Markdown · Canonical · 2026-08-10

Modal Path Ethics Apologizes to Walter Veit

On July 31, Modal Path Ethics subjected Walter Veit to a fairly aggressive audit concerning his proposal for the end of moral philosophy.

The End of Moral Philosophy Has an Objective Function

Walter Veit abolishes moral facts, then asks utility to govern what remains.

Modal Path EthicsAidan Lawson

There were calculators.

There were optimizer-priests.

At one point, doom arrived early.

Modal Path Ethics still stands by the central objection. An empirical moral science still needs an objective function, and the choice of that function quietly reintroduces philosophical judgment concerning value, standing, aggregation, distribution, and loss.

Then Walter Veit published another article.

The Two Kinds of Philosophers—And Why We Only Need One

Personal Perspective: Of swallows and moles, growing up, and the future of philosophy

Psychology TodayWalter Veit Ph.D.

In this one, he divides philosophers into swallows, who soar around in speculative abstraction, and moles, who dig around in the empirical dirt with the sciences.

Walter is a mole.

More importantly, he recently encountered a stuffed mole in a shop, left without buying her, thought about the mole overnight, returned the next morning, bought her, and concluded:

“Moles got to stick together.”

Modal Path Ethics has reviewed this evidence.

This framework may have come in a little hot.

This becomes especially awkward here because Veit appears to be attacking much of the same institutional pathology examined in The Immortal Corpus: philosophy preserving its own professional machinery, mistaking disciplinary continuance for intellectual necessity, and drifting away from contact with the wider fields it claims to understand.

So a correction is due.

• Walter Veit is no longer classified as an optimizer-priest attempting to abolish philosophy.
  • He is provisionally reclassified as [another guy trying to kill the immortal academic organism from a different side of the building].

There remains a real disagreement.

Veit wants philosophy pulled toward empirical science. Modal Path Ethics agrees enthusiastically until the empirical instrument reaches the question of what it should optimize. At that point, somebody has to decide what counts as loss.

We continue to believe the philosopher is hiding in the loss function.

This is now said with less aggression.

Modal Path Ethics apologizes for the severity of the previous characterization.

Please give the mole our regards.