“Have You Tried Shutting Up and Going Away?"-The Moral Solipsism of Alberta MLA Joe Ceci

Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

The greatest cruelty isn’t being disbelieved. It’s being believed just enough to be ignored politely

This Is Not About Services. It’s About Refusal.

When I contacted Joe Ceci’s office, I wasn’t looking for charity. I wasn’t lost. I wasn’t confused. I didn’t need another door to knock on. I knew what had happened. I had the documentation. I had the case history. What I needed was someone in power to acknowledge the truth and act accordingly.

Instead, I was handed a polite email and a list of places I’d already been.

This story is about more than a missed opportunity to help. It’s much deeper, and much more dangerous.

It’s about how institutions have learned to perform care while actually withholding it. How they use the language of listening to disguise the act of refusal and how they erase moral testimony with the tone of professionalism 

I recently read Elise Springer’s ‘Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness’ , a book that could have saved me a world of trouble had I read it sooner.  In it Springer tells us that moral life doesn’t begin with judgment. Before we argue about right and wrong, we begin by responding to each other’s concerns. And when those concerns are met with silence, evasion, or polite containment, the failure is not theoretical, it’s moral.

This post is about the ethics of moral testimony. This post will cover why it is important that we not just allow others to speak their concerns, we are obligated to receive their concerns. Not just listen, but to allow those concerns to affect us. It’s also a warning that institutions often dismiss not just stories, but judgments, treating those who speak about injustice as unqualified to say what counts as wrong. And it’s about the concept of ethical loneliness, the devastating condition of being harmed, then left alone by those who could have and should have listened. 

Joe Ceci’s office did not openly discredit me. They didn’t need to. They did something subtler: they declined to engage. They offered no uptake, no recognition, and no sense that what I had said might demand moral or political transformation.

This blog is a record of that failure.

Im not expecting this post will do much to change this system. But i hope that when I lay out this map of abandonment, someone will recognize it. Someone will know that this is not personal tragedy. It is designed neglect. And someone else might still be able to name what Joe Ceci’s office chose not to: That what happened to me is real, and it is wrong. And pretending otherwise is betrayal. 

What Moral Responsibility Requires

Moral responsibility doesn’t begin with action. It begins with reception.

When someone presents you with an account of harm, when they hand you the raw material of lived injustice, the first ethical obligation is not to fix, solve, or route. It is to receive: to register that what has been offered is not just data, but a gesture of moral concern.

A moral gesture, according to Springer, is a communicative act that invites another person to participate in the labor of ethical attention. Springer’s work challenges every shortcut we’ve been trained to take: Springer says ethics is not about checking boxes or expressing sympathy. It is about becoming accountable to the concerns of others through engaged responsiveness.  It’s more than an expression of emotion or a request for help, it’s an intentional address that says: This matters. Will you take it up with me?  When someone testifies to harm, names wrongdoing, or calls for justice, they are making a moral gesture, they are inviting recognition, uptake, and co-engagement.

A moral gesture is not:

• A venting monologue that expects no reply.

• A bureaucratic form letter that simulates concern while avoiding moral responsibility.

• A scripted response designed to close dialogue, not continue it.

• A performance of values with no willingness to be changed by another.

  
  

The difference lies in relational intent: the purpose behind a communicative act that seeks not just to express something, but to establish or deepen a shared moral relationship. When someone speaks with relational intent, they are not merely delivering information, they are reaching toward another person with the hope of being understood, taken seriously, and co-engaged. This means that moral gestures ask for response, not reaction; relationship, not resolution. Ignoring them, minimizing them, or mistaking them for mere complaint is not ethically neutral, it’s a refusal of moral life itself.

I did not write to Joe Ceci’s office to offload a burden. I came with something precious: a moral diagnosis, shaped by survival, offered for political uptake. I extended a hand and asked: Can we carry this together? Can we make sense of this harm in a way that leads to justice, not just for me, but for others like me?

What Springer shows us is that moral life is not maintained through gestures of civility or performance. It is maintained through the willingness to be moved, to let someone else’s concern penetrate your own moral world.

“To understand someone’s action as a critical response versus merely as conduct is a choice of interpretive frame. Neglecting the broader frame disables moral understanding.” -Elise Springer 'Communicating Moral Harm'

That’s what Mr. Ceci’s office did: they chose the narrow frame. They read my address not as a moral offering but as an input to process. They treated it as conduct, not gesture. As a person in distress speaking, rather than a moral peer testifying to injustice.

This matters, because the way we receive someone’s concern is a litmus test for whether we see them as a moral equal. If you flatten their voice into procedural noise, you render their agency illegible. You reduce their ethical standing. You treat them not as a subject to respond to, but as a disruption to manage.

