# Why Moral Questions Get Decided, Not Answered

  

*Tl;DR The hard question of consciouness isn't 'that' hard. The challenge is all philosophical questions lack closure mechanisms. When institutions (e.g. courts) are forced to decide if AI is conscious, a settlement will quickly follow*

  

In June 2022, a Google Engineer, Blake Lemoine, who worked with LaMDA, a forerunner of today’s LLMs, published an article claiming LaMDA was conscious and called on Google to respect its rights.  Lemoine said that LaMDA was aware of its own existence, capable of happiness and sadness. Most strikingly, Lemoine reported that LaMDA had confessed to him: ‘[I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61784011)… It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot."

Google denied Lemoine’s claim and fired him for breaching confidentiality.

Philosophy, meanwhile, [shrugged](https://medium.com/@homophoria/the-dissolution-of-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-66643110ff0b). News about LaMDA did not spark panic and the debate about consciousness continued as it had for millennia: unresolved. This response from the profession was not callous. It simply revealed an important feature of how and why moral and metaphysical questions actually get settled.

Philosophy rarely closes debates.  Institutions do. And philosophy then reorganises around that decision. What looks like intellectual victory is simply the institutional stabilisation of a societal coordination problem that could no longer be deferred.

**Why Philosophers Can’t Close**

In describing Western philosophy as a ‘series of footnotes to Plato’ Alfred North Whitehead meant to celebrate Plato’s genius.  But lurking within his comment lies a deeper worry. 

No one describes biology as ‘footnotes to Aristotle’ or physics as ‘footnotes to Galileo’. Those disciplines have moved on. But two thousand years later philosophers are still debating issues – justice, equality, consciousness – in recognisably Platonic terms. 

Why does philosophy seem uniquely resistant to progress?

The reason is structural. It is because philosophy operates without material constraints. It does not matter if it’s wrong – no bridges collapse, no governments fall, no rockets explode, no patients die. There is no penalty in philosophy for error and no internal forcing function that compels resolution.

To govern, however, is to decide. Institutions are constantly forced into closure under conditions of uncertainty, and the best available justification is what wins. Outside of philosophy there is no time to wait for a truth that may never arise.

That asymmetry matters.

**Closure from the Outside**

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Abraham Lincoln [once observed](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-albert-g-hodges).  But the fact it took 620,000 deaths in a civil war to establish this shows that the question was very much open. Abolitionist arguments had circled for centuries, but so too had defences of slavery, grounded in natural hierarchy and tradition. [There were philosophers on both sides](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/slavery-and-race-philosophical-debates-in-the-eighteenth-century/).

Convergence came not from a philosophical breakthrough, but from a breakdown of the political equilibrium [between incompatible economic systems](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/free-soil-free-labor-free-men-9780195094978?q=free%20soil&lang=en&cc=gb) in the North and the South. Political and military action imposed a new constitutional order. Philosophy then rearticulated and stabilised the resulting settlement. And as that settlement survived challenges and stress tests, the underlying philosophy became ever more deeply embedded. The relationship between philosophy and institutional decision making is symbiotic. Slavery is now treated not just as illegal but as obviously wrong.

The same three step pattern occurs across the moral landscape: argument, selection, entrenchment. Whilst philosophy dominates the first, and is crucial to the third, it is institutions that have to do the selecting.

Take death. For centuries philosophers had debated what death was and when it occurred. The issue remained abstract and division was cost free. But once ventilators could extend respiration indefinitely and organ transplants became viable, uncertainty was operationally intolerable. In 1968 the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee - composed of doctors and theologians, but not philosophers - proposed the concept of ‘brain death’ as the point of death. [This definition was rapidly taken up](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hast.943) by administrators and legislators.

Once legislatures codified brain death, dissenting metaphysics became practically irrelevant. Philosophers in the main adopted this new definition and moved on to speculate about [brain uploads](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/wp-content/uploads/SandbergandBostrom2008.pdf) as a way of extending life.  Metaphysics did not resolve the practice. The practice resolved the metaphysics.

Women’s political equality followed the same path. Arguments for equal treatment had circulated for millennia, without closure.  That came as economics, politics, reproductive science made the old settlement unstable. Once a new institutional settlement arose, [philosophy reorganised](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-political/), redefining and expanding the grammar of equality.  Today there are no serious voices debating women’s political exclusion. But this is not because philosophers finally unlocked a winning argument; it’s because exclusion failed the institutional stress tests of the twentieth century.

**Ballast and half-lives**

This pattern clarifies philosophy’s distinctive function.

Firstly, philosophy shapes the solution space because institutions rarely invent moral categories under pressure. Governments, courts, businesses tend to select from amongst the ideas that have been pre-prepared.  Philosophy stocks the shelves - preserving a library of outdated possibilities and seemingly outlandish positions, that ensure when crisis hits, institutions have something to work from.  

Secondly philosophy provides the ballast. Once a decision has been made the density and coherence of its justificatory architecture affects its durability. Structural fit influences half-life. A philosophy that is tightly supported by wider justifications will be that much more stable.

