when all that failed) clandestine sabotage — the famous “Mutual Assured Destruction.”

Artificial intelligence, in my opinion, now confronts the same governance problem as nuclear faced in the 60’s. Nations, corporations, and frontier research labs are currently racing to develop AI systems with transformative capabilities. The rewards for being first appear enormous, while the costs of falling behind may be severe. As a result, the competition has the structure of an arms race: each actor faces strong incentives to move faster, even if everyone would be better off moving more cautiously. This encourages rapid development, even when the risks may outweigh the benefits, because no one wants to lose the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI).

To those versed in game theory, this pattern is familiar: it is the basic structure of a prisoner’s dilemma. Every actor would be better off if everyone slowed down, but no one can safely slow down alone without losing the race.

Fortunately, this problem is not new. It is a recurring one in the history of science and geopolitics, and we have already hit upon a solution that has worked several times in the past. The lesson of nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon governance is that dangerous technologies can be contained through Hobbesian/game-theoretic mechanisms that allow one agent to unilaterally make another actor’s violation more costly than its compliance. We can change the payout matrix of the prisoner’s dilemma by applying pressure from outside.

This paper argues that AI requires the same basic approach. I call this framework Mutually Assured Containment (MAC). It adapts the deterrence strategies that helped contain nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to the unique risks and challenges posed by the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

II. The Race and the Bystanders

In our current context, two actors, the United States and China, appear to be locked in something resembling a race to the death.

Each has rational cause to fear falling behind. The first to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or something close to it, may gain a decisive and durable strategic (and military) advantage; the loser may face a form of technological subjugation from which recovery is difficult to imagine. Even leaders within these programmes who privately (or publicly!) acknowledge catastrophic risks face overwhelming, perversely rational pressure to continue: whoever slows down first risks ceding the lead to a rival who is willing to keep racing.

This is the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: rational individual choices producing collectively (and individually) catastrophic outcomes. Every actor would be better off if everyone slowed down, but no one can safely slow down first. In this regard, the structure of AGI development seems to intrinsically reward accelerationism and punish restraint (even if the ultimate consequences for reckless accelerationism are unimaginably catastrophic).

Companies and nations that race ahead capture market share, talent, and strategic/national-security advantage. Those that pause risk irrelevance, or worse, permanent subjugation to those who decided to barrel on. In the face of such an incentive structure, diplomacy and ethical exhortation become feeble counsellors, and rational fear of being dominated rules the day.

But here is what makes the situation both stranger and more tractable than it initially appears. Our current race has two clear frontrunners, the US and China, and then a second tier of states unlikely to win it but who retain the capacity to stop the race altogether (including, but not limited to, the UK, EU, Israel, and Russia). They, metaphorically, have handguns (near-peer capabilities) and can take aim at the likely winners.

This sounds extreme, even destabilizing. Yet it is precisely how humanity has contained every technology that approached dangerous limits of power: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, bioweapons. In each case, restraint came not from the leading powers’ goodwill but from the credible threat of enforcement by actors or coalitions capable of imposing unacceptable costs on violators.

The logic for these second-tier powers is straightforward, once seen. An AGI breakthrough by the United States or China could produce an overwhelming and durable asymmetry of power not just military but economic, informational, and political. They would lose their near-peer status, and the negotiating leverage that comes with it, which would essentially leave them at the whims and largesse of a foreign country (in the worst case, an adversary).

For countries already operating within American or Chinese hegemony, this should be deeply concerning. Whether power is centred in Washington or Beijing changes the leadership, but not the basic structure of the status quo.

What AGI introduces is a break in that structure. Traditional hegemony still relies on interdependence (trade, alliances, supply chains), so middle powers retain leverage within the system, and the hegemon can be reined in by a coalition. (To take a recent example, the United States cannot invade Denmark if the EU does not want it to).

But a decisive lead in AGI could weaken or even effectively eliminate the hegemon’s dependence on the middle powers, effectively allowing the leading state to act with far greater autonomy than if it remained dependent on the others. (In our example, the US could invade Greenland with impunity). The issue is no longer which hegemon dominates, but whether any meaningful influence remains at all. The difference is between operating at a disadvantage within a system and being rendered largely irrelevant to it.

From that perspective, containment is rational, even if it locks in the current balance of power. Trading one hegemon for another is a tolerable outcome. Enabling a step-change in capability that no non-leading state could counter or survive politically is not. For the vast majority of the world, the calculus is simple: the worst version of the status quo is preferable to a future in which a single state possesses capabilities that make deterrence, negotiation, and sovereignty itself functionally obsolete.

This is the structural fact on which any plausible AI containment regime can (and, I argue, must) be built.

III. The Hobbesian Structure

Thomas Hobbes famously described the state of nature as a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Nobody trusts anybody, everybody lies, cheats, and steals, and society therefore devolves “war of all against all,” (Not all philosophers are happy).

By “war of all against all,” Hobbes did not mean that people were constantly in active conflict. Rather, he meant that, without a common power to enforce peace, everyone lives under the constant threat of violence. In such a world, distrust is rational. Even actions taken for self-defense can look like preparations for attack, and this perversely makes conflict more likely even when no one wants it.

Many scholars of international relations argue that sovereign states live in much the same condition. There is no world government which has power to enforce agreements when states have conflicting incentives, and as a result states cannot fully trust one another. This creates what political scientists call “the security dilemma”: one state’s efforts to make itself safer often make other states feel less safe. As a result, both sides continue to arm themselves, even when neither wants war, and this perversely increases the probability of conflict. The problem has nothing, really, to do with the intentions on either side, rather it’s a problem with the game-theoretic incentive structure (or “payout matrix”).

Frontier AI development increasingly resembles this Hobbesian world. The leading laboratories (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and their Chinese counterparts) operate in an environment where the fear of falling behind pushes everyone to move faster.

Many researchers openly acknowledge that the risks are profound. In the largest survey of AI researchers to date, the median respondent estimated a 5% chance that advanced AI could CAUSE HUMAN EXTINCTION or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment. Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on AI thinks the risk is 10-20% in the next 10 years. Elon Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and later founded xAI (Grok), agrees with him. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic comes in at 10-25% risk of human extinction or similar catastrophe. Sam Altman has declined to give a numerical probability estimate.

Yet, because of the game-theoretic incentive structure, no leading lab can safely slow down on its own without risking that a rival gains a decisive advantage.

Recent efforts to govern AI (including the EU AI Act, the U.S. Executive Order on AI, and voluntary commitments from leading labs) are important first steps but they lack the regulatory teeth requisite to effectively deter these technologies. In particular, none of the aforementioned agreements addresses the underlying strategic puzzle wherein violating safety norms confers a competitive advantage to the violator, such that under the circumstances voluntary compliance becomes irrational even when it is relatively clearly in the interest of even the leaders of the race.

Hobbes faced a similar coordination problem in the domain of political philosophy and international relations. How do you get people to cooperate when, rationally, they cannot trust one another? His brilliant answer was the Leviathan: a sovereign powerful enough to make cooperation rational by making the cost of defection intolerably high. In game-theoretic terms, the Leviathan changes the structure of incentives from outside the game by making defection artificially costly. Change the structure of incentives, and you break the prisoner’s dilemma. Break the prisoner’s dilemma, and you can have peace. And so, Hobbes argues, the secret to perpetual peace is carefully constructed coercion.

This is the basic logic that helped contain nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons throughout the twentieth century. I argue that artificial intelligence now requires the same kind of governance. The goal is not to eliminate competition or remove incentives altogether. It is to change the incentives so that violating agreed safety limits becomes more costly than obeying them. Only then does cooperation become the rational choice.

Hobbes’ solution was the Leviathan. The international system has no Leviathan. But it does have something that Hobbes did not anticipate: coalitions of states capable of acting as a distributed collective enforcer, (a distributed Leviathan), not through goodwill but through credible threats of punishment. This is what produced nuclear restraint, even in the midst of the cold war. It is (I am arguing) what AI governance now urgently requires, in order for the technology to be developed responsibly.

IV. From Mutually Assured Destruction to Mutually Assured Containment

The nuclear age confronted humanity with a parallel dilemma: how could large-scale conflict be prevented when many actors possessed both immense destructive power and relatively strong reason to strike others preemptively?

The answer was, curiously, not disarmament (despite decades of advocacy, nuclear arsenals persist) but unilateral strategies of credible threats and deterrence. Mutually Assured Destruction has (so far) prevented annihilation not primarily by eliminating the weapons themselves, but rather by making their use strategically irrational. For when many actors in a potential conflict possess a credible second-strike capability, the only (sane) winning move is not to play the game at all.

Mutually Assured Containment applies this logic to AI. Rather than threatening mutual destruction, it threatens mutual enforcement: proportional consequences for violating agreed-upon thresholds. The goal is not to destroy frontier AI capabilities but to restrain their unsafe proliferation: to convert the current race into a stable well-paced equilibrium where caution is rewarded and reckless acceleration is punished.

Despite the similarities, MAC is nonetheless importantly different from MAD (and other proposals such as MAIM). MAC aims at deterrence primarily via denial, not only via retribution and punishment. Sanctions, cyber disruption, and infrastructure denial work as proportional measures designed to restructure the payoff matrix, break the prisoner’s dilemma, and so deny the underlying capability of AGI to the violator. In this regard, MAC ideally has a far more expressive palette with which to strategically and geopolitically constrain AI.

As the game theorist and Nobel Laureate, Thomas Schelling memorably put it, “the power to hurt is most useful when held in reserve.” The basic logic is that where consequences, such as economic isolation, cyber disruption, denial of compute, are credible, violations become irrational before they occur, and crucially, avert the likelihood of potentially catastrophic kinetic conflict between near-peer states.

How would this work in practice? In a longer version of this piece, I have articulated a more complete map of AI’s structural weak points, sufficient to design a deterrence regime (i.e. MAC) that operates across multiple layers simultaneously, and ideally to point the way towards a more complete and articulated strategic mapping of AI’s vulnerabilities and chokepoints. For the present piece, however, it is enough to review the plan in outline.