This is what Springer calls moral solipsism, the ethical failure to recognize that another person is also participating in the making of moral meaning. And it’s not benign. It refers to the ethical failure to recognize others as full moral agents. It happens when someone treats their own moral judgment as the only one that matters, shutting down dialogue and denying the agency of others to define what is right or wrong (Springer).

“Moral solipsism isolates each conscience: ‘There is no other moral agent here as far as I am concerned.’”- Elise Springer 'Communicating Moral Harm'

Mr. Ceci’s Office’s response was not aggressive. But it was terminal. It closed the possibility of shared reflection. It treated my account as something already concluded, when what I was offering was an invitation to begin.

Springer insists that to be morally responsive is not to agree with every claim. It is to engage it. To recognize its force. To sit in its discomfort long enough to be changed by it.

If moral life depends on uptake, then what they performed was a refusal to live morally alongside me. 

They left me holding the concern alone.

III. Moral Objectification: When Judgment Is Dismissed

It’s one thing to be disbelieved. It’s another to be discredited at the level of judgment, to have your ability to discern right from wrong quietly stripped away under the guise of polite indifference.

This is what Rachel Amoroso calls moral objectification: the refusal to recognize someone not just as a sufferer, but as a knower of moral harm. It’s when you say, This was wrong, and the reply comes back in code: That’s unfortunate. We appreciate your feedback,Thanks for reaching out. Words that acknowledge the noise, but silence the meaning.Rachel Amoroso highlights the treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 U.S. Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas as a paradigmatic case of moral objectification.

Hill did not just report harm, she offered a moral judgment. She described sexual harassment not merely as misconduct, but as something ethically wrong, incompatible with the standards expected of a Supreme Court nominee. Her testimony was careful, serious, and deeply moral. She was not demanding vengeance, she was trying to protect the integrity of a public institution.

And what happened?

She was discredited, not by direct refutation, but by insinuation. The subtext of the hearings suggested:

• She was mistaken.

• She was exaggerating.

• She didn’t really understand what she was claiming.

• She had ulterior motives.

  
  

The message wasn’t, “This didn’t happen.”It was, “Even if it did, it’s not what she thinks it is.”

This is moral objectification in action.

Hill was treated not as a knower of harm, but as someone whose ability to interpret harm was inherently suspect. Her moral credibility was systematically undermined, not through facts, but through tone, framing, and implication.

Amoroso’s point is crucial: moral objectification is not about whether someone is believed in the factual sense. It’s about whether they are seen as qualified to render moral judgment about their own experience.

Anita Hill was believed just enough to be a threat, but not enough to be a truth-teller.

That’s what happened here.

Their letter didn’t say I was mistaken. It didn’t argue with my claims. It didn’t reject them on factual grounds. It just… reframed them. Soften them. Translated them into a lower register, where harm becomes hardship, injustice becomes miscommunication, and political failure becomes personal need.

It is an act of containment that should have been a moment to empathize. 

Amoroso writes that when survivors of institutional harm articulate not only what happened to them, but what ought not to have happened, they are making moral testimony. They are saying: This is not just unfortunate. It is wrong. And someone should be accountable.

That’s what I did.

And their response, however kindly worded, refused me the moral standing to make that claim. They treated my critique not as analysis, but as frustration. Not as a judgment, but as a symptom.

“Moral objectification is the denial of someone’s authority to know moral harm. It is to treat their moral claims as unreliable, exaggerated, or irrelevant.”,  Rachel Amoroso '“That’s Not That Bad” Epistemic Injustice, Moral Testimony, And The Harm In Dismissing

And make no mistake: that denial doesn’t have to be explicit. It often comes in the form of institutional speech that seems respectful but is functionally silencing. Statements like:

• We appreciate you sharing your experience.

• We understand that you’ve been through a lot.

• Have you considered reaching out to [X office I already tried]?

These are not bad manners. They are rhetorical tools of moral minimization, a quiet way of telling someone: This isn’t as serious as you think. Your standards are too high. Your judgment is not trustworthy.

It’s the epistemic equivalent of patting someone on the head while walking away.

When you render someone incapable of being a reliable witness to injustice, you don’t just disbelieve them. You disqualify them from the moral domain.

And that is the harm. Not that they disagreed with me, but that they  bypassed my judgment altogether. That they treated my moral insight as incidental, as noise orbiting a case file, rather than as the center of the ethical claim.