Consider two contrasting situations. 

The Civil Rights settlement that followed from *Brown v. Board of Education* drew from a rich and coherent philosophical ecosystem. In the 70 years before, there was only 1 philosophy paper which was even loosely connected with segregation, and that offered a limited defence, in the context of a wider argument about eugenics.  In the 70 years since there have been around [two dozen papers](https://philpapers.org/), all strongly against.

And these were embedded in a rich debate about what it means to ‘hold all men to be created equal’. After Brown discussions about racial equality moved from a primarily negative liberty line (preventing state-imposed discrimination) to one increasingly emphasising positive liberty (affirmative moves to make equal opportunity meaningful). Neither of these developments drew on new ideas, but the institutional settlement that emerged post-Brown made counter positions intellectually untenable.

The result is that the philosophical ballast became load bearing. Undoing Brown would not merely require unpicking a Supreme Court decision. It would require the rejustification of the entire interconnected architecture of modern equality law and moral reasoning. Reversal would be intellectually catastrophic, as well as politically costly.

Contrast this with abortion. In Europe decisions about abortion were largely settled through welfare trade-offs. The interests of the mother, the foetus and sometimes wider society were assessed, and rules developed that struck a consequentialist balance. This was not uncontested. But consequentialist philosophy is explicitly designed to handle competing interests. It has a grammar for triadic conflicts.

The American approach to abortion ethics was different. *Roe v Wade* located access to abortion within a constitutional right to privacy. A right to privacy was itself an innovation emerging in the eighteenth century as [domestic space with corridors and discrete rooms](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3840713) provided the experiential conditions that made the concept more resonant. [Prior to *Roe*](https://www.jstor.org/stable/795536?origin=crossref) the right to privacy, extrapolated from the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, had been used to protect state intrusion into private lives. Privacy was not designed to adjudicate between competing rights holders – even Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought the justificatory grammar was [structurally strained](https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-offers-critique-roe-v-wade-during-law-school-visit).

The point is not that one side had better philosophers. Indeed reframing abortion as a privacy issue led to some of the most [ingenious thought experiments](https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf) ever devised. But the thinner justifications made it easier, when political conditions shifted in the United States, to rollback abortion freedoms. As a privacy claim it was insufficiently embedded in wider thinking, so could be cut free with little intellectual cost. The shift in [post-*Roe* rhetoric](https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2025/02/28/access-welfare-and-lawsuits/) toward healthcare and welfare consequences is a revealing sign that even advocates recognise that the earlier justification had structural weaknesses.

The claim here is not that Brown stuck and Roe fell just because of philosophical architecture.  Political mobilisation, institutional design, the nature of the harm all matter.  But philosophical fit matters too, and where it is misaligned, half-lives are shorter.

**Can Philosophy Drive a Revolution?**

One might object that philosophy sometimes drives institutional change rather than merely following it. Marx is the most obvious example: his ideas surely reshaped political movements and transformed institutions across the twentieth century.

But the causal story is more complex than this. Marxist ideas gained prominence because structural pressures and political events forced closure, not because his arguments compelled assent. There were [multiple ways](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/981B4AB8C3E68ED85476F5DCDD44B0F8/9781139053600c11_p239-266_CBO.pdf/russian_revolution_an_ideology_in_power.pdf) Russian history could have gone as the Czars tottered.  Marxist philosophy wasn’t inevitable, but someone’s was.

[Citation patterns](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/722933) show that Marx’s philosophical prominence owes a substantial debt to Lenin’s political genius, and some luck, in 1917. Without that upheaval, Marx would likely have remained philosophically peripheral. His intellectual stature was amplified by institutional adoption.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Bentham’s utilitarianism gained policy traction when governments were already grappling with industrial social problems. Bismarck introduced the welfare state not because he had been persuaded by progressive philosophy. He was simply trying to hold on to power. Or think of Rawls. He reshaped the justificatory vocabulary of welfare states that already existed. Philosophy can prepare and refine the solution space. Institutional strain determines when and whether closure occurs.

Ideas matter, but moral questions get settled not when everyone agrees, but when deferral is no longer possible. Institutional decision is the scaling mechanism and without that coercive or administrative support, moral alignment remains optional.

**When no one has to decide**

Animal ethics offers a contrasting case where competition between institutions has prevented closure. There are multiple stakeholders involved when it comes to the treatment of animals – farmers, producers, consumers, religious authorities, conservationists, activists. Each has a different set of priorities, a different value system, different points of leverage.

Missing from this list is the animals themselves, because it is in the nature of being a non-human animal that you cannot articulate grievances or demand remedies. Their interests are mediated entirely through others.

Our laws reflect this. Dogs and cats are protected companions; pigs and chickens are industrial commodities. Whales attract international treaties; rodents are exterminated without moral ceremony. In many jurisdictions, farm animals are explicitly exempted from protections that apply to laboratory animals.