The framework begins with international agreement on moratoriums for large training runs above specified compute thresholds. Practically, these can be measured in sustained energy consumption and GPU-hours, and gradually adjusted downward to account for the possibility that algorithmic breakthroughs may yield catastrophic capability at lower compute. But currently, frontier AI capabilities still require industrial-scale infrastructure: massive GPU clusters, enormous energy supplies, specialised semiconductor hardware. These cannot be hidden effectively, and depend on a complex (and therefore fragile and highly disruptable) global supply chain.

Notably, perfect surveillance is not required. Deterrence depends on perceived detectability, not omniscience. Even partial transparency (e.g. monitoring chip exports, auditing energy consumption) creates enough strategic uncertainty to make clandestine violations risky, costly, and ultimately prohibitive. In this regard, MAC acts as a kind of distributed, peacetime analogue to a blockade. Where a traditional naval blockade concentrates force at geographic chokepoints to restrict the movement of goods, this framework targets industrial chokepoints (compute, energy, and advanced semiconductor supply) across a globally networked system.

Enforcement of such a regime could follow a graduated escalation, beginning with the least coercive measures and intensifying only in proportion to verified or strongly suspected violations. The first tier is economic: sanctions targeting compute infrastructure, energy supply, and semiconductor access; export controls on advanced GPUs; financial isolation through SWIFT exclusion. These tools have effectively constrained Iran's nuclear programme and can be adapted to the development of frontier AI with comparable precision.

The second tier involves targeted cyber operations (non-destructive denial of service, interference with training runs) following the Stuxnet precedent, which demonstrated that sophisticated actors can degrade technical capabilities without kinetic force.

The third tier involves legal and diplomatic enforcement: seizure of illicit models, exclusion from international bodies, public delegitimisation. The fourth tier, held in reserve and seldom required, involves covert infrastructure denial: sabotage of rogue compute facilities, modelled on Stuxnet-style cybernetic degradation rather than kinetic (i.e. dangerous, risky, and costly) military strikes. This last option exists ideally not to be used but rather to make all prior tiers ultimately credible.

V. The Power of Coalition Enforcement

1. How MAC Can Work

A common objection to MAD-style systems such as MAC is that the containment regime depends on multilateral consensus and so is unlikely to materialize in a fragmented geopolitical environment defined by U.S.–China rivalry. But this misunderstands how deterrence works. MAD-style systems (crucially) do not require universal agreement; they require only that a sufficiently powerful state or coalition can unilaterally impose costs on its violators. Arguably the best feature of this proposal is that even a modest probability of retaliation (especially economic retaliation) can reshape the strategic calculus of rational actors, because global trade and technological development depend on stable access to shared systems.

The United States, the European Union, and their allies control critical parts of the AI supply chain, including advanced semiconductor design, fabrication, and much of the cloud infrastructure on which large-scale AI training depends. This gives them substantial leverage over the development of frontier AI.

The most immediate and obvious source of that leverage is market access. Frontier AI depends on a delicate network of trade, investment, and supply chains that make large-scale development commercially viable. By restricting access to advanced chips, compute services, and key software tools, a coalition can effectively raise the cost (and lower the profitability) of developing frontier AI -- not just because they will make the AGI harder to make, but because they will make it even harder for already ridiculously leveraged AI companies such as OpenAI to credibly claim that they will be profitable in any acceptable timeframe. As such, the goal of a MAC-style architecture would not only be to make AGI more difficult to build, but to make unsafe acceleration economically unattractive.

A contemporary example can be seen in Iran’s restriction of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran did not need to stop every ship passing through the strait to disrupt global shipping, and effectively force the US to the negotiating table. The credible threat of the disruption of trade alone changed the behavior of shipping companies and made the cost of shipping unjustifiably high. MAC relies on the same logic: it need only be strong enough to make violations appear too costly to attempt.

An example of how this sort of restriction might be pursued is ready at hand: Leading-edge chips depend on lithography equipment from ASML in the Netherlands and fabrication capacity at TSMC in Taiwan. As such, this coalition already possesses de facto veto power over large-scale AI development. Disruption (or credible threat of disruption) to their activities could make AI companies quickly unprofitable, and hence could effectively stall development in the extreme case.

Importantly, this leverage does not depend on participation from every major power. It is enough that access to essential inputs passes through jurisdictions willing to enforce common rules. The precedent is familiar. Regulations such as the GDPR achieved global influence not through universal adoption, but through the gravitational pull of market access. The same logic applies here. A state can harden its data centers, but it cannot easily replace denied access to advanced lithography, high-bandwidth memory, or leading cloud infrastructure.

2. Middle Powers and China

This structure also clarifies the role of so-called “middle powers.” States such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, and Russia may not lead the AI race, but they retain meaningful influence over its critical inputs. Their incentive is not necessarily to win the race, but to prevent any one state from gaining a decisive technological advantage (and, self-interestedly, to maintain their “near-peer” status and the strategic leverage that comes with it). A dominant AI power could weaken the interdependence that currently gives smaller states a “seat at the table.” From this perspective, preserving a constrained equilibrium is more attractive than allowing an unchecked technological monopoly to emerge.

China’s position is admittedly more complex. Beijing may reasonably view containment efforts as attempts to preserve Western dominance under the guise of safety. But even adversarial powers share an interest in avoiding catastrophic outcomes. The Cold War nuclear regime emerged not from trust, but from mutual recognition that escalation was existentially dangerous for all parties involved. China’s own statements on AI governance suggest at least some awareness of similar risks. The question is not whether full alignment is possible, but whether shared vulnerability can support partial, functional cooperation.

3. A National-Security Lens for the Argument

Our underlying argument may therefore be simplified in the following way. Advanced AI increases state capabilities. Those capabilities can be used for many purposes, good and bad, including scientific discovery, economic competition, but not limited to cyber operations, intelligence, and military power (killer robots and drone swarms). While many of these uses are beneficial, they can also be used against rival states.

For this reason, any near-peer state that does not expect to develop AGI first should view another state’s AGI development as a potential national security threat. Game-theoretically, no rational state should willingly allow a rival to gain a decisive advantage, because that would weaken its own security, reduce its bargaining power, or permanently shift the balance of power, especially if the newly-AGI-empowered state decides to become adversarial towards it.

States have long acted to prevent rivals from acquiring capabilities that threaten their security. Frontier AI should be viewed in the same way. The question is therefore not whether states will respond, but whether they will respond early, through coordinated containment, or only after a destabilizing breakthrough has already occurred.

Historical precedents serve (by and large) to reinforce the point. Nuclear proliferation has been limited through a mix of export controls, sanctions, and credible enforcement, often without universal consent (i.e. it has been imposed on unwilling states). Chemical weapons have been constrained by a combination of legal prohibition and the demonstrated willingness of powerful states to respond to violations. Even where formal verification has been weak, as in aspects of biological weapons control, compliance has been supported by the expectation that violations would be detected and punished (notably in the case of bioweapons, unlike in chemical and nuclear weapons, humanity has to a great extent contained the threat proactively, without prior major incident). Moreover, in each case, the decisive factor for global containment was not consensus, but credible commitment by actors with the capacity and willingness to enforce the rules.

These examples cut directly against the claim that AI development is either inevitable or beyond meaningful control. That narrative reflects the interests of actors who benefit from continued acceleration. In reality, frontier AI development is unusually exposed to disruption. It depends on concentrated capital, specialized hardware, energy-intensive infrastructure, and globally distributed supply chains. This makes it more, not less, amenable to external pressure.

For this reason, MAC does not rely on eliminating incentives, but on reshaping them. By making access to critical inputs conditional on compliance, and by maintaining credible enforcement mechanisms, a coalition can shift the payoff structure so that restraint becomes the rational choice. The objective is not to halt technological progress indefinitely, but to ensure that its trajectory remains subject to collective control rather than private acceleration.

VI. The Clock Is Running

There is an urgency to this proposal that the nuclear analogy, for all its usefulness, actually understates. Nuclear deterrence works because nuclear weapons are controlled by humans who fear death, understand threats, and respond to incentives. In other words, deterrence assumes rational and human decision-makers.

MAC makes the same assumption. It is designed to influence the governments, companies, and laboratories building frontier AI, but it may not be well-equipped in the same way to contain AI if and when AI becomes an independent actor.

This matters because AGI may eventually become highly autonomous, operating largely beyond meaningful human control and making decisions faster than humans can reliably intervene. Whether or not this happens soon, it marks an important limit of deterrence. If the relevant decision-maker is no longer human, then the logic of deterrence begins to break down. A highly autonomous AI system may not respond to political, economic, or military incentives in the way that human actors do.

Another way to see this is to consider that geopolitics is like chess. Chess is a strategic contest between players trying to anticipate one another’s moves. Today, AI systems consistently outperform even the world’s best human players. Humans have no shot against the best models. Likewise, in our analogy, once machines become the strongest, fastest, most reliable strategic actors in a game, human intuition and human strategy no longer set the pace.

The primary concern of this paper is not that scenario (distressing though it may be). The more immediate danger is the social, economic, and geopolitical disruption that increasingly capable AI systems may produce while humans remain in control. But the possibility of autonomous AGI makes early action even more important. The window for effective containment exists before, not after, AI outpaces the institutions designed to govern it.

Once technology advances beyond the point where human institutions can reliably shape its development, those institutions become far less effective. The opportunity for containment must therefore come while governments, companies, and researchers remain the relevant actors, and while the incentives that MAC changes can still shape their behavior.

VII. The Justice of the Remedy

The deepest objection to this proposal, from my perspective, is moral, not practical. Even if coordinated restraint is feasible, is it fair to coerce states and corporations into slowing AI development? Three lines of argument converge on a single answer: yes.

First, there is a classical Hobbesian (or Pragmatic Idealist) justification. Hobbes argued that peace requires an authority capable of enforcing common rules, and his account is still widely agreed to describe the quasi-anarchic nature of international relations. As Hobbes wrote, “the end of obedience is protection.” When the alternative to coercive authority is existential chaos, the imposition of order (imperfect and resented though it may be) becomes morally necessary, the lesser of two evils which must be chosen until a stable and rational legal regime becomes feasible. In this sense, coercion is not the enemy of liberal order but one of its prior conditions, as overly idealistic notions of “freedom” will predictably lead to chaos, control, and domination by private interests and unelected actors.

