Vincent L. Anderson · Oct 17, 2026

A systemic, determinist diagnosis of hatred and ideology, and why a diagnosis built on moral realism cannot see the mechanism it belongs to. Companion to "Diagnosis Without Desert." Revised 2026-10-19 after adversarial review.

Abstract

This paper presumes three positions without argument: moral anti-realism; impartial altruism as an overriding aim; and Sapolsky's determinism. On the third, every belief and emotion is the product of prior biological and environmental causes, and libertarian free will is excluded. On these presumptions, moral realism is not a rival theory to be weighed. It is a widespread misconception with a function. It attaches a sentiment, such as disgust or outrage, to a justification that presents itself as a stance-independent moral fact, after the sentiment has formed. The paper defines a diagnostic systemically: an account of how a population comes to hold a harmful ideology, and of how hostility toward its holders is produced, amplified and sustained. It argues that a diagnostic built on moral realism is drastically inferior in kind, because it is itself an output of the mechanism it should diagnose. It reads moralized sentiment as perception, so it cannot see the moralization pipeline or the systems that amplify it. The paper reviews evidence for each stage of that pipeline, from post hoc moral reasoning and disgust-driven moralization to the network amplification of outrage. It also argues that wherever a sentiment must be codified, it must be stated as desert or character. The justice system requires sentiment to be stated as desert, and the gatekeepers of financing, healthcare and legal documentation adapt the same conversion. Their codified outputs then stoke moralized issues and are cited as proof that moral facts exist, so the belief confirms itself. The difference in kind follows from the presumptions; the evidence shows that the loop exists and does harm, not that the moral realist diagnostic is blind to it. The size of its behavioral effects has not been measured, and the paper proposes how to measure it.

1. Presumptions and terms

The paper presumes three positions. It does not argue for them, and it does not weigh them against alternatives.

1. Moral anti-realism. There are no moral facts whose truth is independent of the

- attitudes of any actual or idealized agent.

2. Altruism. The reduction of suffering and the increase of well-being for all sentient

- beings is the observer's central and overriding aim. It is impartial: it counts each being's suffering, opponents included.

3. Sapolskian determinism. Every behavior, belief and emotion is the product of prior

- causes. These run from the neural events of the preceding seconds to genes,

- upbringing, culture and evolutionary history (Sapolsky 2017, 2023). Libertarian free will is excluded. No one is the ultimate author of the dispositions they act from, so no one has basic desert.

Moral realism, on these presumptions. Moral realism enters the paper only as something to be explained. It is the widespread belief that moral judgments report stance-independent facts. On the presumptions, that belief is a misconception, and it has a function. Hume described taste as "gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment" (Hume 1751, App. 1.21). The psychology supports the order of events. Moral judgment is usually a quick intuition, and moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction generated after the judgment is reached (Haidt 2001). Moral realism is the step that presents the sentiment's verdict as a fact the world contains. Not every sentiment is converted into such a claim, and the account does not need it to be. The conversion is made wherever the social context requires a sentiment to be codified. A court cannot sentence on disgust. It must state its sentence as what the offender deserves, so the justice system converts sentiment into a claim of desert as a matter of procedure. That conversion then serves as the baseline for the institutions that grant financing, healthcare and legal documentation. Conflict adds a further route to felt objectivity. Section 3 sets out the evidence for each stage.

Terms kept apart.

- Moral anti-realism is a thesis about morality. Its Humean constructivist form extends to all practical reasons.

- Global anti-realism, in Dummett's sense, holds that the truth of any statement rests on its demonstrability. The paper does not use it. Its empirical claims are ordinary empirical claims, true or false whatever anyone thinks of them.

- Moral relativism holds that moral claims are true relative to a culture or framework. It is not presumed. Error theorists and quasi-realists need not be relativists. A

- Humean constructivist holds that reasons are relative to each agent's standpoint, which is close to agent-relativism but not to the cultural relativism some studies manipulate.

- Folk moral objectivism is an ordinary person's belief that a specific moral issue has an objectively correct answer. It is the misconception as people actually hold it, issue by issue, and it is what most of the studies below measure.

Throughout, "realist" and "anti-realist" carry the qualifier "moral."

2. What a systemic diagnostic is

A diagnostic is an account of how a harmful ideology, and the hostility it provokes, are produced and sustained in a population. It also says where intervention can change them. Its unit is the system, not the person.

The parts of the system. The diagnostic tracks causes at several levels at once, and each level is caused in turn.

- Information ecosystems and platforms. These determine which messages spread. Moral-emotional language increased a message's diffusion by about 20% per word, mostly within ideological networks rather than between them (Brady et al. 2017). Positive social feedback for outrage increased later outrage, and users conformed to the outrage norms of their networks (Brady et al. 2021).

- Networks. Among people who had already committed ideologically motivated crimes, having radicalized friends predicted the use of violence (Jaśko, LaFree and Kruglanski 2017). Radical social contexts strengthened the link between grievance and support for violence (Jaśko et al. 2020).

- Material and social conditions. In the same population of offenders, economic and social loss of significance each predicted the use of violence (Jaśko, LaFree and Kruglanski 2017). Humiliation increases the appeal of extremist ideologies through a need for cognitive closure (Webber et al. 2018).

- Institutions. Courts, lenders, health systems and immigration agencies must state their decisions in codified form. Where a decision rests on sentiment, the codified form turns the sentiment into a claim of desert or of moral character. The justice system sets this form, and the others adapt it (Section 3).

- Psychological mechanisms. Intuition, moralization and felt objectivity convert these inputs into moral conviction (Section 3).

- Feedback loops. Perceived dehumanization produces reciprocal dehumanization and support for aggression on the other side (Kteily, Hodson and Bruneau 2016). American partisans estimate the other side's prejudice and dehumanization toward them at about twice their measured level (Moore-Berg et al. 2020).

Individuals as nodes. Carriers, targets and observers are nodes. Their beliefs and emotions are outputs of the system and inputs to it. The diagnostician is one of them. Her outrage at an ideology is produced by the same kinds of causes, and once she expresses it, it re-enters the system as input. Under the determinism presumed in Section 1, no node's beliefs stand outside this causal web.

What the diagnostic is for. It