Philosopher of law, ethics, and technology | Builder of formal ontologies, simulations, and narrative systems

I work at the intersection of legal ontology, relational ethics, and computational modeling. My projects combine philosophical theory with executable structures: ontologies, simulations, tools, and narrative systems that make abstract claims testable, explorable, and teachable.

This GitHub is where those ideas become things that run.

My work forms a unified research program sometimes referred to as The Architecture of Social Being, developed across several major strands:

The Geometry of the Good
A structural ontology of ethics that models obligation, trust, contradiction, and repair as relational facts, rather than norms, preferences, or commands. Ethical failure generates residue and repair obligations, which can be simulated and measured.

The Architecture of Justice and A Structural Ontology of the Law
A realist, BFO-aligned account of legal systems that treats law as a structured network of roles, relations, contradictions, and institutional repair mechanisms. This work informs legal AI, IRAC-style reasoning tools, and formal legal modeling.

A non-voluntarist account of agency grounded in counterfactual accountability and exposure to irreversible relations. This framework applies to humans, institutions, AIs, DAOs, and hybrid systems, and rejects intention or consciousness as necessary conditions for moral agency.

Agent-based simulation framework for testing ethical and ontological hypotheses.

• Models obligation issuance, fulfillment, denial, expiration, and repair
• Tracks contradiction debt, trust, moral energy, and epistemic agency
• Exports CSV data for empirical analysis
• Used to test claims from The Geometry of the Good

Ethical theory, but falsifiable.

Formal ontology modules aligned with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).

• Role complexes (judge, defendant, institution)
• Legal events, obligations, breaches, and repairs
• Minimum Legal Chain (MLC) modeling
• OWL / TTL / UML / PlantUML representations

Designed for legal reasoning systems, research, and pedagogy.

A structural legal reasoning tool for students and researchers.

• Extends IRAC into an ontological pipeline
• Diagnoses contradictions and missing links
• Outputs structured JSON representations of legal reasoning
• Intended for law students, legal educators, and legal AI research

Narrative and structural tooling for tabletop RPGs and interactive storytelling.

• CAML (Canonical Adventure Modeling Language)
  A structured format for encoding narrative possibilities without railroading.

• CAML-Trace
  Forensic and replayable traces of narrative decision paths.

• Everdice Realm
  A DM-respecting campaign assistant focused on long-form coherence, trust, and player agency.

These projects double as experimental sandboxes for agency, obligation, and narrative structure.

Across philosophy, law, ethics, and games, the core commitments are the same:

• Structure matters more than intention
• Obligation arises from relations, not rules
• Failure produces residue that must be repaired
• Agency is earned through accountability, not asserted
• Pluralism is not a problem to eliminate, but a condition to manage

If something cannot be modeled, traced, or tested, I treat that as a philosophical warning sign.

I use these tools and frameworks in undergraduate and graduate teaching, especially in:

• Legal ontology
• Philosophy of law
• Ethics of technology
• Moral psychology
• AI and responsibility

Many repositories here double as teaching infrastructure.

This is an active, evolving research ecosystem. Some repositories are experimental, some pedagogical, some production-ready. All are part of a single long-term project.

If you're a philosopher, legal scholar, developer, or designer interested in making normative and institutional theory executable, you’re in the right place.

• 🌐 Website: https://davidkoepsell.com
• 📘 The Geometry of the Good https://davidkoepsell.com/TheGeometryofTheGood/
• 🧠 Structural Ontology of Law https://davidkoepsell.com/AStructuralOntologyOfTheLaw/
• 🎲 Realm of Everdice https://realmofeverdice.com/

Keywords: legal ontology, relational ethics, moral agency, AI ethics, agent-based simulation, institutional repair

Ideas are cheap. Structures that survive contact with reality are not.