There is, in addition, a game-theoretic justification. In a Prisoner’s Dilemma, rational actors cannot escape suboptimal outcomes through goodwill alone. The incentive structure itself must change. This is, in many ways, the purpose of law. When a society faces a tragedy of the commons, an arms race, or another harmful equilibrium, credible enforcement changes the incentives by making harmful actions more costly than cooperation. Under these conditions, defection is no longer the rational strategy. Coercion is therefore justified not for its own sake, but only as the minimum intervention required to make cooperation, peace, prosperity, and political stability strategically possible.

Finally, there is an ethical justification. Hans Jonas argued that “the promise of power must be matched by a principle of responsibility.” The burden of proof falls on those who would unleash transformative risk, not on those who urge caution. But nothing guarantees that the owners of AGI will remain accountable to the common good.

Consider the often-cited promise of universal basic income. If the leaders of frontier AI companies wished to pursue large-scale public redistribution, existing political and economic institutions already provide ways to do so. The fact that these mechanisms have not been widely used should encourage caution. It is difficult to assume that actors who are not required to subordinate their private interests to the public good today will reliably do so once they possess even greater wealth and power.

More fundamentally, no stable political system should depend on the virtue of whoever happens to hold overwhelming power. Institutions exist precisely because human virtue cannot be assumed. When a technology—or the concentration of power it creates—poses an existential risk, there is no unlimited right to its unrestricted use. Under those conditions, proportionate political, economic, and social restraints can be morally justified.

These three arguments converge on the same conclusion. When cooperation is structurally impossible without enforcement, coercion is not the opposite of peace and justice but one of their necessary preconditions.

VIII. The Alternative

Any system of deterrence carries risks. Sanctions, for instance, can harm civilians in myriad ways. Cyber operations and disrupting technical infrastructure can trigger conflict and escalate in unpredictable ways. But the relevant comparison is not between coercive containment and an ideal world without tradeoffs. It is between containment and the path we are currently on: an unregulated race toward systems that may exceed our ability to control them, either because they are in the hands of private actors not held to public account, or because they have become fully autonomous.

The alternative to MAC is what Luke Drago has called “technocalvinism”: the view that AI development is effectively predetermined by technical and economic forces, leaving little room for human choice or responsibility. This position presents itself as realism, but it functions more like fatalism. It treats outcomes as fixed in advance and, in doing so, removes the basis for restraint.

The historical record, by and large, does not support this view. Societies have shaped the development and use of powerful technologies before. Nuclear proliferation has been quite effectively limited. Chemical and biological weapons programs (as well as potentially irresponsible technologies like cloning) have been constrained even before major incidents. In many cases, biotechnology has been effectively directed toward medical use rather than weaponization by precisely these sorts of regime. These efforts have often been imperfect, but they show that technological trajectories are not beyond influence. To the contrary, they are relatively amenable to outside control as they can often be easily disrupted by interfering with their chokepoints, especially by a mobilized coalition of sufficiently powerful states. As such, the claim that AI alone cannot be steered, stopped, or obstructed, far from being an established fact, flies in the face of one of the more interesting geopolitical discoveries of the 20th century: technology can be contained by decentralized game-theoretic deterrence mechanisms (i.e. “a distributed Leviathan”).

A minimal baseline should be stated plainly: humanity should reduce existential risk before creating systems that could amplify it. If AI delivers on its promises (if, e.g. it helps address disease, poverty, and other large-scale problems) then a delay of a few decades is a modest cost relative to civilizational survival. If those promises are overstated, restraint costs very little. In either case, the downside risk is large enough to justify caution.

As Hobbes argued in Leviathan, order can emerge even among actors who do not trust one another, provided the incentives are structured correctly and the strategies are executed in time. His insight is still commonplace geopolitical strategy, and applies particularly well to this special case of geopolitical strategy: unfettered AGI development.

In other words, it is relatively straightforward to acknowledge that geopolitical, economic and social advancement requires credible and prudent constraints. The question is whether those constraints will be established deliberately, through law and coordinated agreement, or imposed reactively after a crisis, potentially by a rogue state actor, such as Russia or China. In the absence of a single authority, states can approximate one through shared enforcement mechanisms that make restraint the rational choice.

To sum up, this is an argument for credible deterrence as a temporary measure, ideally, one that creates the conditions under which more durable, cooperative governance can take hold. It is a Leviathan of reason: coercive in structure, conservative in purpose, and justified by the enduring imperative of human survival. For until wisdom can govern us, deterrence must suffice.

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.

Arts and Flatteries

Plato makes a fascinating distinction in the Gorgias between arts and flatteries. An art, he says, takes genuine care of the object of its craft, bringing it to good proportion and beauty. A flattery is what merely aims at either the excess of a particular attribute or the complete imitation of that craft. He criticizes rhetoricians who deal with persuasion more than truth, and cosmetics—that deal with the appearance of physical greatness in contrast to gymnastics—the art that cultivates physical greatness. One aims at appearance and persuasion, the other at being and truth. It raises the suspicion that in modern times we tend to confuse arts and flatteries more than ever.

Rhetoric detached from truth only imitates statesmanship. It produces persuasion without wisdom. Instead of seeking truth and communicating it, the speaker masters the audience’s emotions to serve personal interests. These look very similar at face value, but so are dogs and wolves. One is a guard of the household, the other is a guard of itself. Cosmetics, the enhancer of beauty, cannot develop physical excellence by itself, and so confusing the two can be dangerous. There is nothing wrong with enhancing either physical bodies or speeches, but the danger is substituting their essence. That’s where people or politicians care more for appearing than actually being right or healthy.

The Inversion of Meritocracy

So we pursue wealth and then discover it doesn’t bring the fulfillment we expected. We seek admiration only to find ourselves dependent on it. We obsess over appearing healthy, productive, intelligent, or successful while neglecting the realities and processes those images are supposed to represent. We live in a kind of social meritocracy—a society that attempts to distribute status, recognition, and reward according to talents. And while meritocracy can be a great thing, it immediately raises another question: what exactly counts as merit? In a world that rewards appearing great and viciously competes in self-worth, where we confuse fast-food with nutrition, entertainment with art, and persuasion with wisdom, our supposed meritocracy begins to invert into an “Imageocracy”—the rule of appearances.

The subtle thing about meritocratic cultures is that ultimately merit is judged through appearance, and after all that’s our only way to show our inner workings in the public realm. Merit, virtue, excellence have to appear somehow in the world. But we also live in times where appearances are the easiest to fake in probably all human history. In Athens, sophists were obsessed with changing opinions through rhetoric; modern-day sophists do so by manipulating images, content, and evidence to blur our perception of truth. That’s why Plato argued so forcefully that flatteries must never replace the arts as the ultimate standard. Nowadays we often perceive enhancers as “good enough” and move forward. Looking confident used to be a result of wisdom, unifying the ideas and worldview of an individual. Today it seems as if there’s an independent art of “looking confident.”

Every meritocratic realm carries a built-in danger—an obsession with images. The influencer who seems happy or successful is rewarded most. The politician who dominates global media wins elections. Startup founders who prioritize public image, investor opinions, and record IPOs are favored far more than those focused on users’ mental health and social impact. Why then, do intelligent people, who believe they are following reason, so often choose the appearance of the good over the good itself? And how can we learn to distinguish true reason from possibly other guiding forces within us?

Do We Truly Follow Reason?

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who aren’t easily misled, so let’s assume Socrates was right and we all follow reason and logic. Throughout Plato’s dialogues—especially the Republic, Meno, Protagoras, and Gorgias—we find the idea that every human being follows what appears to be good for them and has what they take to be reasonable arguments in support of their conception of justice and the way they shape their lives and ethics. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Even tyrannical leaders follow what they confuse to be the best interest of themselves and the nation. Even oligarchic individuals are reasonable enough to realize that wealth is a good possession, but fail to realize what it is ultimately good for. So if we all strive toward the good (or at least what we perceive to be good) and if reason seeks truth, why do intelligent people repeatedly pursue appearances? Money over well-being, status over character, and plastic treatments over physical health? Perhaps the problem isn’t that we fail to follow reason. Perhaps the problem is that what we call reason isn’t reason at all.

We often experience conflicting desires, and we sometimes want entire opposites at the same time: health and indulgence, truth and approval, peace and victory. But if reason were the only force shaping our actions, that would be very difficult to explain. Just as reason seeks the true and good, so our ambitions seek success and recognition through high pursuits, and our appetites seek immediate gratification through bodily experiences.

The subtle thing is that just as the self-interested politician uses rhetorical arguments to imitate wisdom, so desires and ambitions use the language of reason to justify their own objectives. It becomes interesting how many of our “rational” arguments might be post hoc defenses of conclusions reached by our desires and ambitions.

Plato, through Socrates, offers us an interesting framework to explore this exact problem: In the Republic, he walks us through a curious experiment, and he builds a state composed of three classes: producers, guardians, and philosopher-kings. Justice, in that state, is the correct hierarchy: philosophers rule, guardians protect, and producers serve. And the crucial detail about the Republic that is usually overlooked is that the state is an analogy to help us understand the individual soul better. Socrates proposes examining justice first in the city because it is larger and easier to observe there than in the individual.

So if the state consists of three parts, what are the analogous three parts of our soul? Producers represent our desiring part, guardians represent the spirited protective and ambitious part, and philosopher-kings represent our rational-leading part. With that in mind, Plato goes on to assemble different kinds of regimes and corresponding types of individual souls—or psychological states, analogous to those regimes—which we’ll cover more extensively another time. But the point I’d like to stress now is that our soul is not solely rational (seeking truth), but also appetitive (desiring), and ambitious (proud, protective, wanting great things of itself). This means that not every thought that sounds reasonable originates in reason. Desire and ambition can use reason as an attorney, not as a guide.

Considering those ideas, it’s interesting to think that we don’t only confuse flatteries with arts, but perhaps reason with anxiety, or personal pride with justice, and so on. Anxiety often disguises itself as responsibility. Toxic perfectionism often presents itself as high standards. Vanity often dresses itself as self-improvement. And the desire for approval frequently masquerades as love. The difficulty is then, that our different guiding forces can produce almost the same outward appearance, and what distinguishes them is not the act itself, but the principle that ruled it.

