The Massless Particle: When Rights Meet Reality

Rights are not magic shields against probability.

The Ghost and the Machine

This train of thought started with a response my friend wrote to a paper by the philosopher Julia Driver, while applying to graduate school.

The paper concerns the suberogatory: actions that are permissible but bad. This category sits opposite the supererogatory, which covers actions that are admirable but not required.

In plain terms, the suberogatory includes actions you have a legal and moral right to perform, but which still feel wrong when actually carried out.

The classic example is familiar. You have two healthy kidneys. Your brother needs one to survive. You are permitted to refuse. You are within your rights to let him die. But exercising that right still feels like a bad move.

Driver’s paper attempts to explain why such actions feel bad despite being morally allowed. She struggles most with what she calls the “multiple abortion” case: a woman who has ten abortions for trivial reasons. Driver proposes that the badness lies in concepts like waste or squandered potential. She is looking for a moral residue that accumulates through repetition.

I think this is a category error.

She is searching for a ghost where there is only a machine.

The Massless Particle

In physics, some particles have no rest mass but still carry momentum. A photon is weightless, yet it can transfer energy. It can knock electrons loose. It can burn.

Ethical actions can behave the same way.

There exists a class of actions that are morally massless but mechanically weighted.

• Moral mass = 0. The action is permissible. The right to choose is intact.
• Mechanical mass > 0. The action interacts with physical systems that accumulate risk, cost, or damage.

The common mistake is treating permissible as synonymous with free. Because an action carries no moral penalty, we implicitly assume it carries no inertia. Rights become imagined forcefields.

They are not.

The Blood Magic Glitch

This distinction is obvious to anyone who has designed or analyzed systems.

Imagine a video game spell called Blood Magic.

• Rule layer: It costs zero mana. It is allowed. It is optimal. There is no karma meter or alignment penalty.
• Mechanics layer: Each cast permanently reduces maximum health by one percent. Each cast also triggers a random roll. On a one-in-a-thousand result, a permanent debuff zone appears.

Casting it once is rational. Casting it twice is still rational. Casting it fifty times does not make you evil. The game is not judging you.

But the system is accumulating state.

The fiftieth cast is not morally worse than the first. It is statistically worse.

The badness does not emerge from intent or vice. It emerges from repeated interaction with a stochastic process.

Rights vs. RNG

This brings us to Driver’s hardest case.

Driver argues that repeated abortions for trivial reasons are suberogatory because they “waste” something: potential life, medical resources, or moral seriousness. This treats the discomfort as evidence of hidden moral mass.

I am not interested in that framing. I am interested in the stat sheet.

Abortion is a medical procedure. Like all medical procedures, it carries non-zero risk. Those risks are low on any single iteration, but they are not imaginary.

I have personal proximity to this fact. A past partner experienced a rare complication, the kind that appears as a statistical footnote. The procedure failed. The outcome was catastrophic: a severely disabled child and a long-term entanglement with poverty and state systems.

This was not the result of moral failure. The right to the procedure was absolute. The moral mass was, in my view, zero.

The mechanical mass was not.

Scar tissue accumulates. Hormonal disruption compounds. Anesthesia alone carries a baseline risk of death or neurological injury. These risks are small, but they are cumulative by definition.

Performing a permissible action once is interacting with probability. Performing it ten times is leaning on it.

At some point, you are no longer exercising a right in isolation. You are repeatedly rolling dice in a physical system that remembers.

The Liberal Blind Spot

Up to this point, this has been a conceptual diagnosis. What follows is the political consequence of that diagnosis.

Liberal societies speak fluently about rights and poorly about risk. We tell people, correctly, that an action is permitted. But we often imply a second claim without stating it: that exercising the right is therefore safe.

That implication is false.

Biology does not recognize autonomy. Probability does not recognize moral standing.

When political language flattens risk into choice, people are encouraged to treat mechanically weighted actions as though they were inert. The cost is not eliminated. It is merely deferred to chance.

The universe does not read the constitution.

When outcomes arrive, they arrive without regard for how justified the decision once was.

Saving the Unit

The concept of the suberogatory tries to locate badness where there may be none. It hunts for sin, waste, or moral leakage in actions that are, in fact, morally empty.

The weight never left the system.

It entered through mechanics.

Reframing these actions as permissible but weighted dissolves the puzzle. It preserves moral permissibility while refusing to erase consequence. It replaces moral residue with accumulated inertia.

When we see someone repeatedly engaging in such an action, whether medical, financial, or behavioral, the appropriate response is not condemnation. It is concern.

Not about their virtue.

About their velocity.

A healthier society would make probabilistic risk legible and accessible long before repetition becomes dangerous. Ours does not. Until that changes, the responsibility falls unevenly and informally.

Sometimes it looks like pulling someone aside and saying:

“I know the game allows this. I know it’s legal. But the dice do not reset. And having the right to roll them won’t undo what happens when they come up wrong.”

Rights permit the action. Physics decides the result.

Confusing the two is how people get hurt.