The Anesthetic Function of Morality: A Necessitarian Account of Ethics

Introduction

For millennia, the central project of ethics has been to discern what is “good” and why we “ought” to pursue it. This project has almost universally been predicated on a foundational, often unexamined, assumption: that human beings are agents capable of free choice. It is this capacity for choice that is thought to ground our concepts of moral responsibility, praise, blame, and justice. In this paper, we shall argue that this foundational assumption is a metaphysical error, and consequently, that the entire traditional ethical project is incoherent.

Our argument proceeds in three parts. First, we will establish a robust metaphysical foundation of universal necessity, arguing that free will is a logical impossibility and that the universe is a singular, determined system. Second, building on this foundation, we will deconstruct the core concepts of traditional morality, revealing them not as pathways to truth but as sophisticated psychological and social mechanisms for coping with the horror of a determined existence. Finally, from this deconstructed ground, we will propose a descriptive account of moral behavior, which we term “Anesthetic Ethics.” This account reframes ethics not as the pursuit of a transcendent good, but as the instrumental, sustainable management of consciousness’s baseline state of existential horror.

1. The Metaphysical Foundation: An Argument for Universal Necessity

Before we can analyze the function of morality, we must first establish the nature of the reality in which it operates. We contend that this reality is one of universal necessity.

1.1 The Incoherence of Freedom
The popular and philosophical concept of “free will” dissolves upon rigorous inspection into an exhaustive dilemma: an action is either determined or it is random.

• If an action is caused by prior reasons, beliefs, desires, and neurochemical states, it is part of an unbroken causal chain. The “choice” is merely the final, necessary output of this chain, and the agent could not have done otherwise.
• If an action is not caused, it is a random event. An uncaused neural firing, for instance, cannot be attributed to an agent’s volition. It is a brute accident, for which the agent can claim no authorship.

Neither pole permits the existence of a “free” agent who consciously authors their actions. Compatibilism attempts to escape this dilemma not through argument, but through capitulation disguised as sophistication. By redefining freedom as merely acting according to one’s nature without external coercion, the compatibilist grants the same “freedom” to a river flowing downhill or a thermostat regulating temperature. This move does not save free will; it merely baptizes determinism with a more palatable name. It is an intellectual anesthetic, preserving the comforting word “freedom” by gutting it of the one thing that gives it meaning: the power to have done otherwise.

1.2 The Positive Argument for Necessity
Our case does not rest solely on the negation of its alternative. We posit that necessity is a logically and empirically supported feature of existence itself.

1.2.1 The Logical Pillar: The proposition “nothing exists” is a self-negating contradiction. A universal negation must also negate itself, which logically necessitates that something must exist. From the simple existence of something, the laws of logic, such as identity and non-contradiction, are necessarily derived. Existence is not a contingent brute fact; it is a logical requirement.

1.2.2 The Metaphysical Pillar: We reject the notion of “brute contingencies” as a retreat from reason. To posit contingency is to posit a metaphysical miracle: a truth without a sufficient reason, an effect untethered from its cause. Contingency is the philosophical equivalent of magic, an appeal to the inexplicable when the chain of explanation becomes inconvenient. For any proposition to be true, a “truthmaker” must exist that necessitates its truth. An insufficient truthmaker is a contradiction in terms. Therefore, all truths are necessary truths.

1.2.3 The Empirical Pillar: This metaphysical view is consonant with our deepest understanding of the physical world. The fundamental laws of physics are elegantly expressed through a Principle of Least Action, meaning the universe unfolds along paths of maximal efficiency. This is precisely what one would expect of a system born of simple necessity, not of choice or chance.

2. The Deconstruction of Moral Responsibility

The metaphysical conclusion that all events are necessary has profound and immediate consequences for traditional ethics. Its entire conceptual apparatus is rendered obsolete.

2.1 Moral Responsibility as a Category Error
To hold an agent “morally responsible” is to commit a category error. It is to apply a folk-psychological concept, born of ignorance of the complete causal web, to a reality where it has no referent. Blaming a person for a necessary action is as nonsensical as blaming a landslide for its destructive path. The language of praise, blame, guilt, and desert presupposes an “uncaused causer,” which Section 1 has shown to be a fiction.