Let’s look at a person looking for a job. One person can look for a job out of a realization that one needs it. This will help financially and provide structure. Another can look for a job in order to prove, to earn, and to exceed, and yet another can look for a job out of complete anxiety about self-worth and a fractured self-image. They’re all very different ways of handling the same act. The same can be said of almost any practice or act we’ll perform in the world. Outward action alone, then, cannot fully disclose what guides the person acting. It takes careful examination of the principles and set of beliefs ruling that person.

Toward Radical Honesty

But the problem is not merely psychological. When entire communities reward appearances over realities, flatteries become economically and politically advantageous. Looking successful now yields greater rewards than becoming excellent. Image ceases to be a by-product of excellence and becomes excellence’s substitute. And when a community pursues only appearances rather than wisdom and character as its highest ideals, its driving forces shift toward pride, anxiety, and an obsessive concern for how one is perceived in a world devoted to accumulation, status, and consumption. It is precisely here that Hannah Arendt’s analysis becomes illuminating. Arendt argued that the ancient citizen managed private necessities in the household precisely so they could enter the public realm and exercise genuine political freedom and action. Modern society, however, has become increasingly organized around what she called “the social”—a conformist form of national housekeeping (or basic necessities) that gradually consumes both private life and authentic political action. If Arendt’s diagnosis is correct, then merit is no longer measured by character or excellence in the public sphere, but by images of social approval and accumulation through endless labor. When economic, social, and political life becomes organized around labor, production, security, and accumulation, while genuine political and social action goes unrewarded, it is no wonder that our sense of reason becomes blurred.

If that’s the case, then our problem becomes much clearer. We mistake our guiding forces for being reasonable, when in fact it is our ambitions and anxieties that lead us to think that flatteries—or appearances—of the social space we inhabit are actually ideals of truth. Now we have a much clearer understanding of how we can become confused about our inner workings, mistake falsehood for truth, and irrational forces for reason. What Plato calls flattery—or, in the language of the cave, the image or shadow—is precisely this substitution: the appearance of goodness replacing goodness itself. Therefore, a radical honesty is required, the courage to continually examine the ideals we have already shaped. Were they formed by a mind seeking approval from parents, mentors, or society? Have we been pursuing lives that make sense to our culture but not to our deeper nature? The real battle is not against external failure, but against the pride and fear that keep us from admitting we may have been chasing the wrong image of what’s good for us. Only by daring to distinguish the voices of appetite, spirit, and true reason can we begin to replace our self-rule of appearances with the rule of reason.

Amit Leshed is an independent writer, jazz musician, and software engineer whose work explores Platonic and Socratic philosophy, ethics, and political thought in dialogue with contemporary struggles. His writing focuses on questions of human flourishing, the formation of character and happiness, and the relationship between appearance and being.

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Our lives have rooted themselves into systems and structures that we established to manufacture the formal illusion of freedom. Dedicated to maintaining law and order, these systems seeped into our existence and became defining features of it. A profitable job, a successful inventory, a law-abiding citizen, an AI application that optimises the human experience; all of it. Tech aggregates grow in seconds, and structural accuracy becomes the centre of attention. If one gets the structure right, one can live a happy life. Or so the structure insists.

Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower illuminates precisely how predatory systems sound less predatory when structural benefits are made accessible to the masses. These advantages are designed first as luxuries, then engineered into survival necessities, optimised until they are indispensable in daily life. Once luxury becomes necessity, consumption amplifies and to fulfil those necessities, the most readily available choice for the masses is to voluntarily subjugate themselves to the very systems that manufactured the need. The loop continues, and we are both its product and its fuel.

A capitalistic slave is not born; it is self-made, stretched along the borders of excruciating labour, dedicating precious time to advocate for needs that were embellished onto them through soft power. And they carry these needs as though they make a genuine difference to their existence. It is rightly said that only a slave quantifies existence through productivity, but the more insidious truth is that the slave eventually internalises this quantification so thoroughly that productivity ceases to feel like a demand and begins to feel like identity.

The loss of existential resonance is persistent throughout this experience of making meaning, which is often rooted in the palatable cages of lies. Humans start becoming statistically relevant rather than fundamentally relevant. An eight-year-old child with a phone is not only the death of pensiveness and practical thought, but the early making of a consumer, which is catnip for the expansion of capitalism. The systems feed off each other, and we ensure they are well-fed by exhausting our own resources.

What capitalism quietly engineers is not just physical dependence, but an existential one. When systems pre-assign your values, your ambitions, your definition of a life well-lived, they are not merely influencing you; they are doing the philosophical work that was always supposed to be yours. The question that lingers, uncomfortably, underneath all of this is: if the self is already furnished before you arrive at it, is there a self at all? This is precisely where existentialism seeps into a fractured reality.

Things take a drastic turn when consciousness itself is trivialised, and power hands you a desiccated version of it, a condition in which awareness is a trap and ignorance is a bigger one. Awareness, in this context, only allows you to perceive those things made available to you, those things that stumble into your echo chamber. Ignorance, on the other hand, becomes a neutral emotional state of living that conceals catastrophic realities and projects a tailored one in their place; no wars, no atrocities, no calamities, just the illusion of soft living in an apocalyptic world.

A consumer is raised. A product is raised. An algorithm is satisfied, while emotion, vitality, and longevity are quietly jeopardised. A formulated reality hands us the keys to an ideal, future-facing freedom while actively consuming what remains of us right now. Descartes once argued that there is no way to reliably separate a dream from a real experience. In the modern world, there is equally no way to separate a nightmare from the reality we inhabit, where fast-paced life is mistaken for progress, and dissociation is the cost of keeping up.

Existentialism, in its truest sense, bothers the unbothered, questions the unquestioned, and holds ground for that deviant part of the population that genuinely wants to live and not simply evaporate in a capitalist mist. Being an existentialist in a capitalistic world is something close to a felony, because it means abandoning the structures that wanted to hand you a roadmap and tell you how to live. It is also, for this reason, the most difficult thing to actually pursue.

Sartre, the father of existentialism, argued that existence precedes essence; that we arrive in the world without a predetermined nature and are condemned to create one through our choices. Capitalism doesn’t refute this. It quietly circumvents it, stepping in before the individual ever reaches the moment of self-creation and furnishing the self in advance.

The jarring truth of today’s world is that systems have moved to offer us this essence free of charge. They supply pre-packaged values, thoughts, opinions, and identities, delivered quietly and efficiently, while we float around the world carrying them as our own. There is a predetermined essence already waiting for us, and it has been shaped not by our experience but by what is useful to the system i.e. identities with practical utility, identities that are compliant enough to replenish the machine by remaining voluntarily passive.

In realistic terms, “getting ready for the real world” is not merely a matter of being adaptive. It is a matter of being so thoroughly sacrificial that one would surrender meaning itself, the very thing that makes a person who they are, in exchange for a few perishable resources. With a severe decay in individualism, what remains is an intentional dissonance that slowly preys upon us while we reach for naïve explanations to account for the wrongness we feel but cannot quite name.

Existentialism is not a cure, but it is relatively closer to the cure than anything ever objectively has been. Living the life of a monk is no longer a realistic prescription, not now, when we cannot see past our devices and our dopamine hits. But examining our essences, poking holes in them, questioning what we have absorbed and why; this matters. The essences we have been consuming without scrutiny may well become the single determinant in the making and breaking of our lives.

We are specks of dust in this universe. Yes. And a thousand such specks of dust, in genuine collective consciousness, can begin to override the propagated truths that took up residence in our psyches like permanent guests, truths that burgeon into our existence while simultaneously serving as our only available source of comfort.

Existentialism sounds like the imposter in a numerical world. It does not fit the algorithmic DNA. It threatens those who have come to depend on temporary outbursts of depth to offset their mundanity, and it terrifies those who learnt to live by rules but could never recognise the patterns underneath them. The irony is sharp, but if we allow it to seep deeper than the systems that contain us, the will to live might yet emerge from the walls that have kept us so passive, so contained, for so long.

Existentialism is not arbitrarily positioned against capitalism; it is structurally opposed to it. If capitalism’s deepest power lies in pre-assigning essence, in handing you an identity shaped by utility and consumption before you have had the chance to construct one yourself, then a philosophy whose entire foundation rests on the radical freedom to create meaning from scratch is not merely a counter-cultural gesture. It is a direct philosophical dismantling of the system’s most fundamental assumption; that you can be defined before you define yourself. To practice existentialism in a capitalist world is not to escape the system; that is neither possible nor the point. It is to remain conscious within it, to keep authoring yourself even when everything around you insists the story has already been written.

Bibliography

• Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641.

• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism.

Kalika Padte is a Mumbai-based self-published author and a student, exploring philosophy, psychology, existentialism, art and emotional reality. Her debut prose and poetry collection, Eidolon carries similar thematic undertones. A poet at heart, her diverse body of work also includes thought essays, articles, and literary pieces.

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Kant argues that morality is grounded in pure reason rather than natural inclinations, a distinction he illustrates through two types of commands: hypothetical and categorical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative dictates an action merely as a means to achieve a desired outcome, such as “If you want to get a good grade, you must study”. In contrast, the categorical imperative is an unconditional command that is good in itself. It represents an absolute duty that all rational beings must follow regardless of consequence—such as “Do not lie”. To operationalize this imperative, Kant presents three distinct formulations. While the Formula of Universal Law dictates the universal “form” (48) of morality and the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends indicates its “complete determination” (48), the Formula of Humanity addresses its “matter” (48): humanity as an end in itself. Kant distinguishes rational beings from mere objects or animals, noting that “all objects of inclinations have a conditional worth only; for if the inclinations, and the needs founded on them, did not exist, their object would be without worth” (40). Because rational beings possess the unique ability to exert will and assign value to the world around them, they alone possess absolute worth. Consequently, Kant dictates that humans must always be treated as ends and never merely as means. To use someone as a mere means is to reduce an entity of absolute worth to a mere tool of conditional value. Therefore, treating humanity as an end requires respecting the inherent dignity and rational autonomy of every individual, ensuring no one is used solely to advance the goals of another.

