Contingency Guillotine (CG)

The Contingency Guillotine is the result that no moral claim can be strongly objective, because morality is valuation and valuation requires valuers. Strip away minds, interpreters, and valuational structure, and “right/wrong” stops having determinate content or truth conditions (see Term 12).

Book: Existential Logicism. Location in text: Chapter 7 (“The Contingency Guillotine (pillar 6)”), including sections 7.1–7.8, and Appendix 7.10 (“Formal Derivation of The Contingency Guillotine”).

WHAT IT IS

The Contingency Guillotine is the book’s execution sentence for “objective morality” as a mind independent law of the universe. Not because morality is trivial, but because the concept of a moral truth that exists independently of any mind is incoherent once you ask a simple question: who, or what, is it for? Moral language is not just description. It carries “oughtness.” That “oughtness” is not a property like mass or gravity. It is an evaluative stance, and evaluative stances only exist where valuers exist.

The chapter makes the point bluntly: a universe full of rocks and stars can contain endless physical events, but none of them are moral events. A rock rolling into another rock is not “wrong.” It is just a change in matter. “Wrongness” enters only when you have something that can interpret, care, prefer, suffer, intend, judge, and respond. That is the core of the “no morality without minds” idea that the chapter builds into the Contingency Guillotine.

The “guillotine” metaphor is precise. People often try to rescue objective morality by anchoring it to something they think is firm: human nature, rationality, evolution, wellbeing, divine command, cosmic justice, or “the way things are meant to be.” The book’s claim is that every one of those anchors is contingent. It depends on specific features of a world: specific beings, specific psychologies, specific divine assumptions, specific histories, specific interpretive frameworks. And if your moral truth depends on any of that, then it is not strongly objective. It is conditional. It is “true for” or “true given” a certain kind of valuer and a certain kind of context.

The key clarification is that CG is not trying to erase morality from lived life. It is trying to erase a particular metaphysical posture: the claim that morality is written into the universe as a stance free law that would remain fully meaningful even if no minds existed to interpret it. The book treats morality more like language or money than like gravity: it is a human made system that becomes real and powerful through shared use, enforcement, and coordination, but it is not a mind independent feature of empty space.

WHY IT MATTERS

The Contingency Guillotine draws a hard boundary between two different things people mix together. One is the strength of a moral conviction, or the breadth of agreement around it. The other is mind independent objectivity. CG says you can have intense conviction and deep intersubjective agreement, and still not have strong objectivity. “Everyone agrees” does not turn “ought” into a cosmic property. It just means a population of valuers converged.

It also acts as an anti cruelty filter. A huge amount of human violence is fueled by the idea that a group possesses objective moral law, and that dissent is not merely disagreement but evil. Once you believe your morality is an external law of the universe, punishment becomes “justice” by default, and empathy becomes optional. CG attacks that posture at the root. If morality is contingent on minds, then moral conflict is not a war over cosmic statutes. It is a conflict of valuational structures, incentives, histories, and interpretations. That does not make it harmless. It makes it legible.

CG makes moral change make sense. The chapter leans on the obvious but uncomfortable reality that moral codes shift across eras and cultures, and that the “moral circle” has expanded and contracted depending on context. Under objective morality realism, this forces you into strange stories: either most humans were “objectively wrong” for most of history, or moral truth is somehow hidden and only recently discovered, or moral truth is real but inaccessible. Under CG, moral change is exactly what you should expect when morality is a contingent coordination system built by valuers with evolving pressures and capabilities.

It also sets up the system’s ethical pivot. If you kill strong objectivity, you do not kill ethics. You relocate it. You turn ethics into something that can be studied in terms of minds, incentives, suffering, cooperation, power, and predictable behavioral dynamics. That is why CG is paired forward to the next pillar: once moral laws are not cosmic, the remaining task is to describe the deterministic forces that actually generate moral behavior and moral conflict.

Finally, CG forces honesty about hidden premises. Many arguments smuggle in value claims while pretending to derive them from pure facts. CG aligns with the classic “is ought” pressure, but adds a deeper point: even the meaning of the moral predicate depends on a valuer structure. You do not only need a value premise somewhere in the chain. You need a valuer for the “ought” to be an “ought” at all.

FORMAL SPINE

The Contingency Guillotine has a formal appendix that turns the main intuition into a clean impossibility result. The appendix’s goal is not to debate every ethical theory. It is to formalize what it would even mean for a moral proposition to be strongly objective, and then show that meaning collapses once you take “no valuers exist” seriously as a possible world.