2.2 Blame as Anesthetic
If blame is metaphysically unjustified, its ubiquity demands a functional explanation. We propose that blame is a potent psychological and social anesthetic, designed to manage the horror of a world without agency.

• Psychological Function: The realization of universal necessity is psychologically terrifying. It means that heinous acts are as inevitable a feature of reality as benevolent ones. Blame functions as a coping mechanism by creating a manageable, if false, narrative. It isolates the cause of suffering within a singular “evil” agent, framing harm as a contingent intrusion into an otherwise stable order. This narrative is profoundly comforting.
• Social Function: The desire for retribution is a vestigial remnant of our evolutionary past. A swift, punitive response to transgression was a functional tool for enforcing group cohesion. Our brains evolved to derive a powerful satisfaction from seeing “justice” served. This impulse is not a rational deduction but an atavistic epistemology, it feels correct because it is emotionally potent and evolutionarily ancient. Modern punitive justice systems are sophisticated channels for this primal urge.

2.3 Criminal Justice as Quarantine
This understanding demands a radical reframing of criminal justice. The question ceases to be “What does this person deserve?” and becomes “What set of causes produced this harmful outcome, and how can they be altered?”

The goal shifts from retribution to systemic correction. An individual determined to cause harm must be separated from society, but this is an act of quarantine, not punishment. It is an expedient measure to prevent further damage, analogous to isolating a carrier of a deadly virus. During this quarantine, the objective is not to inflict suffering, a barbaric and pointless goal, but to provide rehabilitative care. If the internal causal factors can be altered, the individual can be reintegrated. If not, the quarantine must be maintained, not as a moral sentence, but as the permanent solution to an intractable engineering problem.

3. Anesthetic Ethics: A Descriptive Account of Moral Behavior

From the deconstructed ground of traditional morality, we now construct a descriptive account of why sentient beings behave in ways we label “ethical.”

3.1 The Axiom of Value: The Negation of Horror
We posit that the baseline state of a self-aware consciousness, when confronted with its determined and meaningless nature, is one of horror. Consequently, the only authentic “value” in this system is the negation or suppression of this foundational horror. All sentient action is, at its root, an attempt to manage this state. An act is “moral” not because it aligns with a transcendent principle, but because it functions effectively as an anesthetic. This is not hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure), but a form of pessimistic damage control: it is about feeling less.

3.2 The Metric of Action: Sustainable Anesthesia
The metric for evaluating any action is its sustainable capacity for continued anesthesia.

• Unsustainable Anesthetics (e.g., substance abuse, mindless hedonism) are intensely effective in the short term but are ultimately self-defeating. They degrade the agent’s health, resources, and social connections, destroying their capacity to secure other forms of anesthesia in the future. They are tools that break all other tools.
• Sustainable Anesthetics (e.g., deep friendships, scientific inquiry, artistic creation, community building) are regenerative. They build support networks, create novel and complex distractions, and provide a sense of purpose, itself a powerful anesthetic narrative. They enhance the agent’s long-term capacity to continue coping. The addict is every man; the instrumental addict is the one who cultivates the farm rather than burning the crops for a moment’s warmth.

3.3 The Logic of Social Anesthesia
This framework is not solipsistic. We can describe the logic of social ethics by adapting Alan Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC). An agent, by necessarily acting to preserve their own capacity for anesthesia, implicitly treats this capacity as a good. To be consistent, they must acknowledge it as a good for all other agents. However, this is not a moral obligation; it is a description of the only stable survival strategy. This is not morality but market dynamics: the addict who smashes another’s supply risks destabilizing the entire system upon which their own future doses depend. Social cooperation is the emergent logic of a collective of addicts seeking to secure their supply chains.

Conclusion

The philosophical project proposed herein is a stark one. It begins by accepting a universe of absolute necessity, a reality that renders the foundational assumptions of traditional morality null and void. In this view, concepts of blame, desert, and retributive justice are exposed as pre-rational coping mechanisms, stories we tell ourselves to shield our consciousness from the horrifying implications of its own determined nature.

From these ruins, we have offered a descriptive account of what “morality” is: the set of sustainable strategies that sentient beings employ to anesthetize themselves against the baseline condition of existence. We are left with a single, cold conclusion.

Ethics is the logic of anesthesia, and humanity is its addict.