Furthermore, Kant uses the Formula of Humanity to discuss and rule out even the paternalistic or benevolent forms of deception or manipulation. The application of the formula is especially clear in cases of deception or manipulation when one’s humanity is being jeopardized to obtain certain goals. In such cases, one rational being is using another rational being as a means to achieve the former’s goals or certain results. This deception undermines the latter’s humanity, as it treats humanity (something with absolute worth) as a means to achieve something of only relative worth. Therefore, deception or manipulation is unacceptable according to Kant’s Formula of Humanity. However, what if the deception or manipulation is of a paternalistic or benevolent nature? According to Kant, such actions should also be ruled out. Paternalism is the action of limiting one’s autonomy to promote their own good but taking away their consent to such action. In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant rules out paternalism as morally ethical by comparing one’s humanity and their happiness. Valuing a person’s happiness is doing whatever you, as a rational agent, believe is good for them, but valuing one’s humanity takes root in respecting their rationality—their ability to rationalize and come to the conclusion about what is best for themselves. According to the Formula of Humanity, in these cases, an agent must act in ways that the other rational agent consents them to do, as they are all rational beings. Even treating someone merely as a means for their own sake is a violation of their humanity, as they (rational beings of absolute worth) are being used as tools to achieve only something of conditional good (their happiness). Imagine a well-intentioned doctor who lies to a patient about a terminal diagnosis to spare them from severe depression. While this paternalistic deception is motivated by a benevolent desire to protect the patient’s happiness, Kant’s Formula of Humanity dictates that it is immoral. By hiding the truth, the doctor strips away the patient’s autonomy and prevents them from making rational, informed decisions about their own life. Even though the goal is to alleviate suffering, the doctor prioritizes a conditional good (emotional comfort) over an absolute good (the patient’s inherent rationality), ultimately manipulating the patient as a mere means to an end rather than respecting them as a rational being.

It is important to acknowledge a critical philosophical nuance: although orthodox Kantianism famously forbids lying, a Neo-Kantian interpretation would argue that the Formula of Humanity requires a different approach when a person’s rational agency is fundamentally compromised. For example, when a person’s cognitive abilities are temporarily suspended, paternalistic deception is not a violation of their autonomy, but a moral necessity to protect it. Imagine a friend is heavily intoxicated and insists on driving a group of other drunk people to get food. In this state, the alcohol has severely impaired their ability to rationalize or recognize the lethal danger they pose to themselves and others. As a Neo-Kantian following the Formula of Humanity, you are obligated to intervene through direct deception—such as hiding their car keys and lying about where they are, or manipulating them into believing the restaurant is already closed. While this superficially looks like treating your friend as a mere means to an end, the lie is not simply to achieve a conditional good like “happiness.” Instead, it is strictly designed to preserve the absolute good of their humanity: their physical survival and their future capacity for rational thought. Because you cannot respect the autonomy of a rational agent if they die in a preventable crash, this interpretation demands intervention to protect the very vessel of their rationality until they sober up and regain their agency. Because the object of the intervention is the preservation of an absolute good, the Formula of Humanity would demand intervention in these extreme cases. The idea of “treating humanity as an end” is justified in these situations because the benevolent deception is entirely directed towards considering humanity as an ultimate end. Kant provides a robust moral framework for thinking about paternalistic deception: although we must treat humanity as ends, respecting their immediate, impaired choices in emergencies would jeopardize the very existence of their humanity.

Because Kant roots the Formula of Humanity entirely in reason, true adherence to this principle requires carefully distinguishing between conditional and absolute worth. In non-extreme scenarios, paternalistic deception is strictly prohibited, even if it promotes someone’s happiness or well-being (which possess only conditional worth). For instance, lying to a friend to prevent them from wasting time playing video games is unjustifiable; while their poor time management might yield negative consequences, they remain a rational agent who must be left free to autonomously determine what is best for themselves. Conversely, if such deception can prevent the permanent damage of one’s humanity or ability to rationalize, it contains in itself the absolute worth of preserving one’s humanity. The Formula of Humanity remains purely based on reason: it dictates that humanity is an absolute end, and any action that prevents the annihilation of rational agency is a fundamental deontological requirement. While this framework establishes a clear mandate at the extremes of human behavior, it is vulnerable to critique when applied to the grey areas of impaired rationality. By creating a strict binary between minor lifestyle choices and acute emergencies, the framework lacks a precise metric for defining exactly when a rational agent’s capacity is sufficiently diminished to justify the stripping of their autonomy. Without a clear boundary, there is a risk that “impaired rationality” could be over-diagnosed by individuals or authorities to justify paternalistic intervention. Furthermore, the assertion that emergency paternalism avoids consequentialism requires careful scrutiny. Even if the ultimate goal is the preservation of absolute worth, relying on direct deception—such as lying about a friend’s car keys—arguably introduces a consequentialist calculation. It requires the agent to justify an immediate, categorically prohibited act of manipulation by weighing it against the preferable future outcome of the endangered person surviving.

Expanding beyond private interactions, this rigorous deontological architecture for emergency paternalism offers a definitive blueprint for the boundaries of political authority and social governance. Should a state enact mandates simply to enhance the collective happiness or refine the lifestyles of its populace—via social engineering or the suppression of information—it fundamentally transgresses the Formula of Humanity. Such maneuvers treat rational beings as if they lack the internal authority to define their own good, elevating conditional values above absolute worth and depriving the citizenry of the vital opportunity to exercise their own reason. Nevertheless, sovereign intervention transforms into a categorical obligation when the actual capacity for rational agency faces an imminent threat. Legislation ensuring public safety, such as the prohibition of intoxicated driving, does not represent an overreach. Instead, these are the essential duties of a state dedicated to the preservation of the physical and mental embodiment of humanity. Viewed through this lens, a Neo-Kantian government must remain non-interventional regarding personal pursuits of happiness, yet must become protective the moment a citizen’s fundamental capacity for rationality is endangered.

To explore this application within the socio-political sphere, one might examine the oversight of lethal weaponry. Firearms are instruments engineered for destruction, directly threatening the physical continuity of a rational agent. When a weapon is turned against another, the perpetrator commits an act that jeopardizes humanity itself. Within this strict framework, the peril to absolute worth creates an unwavering moral mandate to safeguard it. The state is strictly compelled to intervene—through regulation or restriction—to prioritize the existence of rational beings over the mere conditional desires of individuals to possess dangerous objects. By strictly governing access to arms, the state is not merely dictating a version of social order, but is instead fulfilling an unconditional duty to guard absolute worth against violent extinction.

Ultimately, applying Kant’s Formula of Humanity to personal and state intervention provides a powerful defense against everyday authoritarianism. By strictly separating conditional happiness from the absolute worth of rational agency, the framework successfully invalidates paternalism in daily life while demanding fierce protection against existential threats, such as severe intoxication or lethal weaponry. However, because the framework relies heavily on absolute binaries—between clear-minded and impaired judgment—it struggles to flawlessly navigate the ethical grey areas of diminished capacity. Therefore, while the Formula of Humanity remains a definitive blueprint for defining the limits of state power and preserving realized autonomy, its application to the temporarily impaired mind requires a more nuanced metric to fully bridge this gap.

Bibliography

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Author bio: NL is an aspiring thought-provoker and a lover of philosophical conflicts.

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I moved to Brooklyn a few months ago from a different state, and I can’t help but notice the virulent discourse on gentrification that pervades the borough. Of course, this discourse manifests itself in all domains: the new Korean-Mexican fusion hotspot frequented by non-Korean non-Mexican folk, the latest deconstructed addition to the Williamsburg skyline, or even the accelerated proliferation of strollers in Prospect Park. However, the ones I find most intriguing are the sentiments around the nightlife scene.

The reputation of the Brooklyn nightlife scene precedes itself. As the cultural epicenter of (arguably) the cultural capital of the United States, Brooklyn enjoys a cultural vibrancy and diversity that is almost unparalleled in the country. Nightlife being an integral component of the cultural engine in Brooklyn’s motorworks, mainstage venues such as the soon-to-close Brooklyn Storehouse and the soon-to-open Pacha NYC validate Brooklyn’s momentous staying power, while smaller scenes and movements that dot the borough replenish the cultural current and ensure the fringe flourishes. As I have slowly explored both these types of venues within the nightlife scene of Brooklyn, I have found myself heeding the seemingly paradoxical philosophies within the scene.

On the one hand, you have camp ‘Manhattanite’. These frequenters of mainstage and popular venues, largely residents of the foreign land of Manhattan, view Brooklyn precisely as an exercise in exploring the exotic. Whereas venues in Manhattan are riddled with opportunities to bump into your coworkers, those in Brooklyn are escapist fantasies for finance bros who wish to improve cultural clout through proximity.

On the other hand, you have camp ‘NIMBY’, who, unsurprisingly, resent Manhattanites. As is the case for any other domain of gentrification, the ‘enshittification of Brooklyn’ occurs when venues in Brooklyn orient their priorities towards these new folks, thereby disregarding the patrons of long-time. This presents itself not only in jacked-up prices through overly sensationalized features, but also in crowds that are generally unrepresentative of the cultural norms that enable Brooklyn to be Brooklyn—the very norms that undergird the cultural production that Brooklyn is known for. From the non-dancers to the video-grabbers to the Patagonia-vest-wearers, these crowds contribute to an atmosphere that is not only conducive to dancing flowing with the music, but can sometimes even be hostile to this behavior.

I find myself torn. On the one hand, I myself am a transplant living in a relatively nice part of Brooklyn, gradually finding myself exploring the less-nice parts in the name of cultural exploration. On the other hand, having been deeply involved in the raving scene prior to moving, I feel deep resonance with the sentiments of Brooklynites.

Therefore, in examining this discourse, I don’t believe it is productive to play the blame game, where each side holds steadfast to their principles without a comprehensive examination of the situation. That is to say, there is more to this discourse than the Brooklynite’s contempt of Manhattanites because of their capitalistic tendencies that harbor on the Orientalist, or the Manhattanite’s reciprocal contempt of Brooklynites due to a false perception of elitism. In fact, the nightlife scene is a particularly fascinating domain to explore, if only because it is a deeply raw area of life where artificial barriers are often softened, and we readily succumb to the oneness of humanity. This rawness enables us not only to derive interesting implications on the discourse on gentrification, but also on a wider understanding of what the nightlife scene stands for.