Definition 7.1 (Valuer) introduces the central object: a valuer v is a subsystem that has a non trivial ordering over accessible states, and whose dynamics are sensitive to that ordering, meaning it tends to move toward preferred states or away from dispreferred ones. In plain terms: valuers are preference structured systems with behavior that tracks preference.

Definition 7.2 (Moral Proposition) defines what counts as a moral claim in the target sense. A proposition P is moral if it is action guiding and uses moral vocabulary like “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” “should,” or “should not” in a normative way, not as a purely descriptive report. The action guiding part is crucial. It pins moral language to the “oughtness” function.

Definition 7.3 (Strongly Objective Moral Proposition) defines the kind of objectivity CG is denying. A proposition P is strongly objective if it is moral and, for every possible world w, P has a determinate truth value in w, independent of whether any valuers exist in w, and independent of the structural features of any valuers in w. This is the strongest version of moral realism: mind independence across all possible worlds.

Lemma 7.1 (Hidden Valuer in Moral Content) states the key dependency: if a proposition is moral, then its content implicitly requires reference to a valuer’s ordering or interpretive stance. Even if you do not name the valuer, the “wrong” is functioning as “wrong for” some structure of valuation.

Lemma 7.2 (No Morality Without Valuers) states the closure step: in a world with no valuers, for any moral proposition P, either P lacks a determinate truth value in that world, or P is no longer a moral proposition in that world, because the moral vocabulary no longer latches onto anything action guiding.

Theorem 7.3 (The Contingency Guillotine) packages the result: for any proposition P, if P is moral, then P is not strongly objective. In other words, there exists no strongly objective moral proposition. The “guillotine” is that the very requirement that would make morality objective, independence from valuers, is exactly what removes the conditions that make a proposition moral.

Corollary 7.4 (No Mind Independent Moral Facts) gives the intuitive payoff: there are no moral facts whose truth is independent of all valuers. Moral truth, when it exists, is contingent on the existence and structure of valuers and their interpretive frames.

Remark 7.5 links the result to the classic “is ought” pressure, but sharpens it: even if you try to staple “ought” onto the world as a brute property, it cannot function as “ought” without a valuer structured context.

Remark 7.6 articulates the practical “guillotine test” that follows. If someone claims “X is objectively wrong,” either they can unpack “wrong” into the structure of valuers like us, in which case it is value relative, or they insist it remains wrong in a universe with no valuers, in which case the proposition loses moral meaning or determinate truth conditions.

Remark 7.7 frames CG as a bridge, not a dead end. The denial of strong objectivity is not a denial that morality matters. It is a claim about where morality lives: in valuers and in the deterministic structures that govern their interactions.

HOW IT WORKS

Start with what makes a moral statement a moral statement. It is not just that it mentions a behavior. It is that it does normative work. It tries to guide action, assign status, justify praise or blame, or mark a boundary of permission. That is why the formal appendix insists on action guiding content in the definition of Moral(P).

Then demand the strongest kind of objectivity people usually mean when they say “objective morality.” If “wrong” is objective in that sense, it should remain true with a determinate truth value in every possible world, including worlds where no valuers exist. That is what the strong objectivity definition requires.

Now run the removal move: consider a world with no valuers at all. No beings with preferences, interpretations, suffering, intention, or evaluation. In that world, the moral vocabulary has nothing to attach to. “Should” has no subject. “Wrong” has no normative target. Either the sentence stops being a moral sentence, or it remains a moral sentence but becomes truth indeterminate because the truth conditions depended on valuation structure that is absent. Either way, strong objectivity fails.

That is why the guillotine metaphor is not a vibe. It is a structural collapse. You cannot get mind independent moral truth without removing the exact condition that makes moral propositions moral in the first place.

COMMON OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

Objection: “So you’re saying morality isn’t real.”
Reply: CG is not saying moral experience is fake or that ethical systems are pointless. It is denying a specific metaphysical claim: that moral truths exist as stance free cosmic facts. Morality can be real as a human coordination system, as an emergent necessity among valuers, and as a set of stable norms enforced by real minds in real societies. It is “real” the way language is real, not the way gravity is real.

Objection: “This is just moral nihilism dressed up.”
Reply: CG denies strong objectivity, not significance. The system’s move is to separate “there are no mind independent moral laws” from “there is no reason to care.” Reasons to care come from valuer structure: pain, empathy, cooperation, identity, stability, and shared life. Those are not illusions. They are the raw materials of ethics.

Objection: “But suffering is objectively bad.”
Reply: If “bad” means “bad for beings like us who are built to avoid suffering,” then you are already grounding the claim in valuer structure, which CG allows. If “bad” is supposed to be a property that remains fully meaningful in a universe with no valuers, then you have to explain what “bad” is doing there and why it has any normative force at all. CG’s claim is that you cannot. You either unpack it into valuers, or the predicate floats free and stops functioning as moral.

