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What else could you expect from someone like Harry Monaghan, who had publicly put ridiculous meta-ethics into his Arete profile before publicly deleting it altogether, which was as close as you could come these days to saying you didn’t care about the moral life at all?

The plot of the story revolves around characters who try to briefly escape the system through clandestine Black Dinners, during which they leave their phones—and their meta-ethics—behind.

Implicit in Burton’s story is the idea that the meta-ethics are linguistic in nature and translatable into logic compatible with Arete’s code base.

Determining such clear moralistic/ethical statements has perplexed philosophers for centuries, and it is unlikely that a person could articulate a coherent set of meta-ethics for themselves within Arete.

The same lesson applies outside of meta-ethics.