In this essay, I use concepts from Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (D&G) Anti-Oedipus to philosophically ground why the nightlife scene is so unique. Specifically, I take a higher-order examination of the dance floor, substituting the empirical (what is currently happening to Brooklyn’s nightlife scene) with the theoretical: what fundamental features of the dance floor can help illuminate our understanding of what is happening to Brooklyn’s nightlife scene?

II. Leave your ego at coat check

Traditionally, the dance floor is a setting where one can lay their masks bare: a setting where one can break down the structures that one has built through their interactions with society.

This manifests, of course, in the breaking down of appearances, whereby people are encouraged to flow with the music as automatically as possible and do whatever feels right, as the crowd withholds reservation and judgment. Raving culture began in the 1970s, predicated on universal acceptance for marginalized communities who did not receive acceptance in day-to-day life. Even today, the concept of PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect) unites a universalized empathy among ravers, and venues such as Berghain are infamous for their extremely high tolerance for actions that ‘normal’ society would perceive as extremely deviant.

More importantly, however, is that this feature of the dance floor encourages a deterritorialization of identity. By (temporarily) breaking down the fixed, rigid habits and social roles that one has built internally, one can alter not only their appearance, but their identity. This shifts the focus of the individual on the dance floor from constraints (being aware of what they cannot do) to potential (being aware of what the individual can be). If the individual on the dance floor wishes to dance as a lunatic, the driving question isn’t “to what extent can I do this and get away without judgment?” but rather “how much more lunacy do I wish for in my dance?”

This ability to suspend identity is precisely what many seek out in the distant corners of the underground rave scene. For many, it is an opportunity to build a life that concurs with their true sentiments — that is, a life that is uninhibited by social roles we have begrudgingly adopted to appease society. This applies to the queer and African-American communities of the 1970s, thanks to whom this scene developed a vivacious origin. This applies to marginalized communities today who may feel outcasted by the systematic oppressions of modern society. This applies to individuals today who are pursuing life paths that have navigated away from their true intentions and values — a particularly poignant aspect of many working professionals (e.g., Manhattanites).

In its pure form, the dance floor is a healthy representation of D&G’s representation of a deterritorialized society; as not only have the individuals suspended their social roles and norms, but consequently, the newly-formed ‘society’ of these freed individuals is one that is predicated on a lack of ‘societal’ rules. This enables the society to be rhizomatic: each individual has the potential to connect freely (and without reservation) with any other individual. In this context, to ‘connect’ can connote any form of interaction that is unencumbered by social expectation, such that it could take any form. This is the equivalent of ‘catching a vibe’: two individuals could start grooving with each other, bopping with each other, talking with each other, boogying with each other, etc.

This aspect further solidifies the importance that the rave community holds for people. As individuals come unencumbered by social constraints, they are met with the opportunity to connect with other individuals who are able to complement this raw side (that they rarely show in a stratified society). This is relatively unsurprising, as the reputation of the PLUR community precedes itself as among the most welcoming environments.

III. God is a DJ

In any dance floor, the DJ is almost single-handedly responsible for the totality of the audience’s flow of vibrations. Genre, tempo, EQ, volume, trims — any minute action performed by the DJ is materially felt in the energy of the dance floor; and consequently, any minute action performed by the DJ is materially felt in the lived raving experience of every individual on the dance floor. When the DJ increases the BPM, the raver feels their body dancing faster. When the DJ turns the volume up, the raver feels their body frenetically dancing more expressively. When the DJ executes a flawless yet surprising transition, the raver basks in awe.

A substantive part of the raving culture is a concerted focus on being present in the lived experience over the habit of critiquing that many defeatists are oft to adopt, elevating themselves above the experience to be lived. Barring the presence of an incompetent DJ without any of that essential capacity to ‘read the room’, a true raver is one who dispenses with hyper-judgment of transitions for true immersion with the music, readily synchronizing the rhythms of their dance to the beats of the DJ’s music. If, for example, the DJ were to play a genre of music that the raver is unfamiliar with, the raver would need to be open-minded in the ways in which they can groove to the music.

This innate predilection to ‘trust the DJ’ in the raving experience is not only an operative component of living in the moment (thereby improving the overall experience for the dancer), but also in the raver’s deterritorialization, in their ability to release their accepted social hierarchies and roles in the first place. Without this predilection, a raver is rendered unable to fully let go on the dance floor and listen to their bodily rhythms. One can lamentably imagine the sulky self-righteous critique in the corner of the dance floor who claims to enjoy pointing out insignificant flaws in trim-cutting rather than immersing themselves in the music. And though one may argue that the two behaviors can co-exist — one as the intellectual, and the other as emotional — it is clear that the full experience of ‘letting go’ requires a complete suspension of the critique.

This leads to a funny implication, however. In order for the raver to desecrate the codified flows of traditional society, they must consecrate the codified flows of the DJ, effectively swapping one authority figure for another. Whereas the codification of traditional society presents itself in the morality standard of society (e.g., ‘thou shalt not kill’), the codification of the DJ presents itself in their musical taste (e.g., this tune blends extremely well in this particular niche setting).

This applies equally to all ravers on the dance floor, whereby all ravers have formed a similar ‘swapping’ connective tissue with the DJ. This further cements the codification of the DJ’s taste in the micro-society of the dance floor. Any rhizomatic interaction between any two individuals on the dance floor is not completely ex nihilo — rather, it comes with the presumptive notion of acceptance of the DJ’s music. One can imagine an individual, grooving their hips to the 127 BPM tune, approaching another individual, grooving their shoulders to the same 127 BPM tune. This collective acceptance of this central codification of the dance floor enables a synchronization of the dance floor, enabling connections between any two individuals to flow more naturally. Therefore, although the dance floor may appear to be purely rhizomatic, the DJ acts as a secret central organizing node.

IV. Micro-fascisms in the dance floor

In Anti-Oedipus, D&G write:

“The masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

By fascism, D&G mean less the National Socialist Party, but rather concerted investment in domination, hierarchy, exclusion, and/or obedience; in stark opposition to deterritorialization. It is the subordination of oneself to such codified norms and regulations. Given the collective presumption of the superiority of the DJ’s taste, the DJ fits in as the despotic-signifier of the dance floor — the sole entity through which the system’s codified flows derive meaning.

That is, there is a clear investment in the domination of the DJ in the hierarchy of the dance floor, as ravers are shepherded to obedience to the taste of the DJ (at the exclusion of the taste of any other individual). Of course, this is heralded in the modern hyper-modern rave setting, where the DJ is visibly anointed in extremely ostentatious mainstage stages that are meant to evoke their transcendence as an individual. But even in traditional rave settings, even if the DJ proves to be invisible to the eye, the DJ’s presence is acutely felt, recognized, and worshipped in the spirit of the dance floor.

Which raises the question: In this rave setting that provides the greatest opportunity for complete deterritorialization, why is it that there must be a despotic-signifier? Why do the masses pervert their seemingly strong desire for deterritorialization? In order to answer these questions, we must explore further the metaphysics of D&G’s desire.

D&G write:

“If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is a set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious.”

For D&G, all of reality can be explained through desire, which functions as a productive capacity that is responsible for creating the totality of reality as we see and experience it. Desire is produced by desiring-machines, which can be any entity that is capable of forming any connection or flow with another entity (desiring-machine). The examples for what a desiring-machine could be are endless: the body and the music, which can connect to form synchronized dancing; one person’s eyes to another person’s eyes, which can connect to form a dance floor connection; even the mouth and the burger, which can connect to form an action of eating. For D&G, desire is not so similar to the traditional psychoanalytical interpretation, but more akin to connective tissue that enables entities to connect in any manner (e.g., the body and the music each form desire to connect with each other, thus forming synchronized dancing). And again, D&G go so far as to claim that everything is a desiring-machine.

By nature, desire is production: by forming connections between disjointed desiring-machines, desire produces new realities. And since this is the capacity through which a desiring-machine defines itself, desiring-machines continually form connections.

However, by continually forming connections, desire continually produces some extent of structure. For example, when the body and the beat connect to form a body dancing to the rhythm, there is an implicit codified structure of what is ‘supposed to happen’ between the body and the beat, such that the body and beat can continue to synchronize. It is as if, as separate entities, the body and the beat convene to agree that the resulting form of dancing is the correct way to dance. That is, desire reterritorializes. There is a new micro-order that is created between the two entities on the dance floor.

This tendency to reterritorialize helps explain why the raving scene benefits from the despotic-signifier. Desire ultimately always reterritorializes to some extent — and as such, at some level, desire and order are an inevitable pair. Spread over the collective raving audience, reterritorialization is manifest not only in the universal trust in the DJ, but also in the proliferation of PLUR culture, or the universal acceptance of everyone (both of which, again, are the prerequisites to a successful rave scene).

V. The problem with Public Records

Hitherto, this whole essay has presupposed a theoretically ideal dance floor, where every raver fulfills their PLUR obligation to become the ideal raver for everyone else. However, it is the desecration of this scene that is at the heart of the enshittification of the Brooklyn nightlife scene. Complaints abound of Public Records, Elsewhere, Nowadays, Knockdown Center — former mainstay venues in the Brooklyn nightlife scene that have gotten too popular for their own good, attracting hordes of non-dancers who have failed to leave their institutional pretensions at the door. (See thread)

As a raver, attracting these crowds is innately hostile to the culture that ravers attempt to encounter within the pearly gates. A dance floor in which a raver feels at liberty to express their true selves is only made possible if other individuals buy into the reterritorialized norms pervading PLUR culture. However, at the rate at which these scenes are popularizing, it becomes difficult for these newer ravers to immerse into a culture of complete surrender, especially if these newcomer types start dominating the dance floor, instead of the true stalwart ravers who can help inspire them. Therefore, it is all too common a sentiment to find hostility against these new ravers among the stalwart ravers.

That being said, given the complex deterritorializing and reterritorializing dynamic of the dance floor, it can be understandable why the new raver would struggle to immerse themselves in the scene. Notwithstanding the extreme types (e.g., the MM-fund analyst who shows up violently drunk with his pledge class; the Instagram baddie who, being dissatisfied in trading free bottle service for house music, overcompensates by consistently recording everything), most newcomers enter the scene open-minded into the culture. However, without the proper understanding of what to expect, especially coupled with the disappearance of veteran ravers in former mainstay scenes like Public Records, this becomes increasingly more and more unlikely, only fueling further animosity between older and newer ravers.