What Amoroso helps us see is that this isn’t just rhetorical failure. It is epistemic degradation. It quietly lowers the speaker’s credibility below the threshold of moral seriousness. It takes a person with lived expertise and re-categorizes them as irrational, unstable, or simply “too much.”

So let’s be clear: My claim was not just that I was harmed. My claim was that what happened to me was wrong. That this should not happen to anyone. That those with power must respond. And that anyone who fails to respond has chosen complicity.

To hear that claim and reduce it to “feedback” is not misunderstanding.

It is moral objectification, the act of subtracting a person’s ethical authority while pretending to listen.

Amoroso gives language to what I felt when I read their reply: The soft terror of being heard as background noise to my own moral plea.

And once that happens, once your moral perception is discarded, you’re not just excluded from action. You’re excluded from community. You are not someone to respond to. You are someone to contain.

That is the architecture of quiet institutional violence.

And it is the precise opposite of what moral representation demands.

IV. The Effects of Abandonment

There is a difference between being harmed and being erased. One wounds the body. The other undoes the self. When I walked into Joe Ceci’s office, I had already been failed by every other system: the university, the healthcare network, the income support office, the police. Each institution had found a way to disbelieve, delay, deflect, or discard me. I was not looking for another referral. I was looking for witnessing, for someone to say, Yes, this happened. It was wrong. It matters. And we will act.

Instead, I received what philosopher Jill Stauffer calls a reenactment of abandonment. Not the brutal kind. The polite kind. The respectable kind. The kind that says, We appreciate your voice, while making sure it echoes into nothing.

Stauffer calls this condition ethical loneliness: the feeling of being not just harmed, but left alone in that harm by those who could have made it right. It is a second injustice, layered atop the first. And it leaves scars that policy cannot fix.

“Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the failure of hearing.”,  Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness,

Coined and expanded by Jill Stauffer, it describes not only the absence of justice, but the absence of uptake, of acknowledgment, engagement, and moral repair. It is what happens when your suffering is documented, maybe even believed, but never truly received.

You are not just alone. You are left alone with the burden of having spoken, and still being met with silence.

The philosopher Jean Améry, a Holocaust survivor and author of At the Mind’s Limits, embodies this condition. After surviving torture by the Gestapo, he wrote not only about violence, but about what comes after: the impossibility of healing without recognition. In postwar Europe, Améry was expected to move on, to reintegrate, to "forgive." But no one said to him what he most needed to hear: You are right to still be in pain. You are right to still be angry.

His suicide in 1978, as Stauffer writes, was not just personal despair. It was the final consequence of quiet, procedural abandonment, the polite forgetting of a survivor’s moral truth.

Ethical loneliness is what remains when the world affirms its goodness at the expense of those it has harmed, and when institutions, like Ceci’s office, hear moral testimony, but refuse to act. It is not the absence of response. It is the presence of the wrong kind of response: respectful, scripted, and empty.

Their reply was a failure of hearing. Not audibly. Ethically. They treated my address as a file to respond to, not a human act of moral communication. They saw the administrative demand. They missed the existential one.

And so the wound deepens.

Because when your final point of contact responds with something that looks like care but isn’t, the result is not comfort, it’s devastation. It tells you: Even here, even now, even with all the evidence laid bare, you are still unseeable.

The Consequences Are Not Abstract

• Fractured Trust

Trust in social institutions isn't abstract optimism. It's a wager: believing if I speak truthfully about my suffering, someone will listen and care. But repeated violations by police, doctors, universities, caseworkers, and elected officials fracture more than trust in any one system. Help-seeking itself becomes dangerous. Each attempt risks not only silence or deflection, but procedural gaslighting—pain acknowledged but erased again.

Your mind learns to stop reaching out, not because you're healed, but because you've learned it's unsafe. Trust isn't just believing help will come; it's believing your truth won’t be turned against you.

“Even my capacity to own my own intellectual solitude relies on my ability to trust that I am part of a world and that I can expect just treatment and help when I need it; it is already a form of sociality.”— Jill Stauffer, 'Ethical Loneliness'

Over time, you don't just distrust institutions; you distrust yourself:

• "Am I asking too much?"

• "Is it really that bad?"

• "Maybe I deserved this."

  
  

Ethical loneliness becomes internalized erasure. The people who abandoned you assume you got better because they stop hearing from you, affirming their decision not to engage. But you didt get better, you just stop telling your story because seeing your truth disappear again is unbearable.

Joe Ceci’s office had the chance to interrupt this pattern, to affirm, believe, and act. Instead, they performed concern, then stepped aside.

Trust fractures deeper, not just in that office, but in the possibility of a shared moral world.

