Category decomposition
Most of our moral concepts describe not one property but a bundle of properties that, in ordinary conditions, almost always travel together. While the bundle holds, the concept works and seems fundamental. Technology can pull it apart — and then it turns out the concept was holding several different things at once.
- 1. Name the dependency
- What has already become possible? What decision are we taking? What knowledge or institutional capacity is missing for it?
- 2. Separate the known from the supposed
- Gather sources, state alternative explanations and the conditions for revision. A thought experiment tests a concept; an empirical case tests a claim about the world.
- 3. Justify the priority
- Show whom and what the missing knowledge constrains, what its supply would open, and why this is worth working on rather than something else.
- 4. Define the next piece of work
- Is an experiment needed, or a source, data, an argument, a collaboration? Which specialists, instruments and resources would make that step possible?
- 5. Check the result
- Compare expectations with the knowledge obtained. If the constraint remains, or the diagnosis was wrong, change the approach and the priority.
How it looks
Take sex. Today biological sex, the hormonal system, appearance, reproductive function, physical capacity, social role and the sense of one’s own body are interwoven so tightly that they seem to be one thing. Imagine a world in which the body is changed every ten or twenty years, physical strength is a matter of engineering, and reproduction is technologically separable from any particular body.
The bundle comes apart. For some people sex becomes a parameter of embodiment — an aesthetic configuration or a temporary form of self-expression. One person will choose the same kind of body all their life; another will change it every twenty years; a third will gradually leave human morphology behind altogether.
The next step is more interesting still. Two people with a mutual attraction exchange their bodies for ones of the opposite sex. In each configuration the pair formally looks different-sex, while the attraction runs continuously through the change in the object’s sex. The paradox arises not in reality but in language: categories of orientation are built on the assumption that the sex of subject and object is stable.
Fiction as a laboratory
To pull a bundle apart before the technology does, we change one fundamental condition of the world and watch what happens to the concepts around it. The device is old, but it has a specific function here: to show which of our concepts describe genuinely fundamental properties and which arose from historical and biological constraints of the environment.
Science fiction is therefore a source of problems for us, not an illustration. Ghost in the Shell examines the connection between body, memory and personhood. Psycho-Pass asks what happens when moral and political decisions are handed to algorithms. Frieren lets one look at human relationships from the vantage of a being with a radically different lifespan. Intuition here often forms earlier than academic discourse manages to name it.
The movement’s most dangerous point
Separating the features does not automatically cancel a category or a norm. It exposes assumptions that then need justifying. The same device can be used in bad faith to dismantle a norm that is needed, and we have no criterion that tells analysis from sophistry.
Our working boundary: the burden of proof lies with whoever proposes the revision. Revision also requires weighing consequences, the predictability of rules, and the rights and interests of the people it concerns.
Self-application
The method applies to synchronism itself. Our definition of progress may change, the system of values may become more precise, the way of measuring imbalances may turn out to be unusable. The movement is an object of synchronisation too, and a successful outcome looks like a mechanism able to outgrow the initial ideas of its own founders.