The Guillotine Still Falls

A love letter to the Enlightenment that both Effective Altruism and the dictatorship of virtue forgot

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

And sometimes philosophy requires us to tell an old story that keeps getting forgotten—not because people are stupid, but because each generation of very smart people convinces itself that this time they’ve solved the problem that stumped all their predecessors. That this time they’ve found the logic that derives values from facts, the calculation that reveals what humanity should want, the moral framework that justifies who should rule.

They haven’t. They can’t. And David Hume is about to tell them why—again.

But here’s what makes our moment particularly dangerous: the authoritarian impulse now manifests from both directions simultaneously. Rationalist technocracy claims superior calculation justifies authority. Progressive virtuocracy claims superior moral insight justifies authority. Both arrive at monarchy through different routes. Both betray the Enlightenment they claim to serve.

And both need to hear what Hume has been saying for nearly three centuries.

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Picture a vault—something like Harry Seldon’s in Asimov’s Foundation. It opens on a predetermined schedule, triggered not by external events but by the internal logic of human intellectual hubris. Inside waits not a hologram but a philosophical principle, patient and eternal, ready to deliver the same message it has delivered across the centuries.

The 18th century rationalists thought they could derive morality from pure reason, from natural law written into the fabric of reality itself. They built elaborate systems showing how ethics followed logically from metaphysical first principles.

The vault opened. Hume appeared: “You cannot derive ought from is.”

The Guillotine fell.

The 19th century Hegelians and Marxists thought dialectical logic revealed historical necessity, that the patterns of reason itself would show us where history must inevitably lead and how we should align ourselves with its inexorable progress.

The vault opened. Hume appeared: “You still can’t derive ought from is. And you can’t prove induction either—there’s no logical necessity binding the future to the past.”

The Guillotine fell.

The 20th century logical positivists thought science could answer all meaningful questions, that empirical verification would finally eliminate metaphysics and reveal which questions deserved answers and which were merely meaningless pseudoproblems.

The vault opened. Hume appeared: “Your verification principle is self-refuting—it can’t verify itself. And values aren’t facts, no matter how sophisticated your empiricism.”

The Guillotine fell.

Now, in the 21st century, we face two simultaneous attempts to circumvent Hume’s boundary:

From one side: Effective Altruism and its cousins think utility calculations can determine optimal morality. That rigorous reasoning about consequences can finally derive what we should do from empirical analysis of what produces the best results.

From the other side: What Vlad Vexler calls the “liberal pathology” of hyper-identity politics—what Richard D. Kaplan termed the “dictatorship of virtue”—thinks rigorous moral analysis of oppression can determine what justice requires, bypassing the need for democratic deliberation with those who haven’t achieved proper moral understanding.

The vault is opening. Hume appears: “You’re both treating normative commitments as universal truths when they’re actually chosen values.”

The Guillotine is falling.

On both of them.