An additional problem arises when these newcomers misinterpret what the rave scene actually is. Emboldened by their multiple excursions to scenes they believe to be raving mainstays, they start conceptually differentiating raving from clubbing only through the music selection and substances taken, completely ignorant of the true fundamental features of the rave scene. This faux-raving scene establishes itself as a substitution for clubbing, and not as the complex deterritorialization and reterritorialization that is very core to the heart of raving.

A panacea solution is not easy, and may not exist. Zealots in the rave community would argue for a complete gatekeeping of the rave culture, forcing current mainstay venues to enforce extremely strict crowd-selection maneuvers (think proto-Basement, although many in the community would argue that even Basement’s gates are not difficult to bypass). And surely, there is merit to this argument. Scaling the rave scene is the first step to the encroachment of the capitalist behemoth in the Brooklyn scene. Universalized admission into the scene would ensure that closed-minded types (those that, even with strong encouragement and guidance, would be unwilling to adopt the deterritorialization necessary for the rave scene) invade, guaranteeing the depreciation of the PLUR culture.

At the same time, we must not forget that the rave scene is built on the foundation of universal acceptance. In principle, everyone should be welcome. Of course, as in any society, there are bad actors who forego cooperation and choose to individually profit from the system. However, by and large, gatekeeping isn’t in the true essence of raving culture. In fact, in many scenes, newcomers are adorned with additional love and attention from veteran ravers (e.g., getting sprouted). Regardless of background, any individual should have the right to completely let go of all their societal inhibitions and identities for one night. And at its core, the raving scene acts as an engine for cultural production, with many DJs curating unique artistic experiences designed to be enjoyed by the masses.

At the very least, education and curiosity go a long way. My hope is that the philosophical grounding of the nightlife scene I have expounded in this essay can help not only any newcomer understand what hallowed grounds they enter when raving, but also encourage veteran ravers to refine their understanding of the situation at hand. Enshittification is obviously not great. But an unyielding, indiscriminate hostility against all newcomers isn’t in the spirit of the culture either. Perhaps there is no solution. But certainly, both sides can continue to understand each other better.

Bibliography

Buchanan, Ian. “Gilles Deleuze.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2024. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Haenfler, Ross. “Ravers.” In Subcultures and Scenes. Grinnell College. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/subcultures-and-scenes/ravers/.

Wark, McKenzie. Raving. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Evan Bimaputra (Associate Editor of the New York Journal of Philosophy) 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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Swift’s essay is meant to be farcical and horrific, to shock readers at the cruelty of the British colonial mindset. And yet, its core ideas—that we must calculate each life’s cost, and that some lives are not worth that cost because they do not produce enough capital or good to the nation—are not as far from emerging ideologies of our own time as we may believe.

“[I]t’s your patriotic duty to be as healthy as you can,” says Dr. Oz, Trump’s overseer of Medicare and Medicaid. Oz demands that health care dollars be allocated “efficiently” because “we’re not getting our money’s worth.”2 Implicit in Oz’s philosophy is the inevitable conclusion that we must not support patients whose medical needs or conditions make them “inefficient.” If health is a patriotic duty, and we value efficiency above all, some lives do not make the cut. While measuring the cost efficiency of life was mocked by Swift in 1729, it was a vital part of public policy in Nazi Germany two centuries later.

More recently, in our own country, the concept revived in the writings of Peter Singer. And it is now embraced not only by official government but by the unimaginably powerful Silicon Valley Tech aristocracy under the seemingly innocent guise of effective altruism. In this essay, I will track this train of thought, exploring how we have gone from Swift to Oz, while the transitive tissue was people trying to do good efficiently.

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The largest “savings” claimed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the Silicon Valley titan, Elon Musk, is slashing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency charged with providing “health and human services and sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.” The ideologies evidenced by DOGE, Musk, and Oz are, ironically, tied to a movement for social good that bewitched Silicon Valley, effective altruism (EA)—and to eugenics. EA’s “Data-driven approach” entails the concept that money must be allocated in a seemingly objective manner to provide what someone deems to have the greatest impact per dollar. In measuring efficiency, one must perforce value lives relatively, i.e., one must quantify intangibles such as pain, happiness, and the value of a life itself. By tracing the history of EA, we can see the philosophical path that has brought us to our current moment where government approaches Swift without the irony.

In October of 2015, I stood in a retrofitted warehouse in San Francisco arguing about effective altruism—a phrase I had heard but never stopped to understand—with what, at the time, was considered an admirable master of the universe: a startup founder. In some ways, he was the ideal tech founder. He was young, handsome, slightly reckless, and created his startup after an epiphany about “disrupting” a small part of life. In other ways, he was atypical; his startup was a nonprofit. His team members weren’t there to make ungodly sums of money for themselves and their investors. We were implementing crowdfunding for the less fortunate. We were implementing “tech for good.”

I came to the start up through a Stanford English department newsletter advertising an Editorial and Content Internship at “a new crowdfunding nonprofit funded by Y Combinator.” Fully ensconced in my humanities bubble, I’d never heard of Y Combinator or even crowdfunding. My only experience with tech was writing a paper about the dangers of electronic medical records. And yet, I got the internship.

At the startup I wrote public facing profiles to attract donations. I loved the energy of a group of youngish people using their highly specialized skills to help people, while also providing donors the satisfaction of knowing their money was having a direct, outsized impact. I didn’t think much more about it than that. I certainly didn’t ponder Effective Altruism.

The startup’s Halloween party was after my internship ended. I’d never spoken with founder one on one, but we ended up in a corner and he said something about how happy he was that Effective Altruism was catching on with the public. Emboldened by his casual manner, I admitted that I didn’t know what Effective Altruism was. He laughed, “You really worked for a tech company inspired by Effective Altruism, and you knew literally nothing about either?”

“Well, I figured it was fine since I was writing, and the rest of you know nothing about words.”

As he swayed slightly, he explained, “Effective Altruism is a theory that we are obligated to do as much good as possible, that it’s ethically mandatory to give in the most effective way. For example, malaria nets cost so little, but they literally save lives. For $2 a net you can save a life. On the other hand, if you donate to another cause that might save a life for $200,000 you’ve literally passed on saving 99,999 other lives. Effective Altruism tells you to donate to the cause that saves a life for $2, instead of the cause that essentially wastes money on fewer lives.”

I was quiet as my brain processed what he’d said. I wasn’t a philosopher. I studied creative writing, literature, and history. I wrote about the Holocaust, and my life with chronic illness and disability.

The founder’s words caught in my chest, though I wasn’t yet sure exactly why.

“You can’t really say that a life is worth $2.”

“What do you mean? Of course, I can.”

“The mosquito net is worth $2, sure, but that isn’t the value of the life. The worth of a life can’t be quantified, or shouldn’t be. You can’t say that it’s wrong to put money into expensive research that might—or might not—cure cancer. You can’t say that a cause which doesn’t even save lives but makes them better is wrong. My Dad volunteers with Make-A-Wish. Is that wrong? Is he unethical to do that instead of soliciting money for malaria nets?”

Unfazed by my vehemence, he replied, “I’m not saying that it’s immoral but it’s not really ethical. You must do the most good possible. Make-a-Wish spends hundreds or thousands of dollars to make one kid happy. Those dollars could have saved the lives of many other kids. You’ve read Peter Singer, right? It’s his theory. All EA is based on his writings. He wrote the book on it, literally. He’s brilliant. You should read The Most Good You Can Do.”

He sounded logical. But what he said, or maybe the way he said it, was pulling at me. Did he really believe we should quantify lives in dollars and cents? Did he really see nothing dangerous about insisting that such accountings were morally imperative? I’d lived my life on the bad end of a medical bell curve. I didn’t want to be part of a world that bowed to statistics as the be all and end all. In The Logic of Effective Altruism Peter Singer argues that “living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.”3 Singer defines the most good as a “world with less suffering and more happiness.”

Over time, despite my reservations, and without fully realizing it, I absorbed the ideas of EA. I had decided that a few brilliant people in Silicon Valley could change the world. I had bought into the idea that doing good was about quantity.

Several years later, hoping to “scale up” my good, I worked at a foundation established to distribute grants to organizations implementing Effective Altruism to “do good well.” The foundation was passionately dedicated to the concepts of EA. I thought it was my chance to “scale up.” Instead of doing good through a single nonprofit, I’d help grant funding to dozens of them. I believed in the founder’s mission to quantify giving, to use data to evaluate charities and share that data with donors. I trusted that we could save the world with data-driven altruism.

Over time at the foundation, I became increasingly uneasy. I wasn’t sure if I was doing much good, let alone doing it well. In a beautifully appointed office in the heart of the Valley, I was using a narrow set of tools to examine the most complex and systemic issues. In hours of discussions with colleagues over how to make the world better through efficient and data-driven giving, I began to doubt more. Yes, it made sense to ensure that nonprofits used their money wisely. And it made sense to find effective solutions to pressing problems. But as I pored through websites and charts that applied cost—benefit ratios to suffering I felt wrong. Did we truly believe we could objectively quantify pain and rank suffering? By what criteria were we to decide whether cancer was “better” or “worse” than malnutrition or that the foster care system in America deserved less funding than orphanages in Romania? If our philosophy was that we could rationally and confidently make such choices—could assess which suffering matters more—didn’t that mean that we were creating a cutoff point below which sufferers were unworthy? And, if they were unworthy, what should be their fates?

That the foundation was by, of, and in Silicon Valley was no coincidence. Economist Peter Coy explains effective altruism as “a new movement inspired by philosophers (including Peter Singer…) and embraced by Silicon Valley engineers who pride themselves on taking a logical, data-driven approach to life. [With] emphasis on issues it describes as important, neglected, and tractable.”4

Peter Singer inspired the royalty of Silicon Valley. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz established Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy to “answer a fundamental question: how can philanthropic giving achieve the greatest impact.”5 Laura Arrillaga Andreessen, whose family name is on multiple buildings at Stanford and who is married to PayPal co-founder and leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has long championed Giving 2.0, a data-driven, philosophy of giving deeply connected to Singer’s version of Effective Altruism. She argues that “giving away money is easy, doing so effectively is harder.”⁷ Other tech world followers include Jaan Tallinn, the founder of Skype, pre-scandal Sam Bankman-Fried, and, Elon Musk, who has said that his philosophy “closely aligns” with effective altruism. The data of the “data-driven approach” is a search for how to allocate money where it has the greatest impact per dollar given. To decipher this enigma, however, we must have something to measure the dollars—and the impact—against. We must quantify intangibles such as pain, happiness, and life itself. To understand how this plays out, it is useful to look back at where this idea got its start, the unofficial founder of effective altruism, Peter Singer.

