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.

Website · Formal Ontology Program · Google Scholar · CV

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

The Geometry of the Good (EthicsPress, 2025)
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 (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming)
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. The Irreversible Accountability Test (IAT) operationalizes the account.

BFO-aligned ontology engineering applied beyond law: classification systems in medicine and psychiatry, historical philosophical systems, and the ontology of digital objects.

A new initiative, co-founded with William Mandrick and Barry Smith, to coordinate the development of interoperable, realist, BFO-aligned ontologies for the legal domain.

• Ontology Design Pattern specifications (LOF-ODP-001 through LOF-ODP-003)
• Validated OWL files accompanying each pattern
• A shared foundation for legal AI, compliance, and institutional modeling

Legal ontologies that interoperate by design, not by accident.

A dialogue architecture that pairs language-model extraction with reasoner-validated commitments to build BFO-aligned OWL ontologies directly from source texts.

• Every ontology validated for logical consistency with the HermiT reasoner
• Per-class provenance linking concepts to the passages that produced them
• IAT computational study series testing accountability and reflexivity in language models

🔗 Program overview

A growing public library of BFO-aligned formal ontologies built with BFO-Agent. Each is browsable, citable, and free.

• A Structural Ontology of the Law: nearly 6,900 classes describing law as a structured region of social reality
• The Geometry of the Good: the structural skeleton of the 2025 book, made inspectable
• Spinoza's Ethics: extracted from the Elwes translation, with full provenance to each proposition
• The Leibniz Corpus: thirty-six selections spanning 1679 to 1716

(formerly the FOL-BFO-OWL Tester)
Online toolset for ontology validation, first-order logic testing, and OWL/RDF reasoning, built for ontology engineers, students, and reviewers.

🔗 Launch

Formal ontology modules aligned with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), accompanying the Palgrave book.

• Role complexes (judge, defendant, institution)
• Legal events, obligations, breaches, and repairs
• The 8-node Minimum Legal Chain (MLC) and a 13-type contradiction typology
• OWL / TTL / UML / PlantUML representations

🔗 Overview · MLC Chain Auditor · Teaching Package · Ontology IRI: http://seal.tamu.edu/legal-kernel

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

• Models obligation issuance, fulfillment, denial, expiration, and repair
• Tracks contradiction debt, trust, moral energy, and epistemic agency
• Compares outcomes across nine normative regimes
• Adaptive mode adds heritable dispositions and emergent moral archetypes
• Rupture Predictor for identifying conditions that precede institutional collapse
• Exports CSV data for empirical analysis

Ethical theory, but falsifiable.

🔗 SimEthica Adaptive · Original · GoG + IAT Moral Reasoner

A BFO-grounded social ontology lab: an interactive environment for simulating how social entities, roles, and institutional structures form and persist.

🔗 Launch

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

🔗 Launch

Interactive tools built for the classroom.

• Contradiction Kernel: the core mechanism of the relational framework, in interactive form
• Chain Lab: build and break chains of obligation and recognition
• Chain of Recognition: a visualization of how recognition propagates through institutional structures
• The Dilemma Room: a live, anonymous, multi-round Prisoner's Dilemma for a whole classroom, joined by QR code, with results displayed in real time

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 Studio
  A desktop campaign toolkit for game masters, available on Steam: SRD reference, quest tracker, timeline, relationship map, session prep, custom maps, and a player view.

• Everdice Realm (source)
  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 am an Instructional Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, where I coordinate the Society, Ethics, and Law (SEAL) B.A. program and coach Mock Trial. 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.

I consult on formal ontology: BFO-aligned modeling, custom ontology development, and review and validation for legal, biomedical, and AI applications.

🔗 Formal Ontology & Consulting

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

• 🧬 Formal Ontology Program: https://davidkoepsell.com/formal-ontology.html

• 📘 The Geometry of the Good: https://davidkoepsell.com/geometry-of-the-good.html

• 🧠 Structural Ontology of Law: https://davidkoepsell.com/SOoL.html

• 🦉 OwlTester: https://ontology.davidkoepsell.com

• 🎲 Realm of Everdice: https://realmofeverdice.com/

• 🎓 Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LsroX8QAAAAJ

• 🏛️ Legal Ontologies Foundry (LOF)

A collaborative initiative, co-founded with William Mandrick and Barry Smith, to develop interoperable, logically well-formed ontologies for the legal domain. Modeled on the OBO Foundry: member ontologies share a common upper ontology (BFO, ISO/IEC 21838-2), a common format (OWL 2), persistent identifiers, and a common set of principles.

• LOF-ODP-001: the base pattern the others import
• LOF-ODP-002: Legal Role Conferral: legal roles and the acts that confer and terminate them
• LOF-ODP-003: Correlative Deontic Positions: Hohfeld's eight fundamental legal positions and their correlative pairings
• LOF-ODP-004: Minimum Legal Chain: the chain through which a particular legal position comes to exist

Legal ontologies that interoperate by design, not by accident.

🔗 Foundry site · GitHub org

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

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