Objection: “God makes morality objective.”
Reply: If morality depends on divine command, it depends on a mind’s will or nature, which is contingency in exactly the sense CG targets. And even if you try to define God’s nature as necessarily good, you still have to explain how “good” functions without valuation structure. Calling it “objective” does not remove the interpreter problem; it relocates it. The moral claim still has to be understood, applied, and enforced by valuers.

Objection: “Rationality produces objective morality.”
Reply: If “rationality” includes valuational axioms, then morality is still contingent on the structure of rational agents and what they take as ends. If “rationality” is purely descriptive logic, it cannot by itself generate normative force without importing a value premise. CG agrees with the “is ought” pressure and then adds the stronger semantic point: “ought” is empty without a valuer context.

Objection: “Without objective morality, you can’t condemn atrocities.”
Reply: You can condemn atrocities more honestly. You condemn them in terms of real harms to valuers, predictable downstream suffering, destruction of trust and cooperation, and the kind of world such actions create for minds like us. CG does not silence condemnation. It removes the metaphysical shortcut where condemnation is justified by pretending to read cosmic law. It pushes ethical argument back onto the real structure of valuers and the real outcomes they face.

HOW TO USE IT IN DEBATE

Move Card: Run the Guillotine Test
Claim: If your moral claim is “objective,” it should remain a moral truth in a universe with no minds.
If they say: “It would still be wrong, even if no one existed.”
You respond: Then explain what “wrong” means without any valuer structure for it to guide, constrain, or matter to. If you cannot unpack that, you are asserting a word without a truth condition.
What this forces: They either unpack morality into valuers or concede “objective” was rhetorical, not metaphysical.

Move Card: Separate convergence from objectivity
Claim: Wide agreement can make a norm stable, enforceable, and functionally universal among humans, but that is not mind independence.
If they say: “Everyone should agree, so it’s objective.”
You respond: “Should” is already a normative operator. The question is not whether you can persuade valuers to converge, but whether the proposition’s truth is independent of all valuers. CG says it cannot be.
What this forces: They must argue for convergence and consequences, not pretend cosmic legislation.

Move Card: Catch the hidden valuer
Claim: Moral language always hides a valuer reference, even when it pretends not to.
If they say: “No, I mean wrong in itself.”
You respond: “In itself” is the move CG cuts off. Either “wrong” is shorthand for what valuers like us are structured to reject, or it is an inert label with no normative function.
What this forces: They must name the valuer structure they are relying on.

Move Card: Neutralize divine command as a loophole
Claim: “God says so” is still dependence on a will, an interpreter, and a mind. That is contingency, not strong objectivity.
If they say: “God’s morality is objective.”
You respond: If it depends on God’s will, it is contingent on a mind. If it is independent of all minds, then it is not grounded in any valuer structure and loses moral force.
What this forces: They must pick a horn: contingency or emptiness.

Move Card: Bridge to deterministic ethics instead of cosmic law
Claim: If morality lives in valuers, then ethics is about the deterministic forces that shape valuer interaction, not about discovering stance free laws.
If they say: “Then it’s all subjective and arbitrary.”
You respond: Subjective does not mean arbitrary. It means grounded in the real structure of minds and the real dynamics of suffering, cooperation, punishment, and stability. That can be studied rigorously.
What this forces: They must debate the actual causal and social mechanics of moral life.

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER PAGES

Connects backward to: Spectrum of Consciousness (see Term 10). CG depends on the idea that valuers exist on a continuum, and that morality only shows up where valuation capable systems exist.

Connects backward to: Tripp’s Prison (see Term 6). Moral truth claims still live inside frames and interpreters; there is no operative “view from nowhere” tribunal that can declare moral law from outside all minds.

Connects forward to: Deterministic Moral Forces (see Term 13). CG clears away stance free moral law and sets up the replacement program: morality and punishment as products of deterministic structures that can be modeled and reshaped.

Connects outward to: Finite Mind, Finite God (see Term 53). CG applies immediate pressure to moral law theologies by showing that moral “objectivity” cannot escape dependence on interpretation and valuation, even when the interpreter is framed as divine.

TERMINOLOGY INDEX FOR THIS PAGE

Term 6: Tripp’s Prison (TP)
Term 10: Spectrum of Consciousness (SOC)
Term 12: Contingency Guillotine (CG)
Term 13: Deterministic Moral Forces (DMF)
Term 53: Finite Mind, Finite God (FMFG)