David Koepsell

The Geometry of the Good develops a structural realist ontology of ethics, grounding obligation, responsibility, and moral repair in relational directedness. Combining phenomenology, formal ontology, and computational metaphilosophy, the book offers both a philosophical framework and experimental validation through agent-based simulations. This book treats ethics as a structural feature of reality, akin to geometry. Comparable works in analytic ethics (e.g., Scanlon, Korsgaard) or phenomenological accounts (Levinas) focus on normativity or responsibility without providing an ontological or testable foundation. By contrast, this book situates obligation within a realist metaphysics and demonstrates its implications using computational modeling.

This paper presents empirical evidence for the Imperative of Pluralism, the thesis that pluralism is not merely a moral or political preference but an ontological necessity for sustaining relational and democratic orders. Drawing on data from the SimEthica simulation framework, I analyze agent-based systems endowed with cognitive agency and epistemic autonomy. These agents form obligations, negotiate trust, and repair contradiction debt across regimes of differing plural structures. The results show that moral and institutional resilience depends on epistemic diversity coupled with partial alignment. Systems that enforce homogeneity (authoritarian or all-legal) or lack shared norms (anomic or purely pluralist) collapse, while systems maintaining moderate diversity remain stable and adaptive. The findings provide empirical grounding for the philosophical architecture developed in The Geometry of the Good (unpublished manuscript), confirming that pluralism is structurally indispensable for sustaining social being.

This study applies the author's Contradiction-Debt (CD) model (based on the Geometry of the Good, forthcoming) to assess the risk of governance rupture in Argentina as of September 2025. The CD model evaluates violations across five domains—security/rights, rule of law/elections, center–local contradictions, narrative/facts gap, and humanitarian obligations—against the effectiveness of repair mechanisms, weighted by institutional capacity. Using recent reports from Human Rights Watch, Dejusticia, Al Jazeera, and Forbes, we coded violations, repair efforts, and capacity indicators. Argentina’s violation score (V ≈ 1.03) far outweighs its effective repair score (R_eff ≈ 0.095), yielding a repair-to-violation ratio (R/V) of ~0.09. This ratio falls below the 0.30 threshold, placing the country in a 1–2 quarter rupture window. Tipping conditions—including low legitimacy, weak elite cohesion, high cost strain, and rising protest backlash—are all present, reinforcing the high-risk designation. Projections for Q4 2025–Q1 2026 suggest escalating protests, elite fragmentation, and worsening humanitarian conditions, with plausible scenarios ranging from mass mobilization and government collapse to autocratic consolidation. While the model highlights severe rupture risks, it also underscores potential stabilizing measures: acknowledgment of grievances, inclusive reforms, and restoration of institutional oversight could raise the R/V ratio and avert crisis. This analysis demonstrates the CD model’s utility in diagnosing early warning signals of rupture and in identifying pathways for policy intervention.

The 2nd Edition of _Who Owns You_, David Koepsell’s widely acclaimed exploration of the philosophical and legal problems of patenting human genes, is updated to reflect the most recent changes to the cultural and legal climate relating to the practice of gene patenting. Lays bare the theoretical assumptions that underpin the injustice of patents on unmodified genes Makes a unique argument for a commons-by-necessity, explaining how parts of the universe are simply not susceptible to monopoly claims Represents the only work that attempts to first define the nature of the genetic objects involved before any ethical conclusions are reached Provides the most comprehensive accounting of the various lawsuits, legislative changes, and the public debate surrounding AMP v. Myriad, the most significant case regarding gene patents.

This study introduces an agent-based simulation constructed to empirically examine central ontological propositions from The Geometry of the Good—a realist philosophical framework positing that ethical obligation arises from the structure of directed relationality rather than from choice, contract, or cultural consensus. Through the simulation of agents equipped with norm preferences, contradiction debt, trust dynamics, and capabilities for moral repair, this research analyzes how various sociomoral configurations (pluralist, utopian, authoritarian, anomic, and collapsed) influence the emergence and coherence of obligations. Principal findings indicate elevated fulfillment rates and clustering of trust within pluralist and utopian paradigms, significant accumulation of contradiction debt and stagnation under authoritarian models, and systemic ethical breakdown in both anomic and collapsed contexts. These outcomes substantiate the hypothesis that directedness, repair, and diachronic recognition constitute the ontological foundation of normativity, highlighting that ethical structures depend fundamentally on mechanisms such as addressability, acknowledgment, and fidelity. Overall, the findings provide a replicable platform for assessing metaphysical-ethical claims and illustrate the potential of simulations to uncover formal properties of ethical systems that may otherwise elude empirical analysis.

