Ethical Theories, Misc

The question “Why should I be moral?” has long haunted normative ethics. How one answers it depends critically upon one’s understanding of morality, self-interest, and the relation between them. Stephen Finlay, in “Too Much Morality”, challenges the conventional interpretation of morality in terms of mutual fellowship, offering instead the “radical” view that it demands complete altruistic self-abnegation: the abandonment of one’s own interests in favor of those of any “anonymous” other. He ameliorates this with the proviso that there is no (...) rational basis for morality’s presumption of precedence, leaving it up to each person to decide when and whether they prefer self-interested concerns to more stringent moral requirements. I counter Finlay’s radical altruism with fair egalitarianism, a more congenial interpretation of moral normativity that repudiates self-abnegation and holds instead that ceteris paribus everybody’s interests are equal. As a result, supererogation and moral sainthood become more intelligible, and the choice between self-interest and morality becomes one between different decision procedures, the particular advantage of morality being others compatible results. (shrink)

Abstract Virtues can be enacted, asserted, or made perceptible. Courage is done; honesty is said; grace is seen. When the rendering is made a coordinate of a virtue classification and measured, it proves inert on how a virtue is captured and strongly predictive of something else: whether a cell of the classification is occupied at all. Roughly three-quarters of assertible cells and two-thirds of perceptible cells stand empty, against fewer than one in five enacted cells. A catalogue drawn from the (...) whole recorded moral tradition is dense in one mode and nearly barren in the other two. This article treats that asymmetry as a finding in need of explanation and sets three accounts against each other. It may be an artefact — of who compiled the catalogue, of who coded it, of what languages happen to lexicalise, of there being fewer such virtues to find, or, most dangerously, of arithmetic, since a classification whose entries are predominantly enacted will leave the other columns' cells sparse for no reason at all. It may be a trace of occupation: where a counterfeit conserves the form and the name well enough to pass undetected, it takes the lexical slot before the virtue is named, and the cell reads empty because something else already answers to the name. Or it may be an immune response: clean assertion is the unmarked default and goes unnamed, while a community proliferates terms for the varieties of deception as a collective radar. Evolutionary signalling theory grounds the mechanism — acts are expensive to fake, assertions and appearances are cheap talk — and supplies the third account, which predicts everything the second does. Two narrower predictions separate them, both decidable from dictionaries by parties with no stake in the framework. If counterfeits took the names, assertible and perceptible virtue terms should show elevated semantic pejoration: specious once meant beautiful, plausible once meant deserving applause, while courage has not moved. And detection cost depends on the horizon of exposure as well as on the mode, so the same gradient should appear within the enacted column, where the disputed coordinate is held fixed. The article establishes none of this. Its base coefficients are one person's coding of his own catalogue, an audit of that catalogue corrected two of the author's claims and exposed an inconsistency in its indices, and the arithmetic check that could dispose of the whole finding has not been run. What is offered is a question stated precisely enough to be settled by someone else. Keywords: virtue ethics; moral vocabulary; lexicalisation; semantic pejoration; classification; catalogue methodology; counterfeit; evolutionary signalling; epistemic vigilance; Philosophy of Virtues Highlights • The rendering coordinate is inert on inversion channel and strongly predictive of vacancy; these are independent facts about the same coordinate and the second has no explanation. • A catalogue drawn from the entire moral tradition is roughly four times denser in enacted virtues than in asserted or perceptible ones. • The Occupation Hypothesis: vacancy marks where the counterfeit reached the name first. • The discriminating prediction is lexical and external — counterfeit surplus in empty cells, no asymmetry under the artefact account. • Cell vacancy in a crossed classification may follow from the marginal distribution of the coordinate alone; until that expectation is computed, the finding may be arithmetic. • Detection cost depends on the horizon of exposure as well as on the rendering, which yields a within-column test that does not use the disputed coordinate at all. • Evolutionary signalling theory grounds detection cost and supplies a third rival on which the surplus is an immune response; the surplus prediction therefore does not discriminate, and this is recorded as a defect found before any data was collected. • Semantic pejoration of assertible and perceptible virtue terms is the prediction that does discriminate, and it is decidable from the same dictionaries. • Independent catalogues assembled by other methods — Peterson and Seligman’s, Nussbaum’s spheres — should show the same asymmetry if it is a fact about the tradition and not about this author. • The article’s entire evidential base is one person’s coding of his own catalogue, and it is written to be checked rather than believed. Relevance Every virtue catalogue in the tradition, from Aristotle’s to the most recent psychological classifications, is compiled by asking what a good person does. If the asymmetry reported here is real, that method has a systematic blind spot, and the blind spot falls precisely where the corresponding counterfeits are hardest to detect. The proposal is testable by lexicographic means at low cost, and it would bear on any project that classifies moral qualities — philosophical, psychological or institutional. (shrink)