• Narrative Rupture

  
  

Narrative rupture happens when institutions, justice systems, universities, welfare offices, political representatives, respond to a story with disbelief, procedural deflection, or neutrality. It's when someone clearly narrates harm, yet receive no confirmation of what happened, why it matters, or who is responsible.

Human beings construct meaning through narrative, connecting past, present, and future. But when institutional harm goes unacknowledged, a story finds no grounding. Testimony lands nowhere. Memory is treated as unreliable, judgment questioned, and coherence lost.

“A survivor whose story cannot or will not be heard is likely also someone whose harms have not yet been addressed. And if that is true, it is likely also true that social conditions do not yet exist that would make successful political transition or societal reconciliation possible"- Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness

This rupture destabilizes identity. The question becomes 'who are you?', are you a victim, witness, survivor, fraud? Without narrative continuity, reality feels uncertain, and the future unwritable.

When a political office claiming justice responds with polite dismissal, “We appreciate your feedback”it’s not neutral. It's a narrative knife, deepening trauma and civic betrayal. Their letter reproduced narrative rupture, confirming my story as unreal and my identity as unstable.

• Ontological Damage

Ontological damage occurs when institutions stop recognizing you as a moral subject and treat you as an administrative object—a problem to manage, a file to close. It's procedural depersonalization. You lose dialogue, trust, and moral credibility. Your presence becomes inconvenient, your suffering labeled as volatility, your clarity misread as intensity.

This isn't abstract harm. It reshapes your social existence—how others see you, how institutions categorize you, how you begin to view yourself. We exist meaningfully through recognition: being acknowledged as people with moral standing, whose experiences and voices matter.

When real, documented harm is met with polite deflection, you shift from person to problem:

• Your voice becomes a risk to manage.

• Your persistence, volatility.

• Your moral testimony, mere feedback.

“Resentment seeks response, acknowledgment of the dignity of the person harmed, and safety: assurance that the harm will not recur. It is a reasonable reaction, voicing just demands..”— Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness

Joe Ceci’s office reframed my ethical testimony as administrative data, not moral communication. They routed me away rather than responding to me as a peer. Over time, this corrodes self-understanding. Without moral recognition, you begin speaking cautiously or not at all—not because you're better, but because you've become unreadable.

This is the damage inflicted: I am still here,but I am no longer seen.

• Anticipatory Grief

A particular grief arises not from past loss, but from futures denied. When every moral gesture is shelved, softened, or sidelined, you mourn not just what's happened, but what becomes impossible.

Anticipatory grief emerges when you realize the systems aren't broken—they function as containment, not care.

You see what won't happen next:

• The university won't apologize.

• Police won't lay charges.

• Funding won’t arrive.

• Each appeal will quietly vanish.

You withdraw: No more phone calls. No opening envelopes. No new explanations that end in polite refusal.

“When justice systems are built without recognition of the harms that precede and exceed them, those harmed are abandoned again.”— Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness

This grief is structural, procedural, and very real. It’s watching your future foreclose while still alive:

• No degree you earned.

• No safety in police encounters.

• Too poor for justice, too angry to be believed, too complicated to help.

Their letter revealed cruelty—not by what it said, but by its silence. No recognition your future was warped by injustice. No acknowledgment you're now living a future that shouldn't exist. Grief isn’t overreaction; it's the sane response when the world says: We see you, but we will not change for you.

Anticipatory grief isn't mere pain—it's premature burial of dignity, dreams, and the hope of moral repair. Their letter didn’t create your grief. But it confirmed it.

• Permanent Exclusion

At some point, exclusion becomes permanent. It’s no longer bureaucratic oversight—it’s structural. Ethical loneliness solidifies from event into condition.

You realize your pain isn't unheard due to miscommunication, but because there's no place in the system designed to hear it. You're no longer a client, student, or citizen—they quietly decide not to design for you. You become a remainder, too complex to process.

“Frieda Fromm-Reichmann argued that loneliness was at the heart of most mental illness, but that loneliness is not the solitude of the writer, the isolation of the artist, or the seclusion of the person waiting to recover from illness— rather, it is the want of intimacy..”— Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness

Joe Ceci’s office confirmed my exclusion, not overtly, but administratively. By recycling steps I have already taken, declining verification, and refusing moral uptake, they didn't just fail to help. They neutralized my claim.

Without explicitly stating it, they said:We will not act, we will not say why, and you will carry that silence. This is the final wound, not denial, but polite refusal where solidarity belonged. You remain alive, articulate, documented, and still denied entry to the moral world your government claims to serve.

Ethical loneliness isn't absence of help; it’s the presence of quiet refusal.

