An application of "The Diagnostic Advantage of Moral Anti-Realism" to white supremacy, anarchism, Marxism, liberalism and white abolitionism. Written Oct 19, 2026.

1. How the framework is applied

What the framework can and cannot do. The paper presumes moral anti-realism, impartial altruism and Sapolskian determinism. On those presumptions no ideology is true or false as morality, because there are no stance-independent moral facts for it to match. The framework therefore does not rank ideologies by moral correctness. It does two other things. It diagnoses how each ideology, and the hostility around it, is produced, amplified and sustained (Sections 2–3 of the paper). And it measures each against the one aim it presumes: the impartial reduction of suffering for all sentient beings, opponents included. An ideology can be assessed on that second axis without any appeal to moral fact, because the assessment is about consequences and about whose suffering the ideology counts.

What "extreme" means here. The paper does not define extremity. This application uses a definition built from the paper's own stage 4: an ideology is extreme to the degree that it (a) treats its core claims as non-negotiable and objectively grounded, (b) licenses intolerance, exclusion or violence toward outgroups, and (c) excludes some beings' suffering from the count. On this definition extremity is a property of how an ideology is held and enacted, not only of its content. Every ideology below has extreme and moderate carriers, and the analysis notes both. Where an ideology's content alone satisfies (b) and (c), its extremity does not depend on the carrier.

A note on the list. "All extreme ideologies" cannot be covered in one document; the five named here are analysed, and the template transfers to others. Liberalism is not usually classed as extreme. It is included as the comparison case, and because the paper's institutional branch (desert-based sentencing, "good moral character" tests) is largely built from liberal legal institutions.

Template for each ideology.

- Core claims, briefly and in the terms its own carriers would accept.

- Inputs: the material, social and psychological conditions that predict uptake (Sections 2 and 4 of the paper).

- Moralization profile: which sentiments it recruits (stage 2), what it presents as stance-independent fact (stage 3), and how non-negotiable it makes its claims (stage 4).

- Codification: where it has been, or seeks to be, written into institutions (the

- institutional branch).

- The hostility loop: how the ideology and its opponents feed each other (stage 5). Against impartial altruism: whose suffering it counts.

- Leverage points: where the moral anti-realist diagnostic would intervene, and where the moral realist diagnostic would only condemn.

2. White supremacy

Core claims. People racialized as white are a natural kind, superior in worth or capacity, and entitled to dominance or separation. Contemporary forms centre on demographic threat, such as the "Great Replacement" narrative popularized by Renaud Camus (2011).

Inputs. The paper's predictors apply directly. Significance loss and humiliation raise the appeal of extremist ideologies through need for closure (Webber et al. 2018). Self-uncertainty under threat moves identification toward radical groups (Hogg, Meehan and Farquharson 2010). Economic and social loss of significance, and radicalized friends, predict violence among those already radicalized (Jaśko, LaFree and Kruglanski 2017). Status loss of a formerly dominant group is the characteristic input here: the ideology converts a felt decline into a story of theft.

Moralization profile. This is the most disgust-driven of the five. Its vocabulary is purity, contamination, degeneration and invasion, which is the disgust route to moralization that Rozin (1999) and Wisneski and Skitka (2017) describe. It presents race as a biological fact and racial hierarchy as a natural or divine order, so the sentiment arrives already dressed as stance-independent truth. Non-negotiability is extreme: the outgroup's existence, not its conduct, is the offence, so no compromise is available in principle.

Codification. The clearest historical case of the institutional branch. U.S. naturalization was limited to "free white persons" from 1790; anti-miscegenation statutes stood until Loving v. Virginia (1967); Jim Crow and the Nuremberg Laws (1935) wrote racial worth into citizenship, marriage and access to goods. Each statute then served as evidence that the hierarchy was real, which is the self-confirming circle the paper describes (Section 3, "the branch closes on itself"). It has since been codified against as well, for instance in Germany's criminal bans on Nazi symbols and incitement (StGB §§86a, 130).

The hostility loop. Contemporary carriers are thick in online networks where moral-emotional language spreads within, not between, ideological communities (Brady et al. 2017). Opponents' condemnation is recycled as proof of persecution and replacement, and their meta-perceptions are often exaggerated in turn (Moore-Berg et al. 2020). Mass-casualty attackers in Christchurch (2019), El Paso (2019) and Buffalo (2022) cited replacement narratives, which is the stage 4 link from conviction to violence (Mooijman et al. 2018) in its sharpest form. Against impartial altruism. It fails at the root. It does not merely weigh some beings' suffering wrongly; it removes whole groups from the count or counts their suffering as a good. This is the one judgment the framework can make with full confidence, and it is made without any appeal to moral fact: impartiality is the presumed aim, and the ideology is defined by its partiality.

Leverage points. Significance and belonging offered through non-racial channels (Webber et al. 2018); network exit and alternative social ties, given the network predictors (Jaśko et al. 2020); malleability framing (Halperin et al. 2011); platform incentives that reward outrage less (Brady et al. 2021); and non-judgmental narrative exchange (Kalla and Broockman 2020, 2023). Exit programmes such as EXIT Deutschland and Life After Hate work on these lines; their effects have not been rigorously evaluated. The moral realist diagnostic would mainly condemn, which this ideology's own narrative predicts and absorbs.

What the framework adds. Under determinism, carriers are not ultimately authors of their dispositions. That changes the response, not the assessment: the ideology is maximally harmful against the presumed aim, and its carriers are caused nodes whose causes can be changed.

3. Anarchism

Core claims. Coercive hierarchy, above all the state, is illegitimate and unnecessary; social order can rest on voluntary association and mutual aid. The tradition is wide: Proudhon's mutualism, Kropotkin's communist anarchism (Mutual Aid, 1902), anarcho-syndicalism, Stirner's egoism (1844) and, more distantly, market anarchism.

Inputs. Distrust of institutions that have excluded or punished the carrier; experiences of police or state coercion; and, historically, industrial labour conditions. On available accounts, uptake is concentrated in youth subcultures and in movements formed around specific grievances, so network effects are likely strong (Jaśko et al. 2020).

Moralization profile. Split, and the split matters to the framework. Stirner is an anti-realist: he called morality, rights and the state "spooks," abstractions that people serve as if they had authority of their own. That is close to the paper's own diagnosis of borrowed universality. Kropotkin, by contrast, grounded anarchist ethics in a naturalized account of solidarity, and much movement rhetoric treats "freedom" and "domination" as stance-independent fact