Consider Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal:” that
Ireland, in a time of economic troubles, sell its children as
food to the rich. Few would say, “this proposal is wrong
because his facts are in error.” Fewer yet would say, “this is
unethical because his satirical intent imputes a subtle air
of fictionality to the whole idea. It is false. It is fictional.
Thereby, it is wrong.” There are unconventional ethical
scholars, no doubt, who have no real quarrel with the
modest proposal itself, but very few who would say, well,
the flaw here, the reason this is wrong is, it’s false. It’s not
sufficiently real.

In the same fashion, the fundamental wrongness of the
world is independent of its truth status. It’s not wrong in
the sense of something is wrong here.

It’s wrong in the sense that its fundamental structure is
arranged in a way that is bad.

Worlds shouldn’t be put together like that.

If the wrongness of things happened after the world’s
creation, if it was a tectonic shift, a collapsing of layers—
like an earthquake that shatters an urn and sprinkles
someone’s ashes onto your delicious open-face tuna/
Nutella sandwich; tumbles postwar times and rising fridge
availability together to produce gelatin-era American
cooking; and drops a young goat from a shelf above into
the soup pot to start boiling in its own mother’s milk—
then it’s possible that that structure was never intended;
that it’s not a design flaw so much as a flaw in the pattern ...
But it’s still the arrangement of Creation, the way it is,
and not whether it is, that’s at fault.

In that sense, rejecting the world for its falseness is
fundamentally a mistake—it’s missing the point. It’s like
hearing a group of politicians start talking seriously about
actually implementing A Modest Proposal and reacting
with outrage because Swift was kidding, or because you
think it’s actually not good economics at all.

- Jenna Moran, Glitch: A Story of the Not