Imagine morality not as a list of commandments or a balance sheet of pleasure, but as a landscape—an uneven terrain of possible worlds. Each choice nudges us in a direction. Some paths open outward, creating more room for agency, trust, and repair. Others narrow until movement becomes brittle, violent, or impossible. This is not metaphor alone. It is a structural fact about how systems behave over time.
Philosophers use the language of “possible worlds” to talk about necessity, counterfactuals, and causation. Modal realism takes that language seriously. It treats possible worlds not as abstractions, but as real configurations constrained by logic, physics, and history. We inhabit one such world, but our actions continually push it toward neighboring regions of possibility space. Morality, on this view, is not about isolated acts. It is about trajectories.
This is where moral geometry becomes useful.
Picture moral life as a field with an apex. Orientation matters. A positive orientation—what I think of as the upward apex—corresponds to choices that tolerate friction, accept cost, and distribute agency. These paths are slower and often less efficient, but they tend to preserve optionality. They keep futures open. A negative orientation—the downward apex—privileges domination, optimization, and the avoidance of corrective feedback. These paths can look powerful in the short run, but they bend the landscape toward collapse.
The geometry is not symmetrical. Near the downward apex, the field steepens. Small advantages compound. Error correction is suppressed. Systems begin feeding on their own substrate: trust, legitimacy, human attention, ecological margin. What looks like strength locally becomes fragility globally. The system accelerates, but only because it is falling.
From this perspective, evil is not the absence of good. It is misalignment. It is movement along a gradient that consumes its own future. No divine decree is required to see this. A bridge design that collapses under load is not “wrong” by convention; it is wrong by structure. Moral systems are no different. Capitalism may not be entirely wrong, just as a bridge isn’t, but wrong for a particular market or wrong in a particular way. Especially when it reduces friction.
Friction plays a central role here. Friction is not a flaw in the system—it is how systems learn. Worlds that remove friction in the name of efficiency drift toward unstable regions of moral space. They lose the ability to correct error. They become fast, brittle, and blind.
This is why stories matter. Fiction is a way of mapping moral geometry without collapsing it into slogans. Every narrative asks a modal question: what kind of world results if these values dominate? Good stories trace the curve, not the rule. They let consequences unfold.
Seen this way, morality is neither arbitrary nor authoritarian. It is navigational. We are not choosing between opinions. We are choosing between regions of the possible—some that widen as we move through them, and others that narrow until there is nowhere left to stand.