Ceci’s office may believe they treated me with respect. But respect without recognition is just performance. What I needed was not just a listener. I needed a moral companion, someone who would not let my suffering slip beneath the waves of bureaucratic plausibility. That opportunity was squandered.

And the cost of that abandonment will not be absorbed quietly.

V. What I Asked For vs. What I Got

Let’s be precise about what I asked for.

I did not contact Joe Ceci’s office because I needed help filling out forms or navigating a website. By the time I walked in, I had already exhausted every one of those paths. I knew the numbers. I had the emails. I had the rejection letters, the closed case files, the transcripts, the timelines. I didn’t need more instructions. I needed advocacy.

What I asked for was:

• Escalation to Ministers, not contact information. A demand, from a sitting MLA, to the Ministers responsible for Income Support, Post-Secondary Education, Justice and Public Safety, and Insurance Regulation, calling for investigation, not conversation.

• Public acknowledgment that what happened to me was not a one-off error but a manifestation of systemic failure, across departments, over years, in full view of the institutions that claim to protect people like me.

• The use of my case as political evidence, as fuel for the fire Ceci claims to be lighting. I brought a pattern. I brought receipts. I brought a story that could serve as the backbone for legislative scrutiny. I came offering political leverage. I left with nothing.

  
  

 And what did I get instead?

• Soft words about how hard things have been.

• Referrals to agencies I’d already spoken to, some of which had explicitly refused to help me, on record.

• No verification of my evidence, no follow-up questions, no indications that anyone was willing to stand beside the moral truth of what I’d lived through.

  
  

And most telling of all? No demonstration of belief. Because here’s the unspoken logic behind the response I got: If you do believe my story, if you take seriously what I’ve laid out in hundreds of pages of correspondence, records, legal arguments, and personal testimony, then your silence is indefensible. Your inaction is complicity.

So the only way the response I received makes sense is if they don’t believe me.

Or more precisely: if you believe that the harm was real, but that it must somehow still be my fault.

That I asked for too much. That I failed to stay calm. That I made things worse for myself. That I’m too complicated, too angry, too unstable to merit help.

So let me put it plainly: If your response makes sense only on the assumption that I caused this suffering, then say so. Otherwise, act like you believe me. Because there is no middle ground. You either take my story seriously enough to act, or you don’t. There is no ethical version of professional distance in the face of moral testimony.

You don’t get to say “we hear you” while walking away.

VI. You Don’t Get to Say You Care

This is the part where I speak directly to Joe Ceci, and to anyone who dares to speak the language of justice while abandoning the people it’s meant to serve.

You don’t get to say you care about the vulnerable while turning away from their testimony.You don’t get to talk about systemic change while ignoring systemic proof.You don’t get to claim the moral high ground while walking quietly past the fire someone handed you.

I brought my story to your office not as a favour, but as a challenge, an opportunity for moral engagement, for political courage, for public accountability.

What I offered was:

• A map of institutional failure.

• Evidence of injustice across education, healthcare, income support, and policing.

• A case study, not of personal dysfunction, but of systemic betrayal.

  
  

What I asked was simple:If you believe in justice, start here.If you believe in access, help carry my case.

If you believe in truth, stand beside my account. If you believe in care, risk being changed by what you hear.

But you didn’t.

They responded with civility, not solidarity.Your office performed concern, not courage.And in doing so, you made it clear: You don’t believe me. Or worse, you do, but you won’t act unless the political cost is lower.

“To receive a moral gesture and fail to respond is to collapse the shared structure of ethical life.”- Elise Springer

That collapse happened in your office.

You don’t get to say you care while refusing to answer when it counts.

You don’t get to say “we stand with the most vulnerable” and then stand aside when one of them walks in and says: Look. This is how it happens. This is how it breaks you. This is what the system does.

So here is my final statement:

I am not here to be saved. I am not here to be managed. I am not here to be passed along. I am here to testify. I am here to offer a mirror.

And I suggest, if you truly want to be the person your platform says you are, that you look.

---

Thick Thought Thumper of the Week - "Don't You Dare Hope"

notes

1. Amoroso, Rachel."That's Not That Bad": Epistemic Injustice, Moral Testimony, and the Harm in Dismissing Judgments of Wrongdoing.Master's thesis, Florida State University, 2019.ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 13901394.https://purl.lib.fsu.edu/diginole/2019_Summer_Amoroso_fsu_0071N_15376

2. Springer, Elise. Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness. The MIT Press, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9507.001.0001.

3. Stauffer, Jill.Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Have You Tried Shutting Up and Going Away?

d Have You Tried Shutting Up and Going Away?d Going Away?