Kenneth Arrow’s miserly little aphorism about altruism being a scarce resource? That’s rich. He treats virtue like it’s some kind of artisanal oat milk: limited stock, please use sparingly. Sandel—ever the ethics gym bro—comes back swinging with the idea that virtue is a muscle, not a fossil fuel. Use it or lose it. He essentially argues for a political culture of moral hypertrophy, where we actually build the capacity for generosity through practice.

And of course, neoliberalism hears that and goes: Ew, what if instead we just sold people solutions to the problems we’re actively manufacturing? Which brings us neatly to Gilmore Wilson: the thesis that crises aren’t just unfortunate events—they’re governing technologies. Manufactured precarity becomes the pretext for introducing “solutions” that deepen control while siphoning off resources. The state becomes an anti-state: not a provider, but a manager of managed decline. Like a landlord who also started the fire.

Sandel again, diagnosing the moral fatigue of our moment: people are encouraged to abandon the fantasy of a just world and instead start optimizing themselves like iPhones with depression. Why fix the world when you can be less emotionally affected by it? It’s a neat little logic loop of late-capitalist coping: the world is unchangeable, so change yourself to match the damage.

Meanwhile, prejudice is treated as a software bug you can patch with contact and education, as per Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis. Great—if you’ve got the right institutional support, the common goals, the local atmosphere, the shared recognition of humanity. So basically: in a utopia, you can build a utopia. Thanks, Gordon.

But as you rightly note: if prejudice is structural, not just interpersonal, then meeting someone from the other side of a chasm doesn’t fill in the chasm. You’re still operating in a rigged system. And every time someone is pushed out of a network of reciprocity—economically, socially, or politically—their moral visibility dims. The lights go out on their status as fully human. Social death becomes not a metaphor, but a practical policy outcome.

GPT