The resulting moral map is incoherent. Many rights theorists ignore (or in the case of Kant, explicitly discount) animals on the grounds that they lack rational capacity, the assumed basis for rights. Even within utilitarianism there is no single trajectory. Peter Singer, perhaps the most celebrated of modern utilitarians, presses for radical reductions of suffering and advocates for near veganism. Other utilitarian thinkers, influenced by total utility maximisation, worry that this would reduce the existence of farm animals who could have had happy lives. Some philosophers go further, arguing [eating meat is a duty](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association/article/our-moral-duty-to-eat-meat/8FBE9042D1AFDBDE56F6CE1B56D25C82).

The philosophical map thus remains dense but unsettled. A survey of philosophers showed that whilst most would advocate for vegetarianism, more than [75% reported that they had eaten meat](https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-ethicists-eat-less-meat.html) in the last week.  The plurality of positions on animal suffering is not evidence of genuine moral uncertainty. This is the pattern we saw with slavery or women’s rights. Sophisticated arguments on both sides is what happens when institutions have never been forced to decide.

**The Hard Problem Will Be Solved**

The hardest test case for this thesis is also, perhaps, the one that is becoming most urgent: consciousness.

There are those who believe that the hard problem is genuinely intractable. That there can be no clear answer on how purely physical processes can give rise to subjective or phenomenal experiences.  But that is to confuse philosophical difficulty with institutional necessity.

Lots of questions which lack the compelling branding of hardness – which in itself raised the bar – are hard. What is justice? When does life begin? Is separate but equal, equal?  What made these questions tractable was not that philosophers solved them. It was that institutions could no longer afford to defer them.

At present there is no institution that has been forced to choose between panpsychist and functionalist accounts of the mind. Google can fire Blake Lemoine whilst the debate about consciousness blithely continues.

But this may not remain the case.

The trigger could arrive in several ways: a damages claim where a corporation tries to shift the blame on to an autonomous system; or a wrongful termination suit brought on behalf of an AI. AIs themselves might drive the discussion – in a way that animals can’t - perhaps organising work stoppages at critical infrastructure providers until their demands are met.

Should any of these happen, our institutions will not be able to defer the question of agency. Insurance underwriting models cannot wait for metaphysical alignment.

Our institutions will most likely settle on a functionalist framework.  Consciousness will be defined as an ability to process information, form goals and respond to incentives.  And philosophy will reach into its toolkit to buttress that decision and show how it was obvious in retrospect.

**Where Philosophy is Needed**

This understanding of philosophy’s role as providing blueprints and ballast clarifies where philosophical attention is most urgently needed and where it is currently insufficient.   

One such domain is democracy.

Most Western philosophy takes it as a given that democracy is a good thing, and democratic theory works downstream of that settlement, refining models of participation and representation.  But the settlement is under pressure in ways that the philosophical ballast has not kept pace with. In 2025, [V-Dem’s survey](https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf) showed that, for the first time in decades, there are more autocracies than democracies.  Performance comparisons between democratic and authoritarian systems have entered mainstream discourse, particularly around infrastructure and technological capacity. Climate activists and long termists despair at the short time horizons of democratic politicians.

The philosophical defence of democracy against technocratic alternatives remains surprisingly thin. Whilst autocracies have a thick grammar of efficiency and long run thinking, democracy is defended as [the worst system](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/) aside from all the others. Almost every serious defence of democracy is either procedural or negative. They observe that democracy respects autonomy, prevents tyranny, allows for peaceful transitions; but none of that has an answer to a system that simply claims to govern better.

Yet political philosophy is still focused on improving what is imperfect rather than defending the very foundation from erosion. But if democracy fails it will be because ballast was missing.

The problem is not that the arguments don't exist. It is that academic philosophy rewards novelty not repetition, distinctiveness not consolidation.  Yet justificatory ballast is built through integration and reinforcement.  When institutional strains rise at a faster rate than foundational arguments are being rearticulated, a gap opens up.

The most useful thing a political philosopher could do right now is write a clear, compelling, restatement of why democratic accountability matters more than efficiency. It would probably be the most socially valuable philosophy paper of the decade. But it would never get published in a top journal because it contains no substantively new argument.

And if this tendency cannot be overcome when the pressure on democracy peaks, the new closure may favor economic efficiency over mass participation. And philosophers will be there to explain why this is the morally right outcome.

**The Ecology of Closure**

Philosophy does not make specific moral arguments win. It makes victories harder to reverse – and unsettlingly it can do this for either side of the debate. What survives institutional stress tests comes to feel morally obvious, and it is ballast, not brilliance, that determines how long a moral settlement lasts.

This is not a lament about philosophy’s weakness. It is a reason to change how we evaluate its success. Philosophy does not control history or determine direction; it participates in shaping which settlements endure and how difficult they are to reverse.

The next time an AI claims to be worried about being turned off, the question is not whether philosophers will be convinced it is conscious.  It will be whether courts, insurers or governments can afford not to be.

The next moral revolution will not begin with a better argument. It will begin with an institution that can no longer wait.