In this short essay I defend a simple but far-reaching thesis: to be is to be in relation. Drawing from my book manuscript The Geometry of the Good and a companion simulation study, I argue that determinacy requires directedness—an ontological “vector” that points beyond the self—and that directedness, in turn, entails relation. Ethical obligation arises whenever such directed relations obtain; it is not a matter of contract or convention but a structural consequence of being with others. I sketch the argument for a relational ontology, distinguish essential from basic obligations, and briefly discuss empirical support from an agent-based model. Finally, I indicate how this framework reshapes debates in ethics and jurisprudence.

Breaking Bad has been lauded as the best series ever on television by numerous critics and polls. It follows the “Breaking Bad” (i.e., the moral degradation) of Walter White, a middle-class, middle-aged high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Presented in the form of a literary epic employing satire, it provides us with a way to look at complex issues of justice, the good, and meaning, all while imparting a sense of aesthetics of justice and morality. The aesthetics of justice in Breaking Bad examines problems and issues of modernity, employing existential and moralistic themes similar to other satirical epic works featuring antiheroes including Ulysses and Don Quixote. In this chapter, the existentialist themes and aesthetic treatment of Walt’s complex moral world are discussed in relation to other epic satirical works, and an argument expanding upon the author’s prior conceptions of Breaking Bad’s aesthetics of the just and the good is made.

This paper explores the human experience of game-playing and its implications for artificial intelligence. The author uses phenomenology to examine game-playing from a human-centered perspective and applies it to language games played by artificial intelligences and humans. The paper argues that AI cannot truly play games because it lacks the intentionality, embodied experience, and social interaction that are fundamental to human game-playing. Furthermore, current AI lacks the ability to converse, which is argued to be equivalent to Wittgenstein’s view of engaging in “language games.” The author presents a formal ontology of game playing, agents, and their intentional states, and contrasts human agents playing games with artificial agents “playing games.” The paper concludes that while artificial intelligence can simulate some aspects of human language games, it lacks the essential capacities for game playing, such as cognition, creativity, will, intentionality, understanding, and personhood

Beneath the stylized violence and thrilling car crashes, the Mad Max films consider universal questions about the nature of human life, order and anarchy, justice and moral responsibility, society and technology, and ultimately, human redemption. In Mad Max and Philosophy, a diverse team of political scientists, historians, and philosophers investigates the underlying themes of the blockbuster movie franchise, following Max as he attempts to rebuild himself and the world. This book guides you through the barren wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future as you explore ethics and politics in The Wasteland, the importance of costumes and music, humankind's relationship with nature, commerce, gender, religion, madness, and more.

Mars One is an ambitious, private plan to begin colonizing Mars using comprehensively screened volunteers who will make a one-way journey to the Red Planet. Its budget will be partially offset by broadcasting the adventure as a reality-TV program, beginning with the training of the astronauts, and ending with their settlement and, presumably, their deaths on the surface of Mars. In essence, the volunteers being sought for the Mars One project are human subjects in an experiment and ought to be treated as such under international provisions for the protection of human subjects or, at the very least, under a concern for the ethical conduct of a potentially groundbreaking project. In this article, I explore the question of whether the volunteers for Mars One are subject to standard protections for human subjects in scientific research, or to broader ethical concerns and protections for unique reasons

One of the early, non-financial uses of blockchain technologies around which several startups have developed was to help manage, monetize, and make the sharing of genomic data more private. Because deidentified genomic data are excluded from HIPAA and many other regulatory contexts worldwide—and is already a widely traded commodity for science valued in the hundreds of millions over the past decade—genomic blockchains proved a promising entry point for using the benefits of blockchains for dissemination and remuneration of data. Several models have been tried, and most have touted their abilities to make users the “owners” of the genomic data in ways in which current models fail. This paper will explore the various existing and potential models for genomic blockchains, review some shortcomings and unmet needs, and explain why no technical solution alone will fulfill the promise of genomic data ownership without regulation.