"If moral anaesthesia describes the dulling of ethical perception, there is a harder truth beneath it: money talks, these arguments do not. The world as it is does not respond to moral suasion, because it is organized through metrics of value that exclude moral meaning from the start. To speak ethically within an economized world is to speak a language that power does not recognize. This is why the anaesthetization of moral perception endures—it is continuously reproduced by the structures that make value legible. When harm can be costed, compensated, or externalized, moral feeling becomes economically redundant. The capacity to care or to feel outrage no longer threatens the system; it merely decorates it. Arguments against utilitarian logic fail to land not because they are wrong, but because they do not transact. They appeal to a grammar of worth that the world has already priced out".

"If moral arguments fail to land because they do not transact, the question becomes what kind of speech, if any, can still puncture this indifference. The answer cannot lie in louder moral appeals or more refined reasoning. The language of conviction has already been domesticated by the same economy that flattens value into price and empathy into brand. What circulates today is not silence, but saturation—the noise of moral communication emptied of moral force.

Perhaps what still lands is not persuasion but interruption: speech that refuses to be useful, communicative, or reconciling. To speak otherwise would mean to speak from the remainder—the part of moral experience that cannot be quantified, traded, or instrumentalized. Such speech does not seek to convince; it witnesses, it interrupts, it disorients. It does not restore the moral field but exposes its ruination.

This, too, is a form of ethics: an ethics of persistence without efficacy, of articulation in a world that rewards fluency only when it sells. Against the logic of exchange, the only language that lands is the one that cannot be redeemed—speech that stays unconverted, unaccounted for.

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Even when confronted with the collapse of moral perception and the anaesthetizing logic of utility, the human experience of tragedy persists. The moral residue of suffering—the part that cannot be absorbed into calculation—remains, even if it cannot be acted upon or justified. Tragic necessity, in its genuine form, is not a license to instrumentalize harm but a recognition that the moral field itself has shifted under extreme conditions.

In this context, the act of speaking—or bearing witness—becomes a kind of moral persistence. It does not promise correction, redemption, or practical effect. Instead, it asserts the existence of a remainder: the ethical pulse that refuses to be fully consumed by the logic of sacrifice, calculation, or duty. To articulate this remainder is to resist the instrumentalization of both suffering and morality. It is a refusal to let the rhetoric of tragedy or the language of utility fully define what counts as human or what counts as harm.

Even when powerless, even when the world “does not respond,” this speech preserves the possibility of ethical experience. It does not restore the moral world, but it keeps alive the memory that the world could, in principle, be otherwise—if not in practice, then in witness".