§

Singer is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. Though best known to the public for advocating more humane treatment of animals, Singer’s core focus is a new ethical code for all living creatures.

Utilitarianism judges actions not on any inherent moral basis—such as religious ethics—but by the net pain or happiness the actions create. In Practical Ethics, Singer applies this ethical framework to formulate a societal approach to major issues including “euthanasia, and the obligation of the wealthy to the poor.”6 Singer makes two key assumptions. First, happiness and pain can effectively be judged, measured, and ranked. Second creating happiness and avoiding pain are the most important objectives in any decision.

Following upon these seemingly innocuous ideas leads Singer into the dangerous territory of not only assessing a “value” to individual lives but advocating the power to make such value decisions for others. Thus, explains Singer, the “classical utilitarian might have to accept that in some cases it would be right to kill a person who does not choose to die on the grounds that the person will otherwise lead a miserable life.”7 Singer is entirely comfortable with that; indeed he considers such fatal judgments to be morally imperative, “there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia.”8 (Emphasis added) Under this theory, writes Singer, the “incurably ill or severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue” can, and theoretically ought to, be euthanized.9

Singer does not limit his death sentences to extreme cases, such as an accident victim without brain function or a newborn whose lungs have not formed. Infants whom society should be able to kill include the disabled, such as those with spina bifida, a condition Singer considers as precluding the possibility of optimal or acceptable levels of happiness since it can cause paralysis and loss of control over the bladder and bowels.

I will show my hand. I was born with a tethered spinal cord—closely related to spina bifida. I had no control over my bowels or bladder. When I was in kindergarten, I had a successful operation to untether my spine. I regained normal nerve function. And yet, perhaps unbelievable to Singer, I have joyous memories of my life before the operation. I remember my father taking me for chocolate milkshakes on Saturday afternoons. I remember watching TV with my mother, cuddling against her on the couch while sharing bowls of popcorn sprinkled with M&Ms. I remember making snow angels with my sister, watching with delight as she laughed in the fresh snow. I remember so much joy—joy undiminished by having to go to the bathroom every hour and wearing pull up diapers at night. So, let me ask, whether it would have been moral for my parents to apply Singer’s “practical ethics,” to euthanize me for replacement with “another infant with better prospects of happy life?”10 This debate cannot help but remind us of the ending of Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” in which he satirically writes, “I desire those politicians who dislike my overture…that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old…and therefore have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as they have gone through.” A satirist, Swift is not actually suggesting it is better to kill infants than to let them live a marginalized life, Singer is.

And Singer goes even beyond disabilities that impair function. Writing of a hypothetical hemophiliac, Singer admits that hemophilia is not a disabling disease in the normal conception. It causes pain and danger, but not intellectual disability or physiological impairment. Yet Singer marches on, arguing that by nature of being sick, a hemophilic is less likely to have a happy life than a “normal child.” Therefore, he concludes parents ought to have the right to kill a hemophiliac infant because, “if killing the hemophiliac in fact has no adverse effect on others excluding the infant, it would, according to the view be right to kill him.”11 Singer anticipates, and rejects, opposition “it may be objected that to replace either a fetus or a [disabled] newborn infant is wrong because it suggests to disabled people living today that their lives are less worth living than the lives of people who are not disabled yet it is surely flying in the face of reality to deny that, on average, this is so.”12 Singer affirms his personal ability, and, perforce, that of the society he envisions, to know and judge the value and affective experience of another, to score the value of one’s fellow humans. That those scores determine life or death is not only fine with Singer, that’s what he forcefully advocates. It’s all a mathematical exercise, and some people just don’t make the cut. No wonder Singer appeals to Silicon Valley. No wonder DOGE, a beehive of Valley disciples, strikes its most destructive blows on HHS.

§

After my spinal cord surgery, I spent six years completely healthy. In middle school, however, I began to experience symptoms of what, years later, would be diagnosed as a clustering of related neurological and autoimmune illnesses. Undiagnosed and untreated the conditions were excruciating. Even with treatments, I spend much of my day in pain. I plan every aspect of my life around disease management. And yet, other than when faced with misdiagnosis, unsupportive schools, or relatives who don’t understand my condition, I’ve never been unhappy. I’ve enjoyed countless hours with friends over tea. I’ve read books, written essays, and debated issues with brilliant professors and peers. I’ve earned two degrees with honors at Stanford. I’ve watched my sister become a mother, and played often with my niece and nephews. I’ve watched them grow and become their own distinct persons.

I cannot do everything “healthy” people can. But I can have and create joy. Traveling across the spectrum of disability I’ve never once doubted that my life has been equally worth living as those of the fully abled. And so, as we examine the thought patterns of Effective Altruism and assumptions behind them, we must grapple with these facts. How many points does my disabled but happy life score? Do I make the cut? Who decides? What happens to me if I don’t hit the target?

Practical Ethics was met with particular resistance in one place—the former Third Reich, where disability advocates argue his philosophies are not a new step forward but a familiar fall back.

Singer protests comparison to Nazi Germany because the Nazi state decided who lived and who died, while Singer puts that power in the hands of parents or legal guardians. But where is the logic of this distinction? There is none. First, since Singer is not advocating complete freedom to kill any child, his theories necessarily implicate the state. The state would have to establish standards for parents to make the fatal decision; otherwise, parents would be free to kill perfectly abled children for any motive—cost considerations, the child’s gender, or whatever else might make the death convenient for the deciders. Second, if eliminating the disabled furthers the interests of society as a whole—as Singer claims—then doesn’t society, i.e., the state, have the right, indeed the duty, to compel appropriate eliminations? Why should individual parents, heedless of society’s best interests, be able to selfishly impose on the state the costs of special education, medical care, and other special needs of a child who should have been disposed of? And, even if the state chooses to deny these benefits to the unworthy, i.e., the disabled, something has to be done with them.

Singer’s—and Nazism’s—philosophical antecedents, the eugenicists of the past two centuries were quite explicit that society was obligated to cleanse the populace. In the late 1800s, Stanford President David Starr Jordan advocated the “evolutionary obligation of humanity to cull the least productive of its members.”13 In 1915, University of California professor SJ Holmes wrote in The Atlantic of our “social duty to eliminate our hereditary defectives.”14 In Germany in 1920, the authors of Permission to Annihilate Unworthy Life advocated for killing “total idiots in the population.”15 In 1933, Nazi Germany commenced a program of enforced sterilization. The enabling legislation explained that “inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions” were reproducing, creating children who would be burdens to the rest of civilization.

Since “inferiors” unduly burdened the community, sterilization was not enough. Over 70,000 “inferiors” were murdered under the government’s T-4 program.16

While the language of the eugenicists and the Nazis is uglier than Singer’s, the bottom line is unchanged; not only is there such a thing as “unworthy life,” the state has a duty to purify itself.

§

Effective Altruism is not bad per se. As flawed as its foundational thinker—and some of its preconceptions might be—a movement whose goal is to get people to do more good, is, in many ways, good. And yet, when Silicon Valley titans came to Washington, my experiences left me unsurprised at the outcome. If one believes fiercely in data, in the idea that all aspects of human life can be measured, quantified, and ranked, it is not a far leap to, consciously or subconsciously, assume that some lives can measure too low on the metric to matter. If one values innovation, “moving fast and breaking things,” and the power of the individual to change the world by doing whatever it takes to improve a mathematical bottom line, then brash individualism can easily go off the rails.

It is perhaps not coincidental that such thinking has flourished under the present administration. Donald Trump is reported, firsthand, to have asked his nephew, Fred, father to a disabled son, why Fred doesn’t simply let the boy die.

Elon Musk himself was once an environmentalist. EA led him to engage with the idea of charity predicated on data. Now, he not only leads the assault on HHS, but he also flirts with eugenics, regularly posting on X theories that race determines individual potential. One of his first DOGE hires previously posted “I just want a eugenic immigration policy.”17

DOGE’s Singer inspired approach, as described by Sophia Cai in Politico, is quite clear: “to eliminate...protective services for vulnerable seniors, chronic disease self-management education, resource centers for people who have been paralyzed or lost a limb, and one that tries to help older people prevent falls.”18 DOGE has cut funding and over 7,000 employees to the Social Security Administration, which already has an average wait time for benefits determinations of six to ten months.19 Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley stated that “in 2023, 30,000 people died waiting for a decision on their SSA-administered disability benefits.”20 DOGE has cut the CDC’s workforce by 2,400, and the NIH has canceled nearly 800 research projects that “no longer effectuate agency priorities.”21

These cuts plainly reflect Singer—certain lives—those of disabled people and people with or susceptible to certain diseases—are not worthy of helping or saving. The military, on the other hand, will get even more billions under the Administration’s budget proposals.

Eugenics—and the devaluation of those who fall below the line—lurks as well in Secretary Kennedy’s focus on autism, which creates “kids who will never pay taxes.”22

When Singer wrote his “First New Commandant;” “the worth of human life varies,” and that “not all members of the species Homo sapiens are persons,” he did not create a new ideology, he did not originate the idea that human life can be sorted and ranked.23 He did, however, solidify this idea with the language and reason of the twenty-first century. And when he and others translated these ideas into the ideology of effective altruism, the edict became that it is not only possible to rank lives but doing so is society’s, i.e., the state’s duty.

While cloaked in terms of “efficiency” and “cutting waste,” the road on which we are now embarked can, and may well, lead us into unimaginable darkness. If so, we cannot pretend to be surprised when it costs people their lives. People we know. People we love. People like me.

Maybe people like you.

Jen Ehrlich received her BA/MA from Stanford University where she studied literature, history, and philosophy. She is currently completing her MFA at Columbia. Her scholarly and creative work focus on disability, feminism, and technology.

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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

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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.

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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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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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Submissions

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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