This paper applies Ethical Distance Theory to the phenomenon commonly referred to as AI hallucinations and argues that prevailing treatments fundamentally mislocate the epistemic failure involved. Hallucinations are typically framed as instances of falsity, fabrication, or defective inference and are addressed through technical strategies aimed at improving accuracy, verification, or preference alignment. I argue that this framing is inadequate. Many epistemically dangerous hallucinations are not demonstrably false. They are fluent, plausible, and locally coherent. Their harm lies not in the production (...) of incorrect beliefs, but in the premature closure of inquiry. -/- Using Ethical Distance Theory, the paper develops hallucinations as failures of correctability rather than failures of truth. Hallucinations are characterized as speech acts that expand ethical distance by presenting themselves as authoritative while suppressing feedback, redistributing epistemic burden asymmetrically, and inducing silence where questioning would ordinarily be expected. On this account, epistemic degradation is marked less by error than by the erosion of conditions under which error could be discovered and revised. -/- The paper introduces correctability as a central epistemic constraint independent of accuracy and shows how systems can appear epistemically successful, stable, fluent, and reliable while becoming increasingly resistant to correction. This framework explains why preference-based alignment strategies, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, often mask hallucinations rather than prevent them. By optimizing for satisfaction and fluency, they dampen epistemic friction and degrade feedback dynamics. -/- The analysis further argues that silence, understood as the absence of anticipated questioning or dissent, is a primary diagnostic signal of feedback loss in high authority, mediated epistemic systems. It also argues that transparency should be reconceived not as explanation or disclosure but as the preservation of contestability and survivable dissent. While artificial intelligence serves as the principal case study, the argument generalizes to other institutional and sociotechnical systems in which epistemic authority is cheap and accountability diffuse. -/- The paper’s central claim is modest but consequential. The most serious epistemic failures are not those in which systems are wrong, but those in which they become difficult to discover as wrong. Hallucinations matter not because they introduce error, but because they erode correctability. (shrink)

Ethical Distance Theory (EDT) is a structural framework for analyzing ethical risk in complex sociotechnical systems. Whereas many classical ethical theories locate moral responsibility primarily in the intentions, character, or deliberative capacities of individual agents, EDT shifts ethical analysis to the architecture of systems that mediate action, consequence, and accountability. -/- EDT’s central claim is that several forms of distance, including causal, informational, temporal, structural, and incentive distance, systematically shape the likelihood that harmful outcomes will arise, persist, or remain unaddressed (...) in large‑scale environments. The paper develops an ontology of ethical distance and introduces analytic constructs such as distance functions, responsibility gradients, constraint surfaces, and lifecycle governance models. -/- Rather than replacing traditional ethical theories, EDT is presented as a complementary framework that explains why individual‑level moral reasoning often fails to secure ethical outcomes under conditions of scale, opacity, and distributed control. The framework is illustrated through case studies in vehicle manufacturing, the Boeing 737 MAX program, and the historical evolution of weapon systems, and is extended to domains including artificial intelligence, healthcare, finance, and environmental governance. -/- A central implication of EDT is that ethical improvements within one system may generate ethical trade‑offs in others, highlighting the need for cross‑system rather than siloed governance. EDT contributes a domain‑agnostic and anticipatory perspective on ethics that supports the diagnosis of structural ethical vulnerabilities and the design of institutions that better align responsibility, feedback, and incentives in complex societies. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that we have obligations not only to perform certain actions, but also to have certain attitudes (such as desires, beliefs, and intentions), and this despite the fact that we rarely, if ever, have direct voluntary control over our attitudes. Moreover, I argue that whatever obligations we have with respect to actions derive from our obligations with respect to attitudes. More specifically, I argue that an agent is obligated to perform an action if and only if (...) it’s the action that she would perform if she were to have the attitudes that she ought to have. This view, which I call attitudism, has three important implications. First, it implies that an adequate practical theory must not be exclusively act-orientated. That is, it must require more of us than just the performance of certain voluntary acts. Second, it implies that an adequate practical theory must be attitude-dependent. That is, it must hold that what we ought to do depends on what attitudes we ought to have. Third, it implies that no adequate practical theory can require us to perform acts that we would not perform even if we were to have the attitudes that we ought to have. I then show how these implications can help us both to address certain puzzling cases of rational choice and to understand why most typical practical theories (utilitarianism, rational egoism, virtue ethics, Rossian deontology, etc.) are mistaken. (shrink)

The performance of one option can entail the performance of another. For instance, baking an apple pie entails baking a pie. Now, suppose that both of these options—baking a pie and baking an apple pie—are permissible. This raises the issue of which, if either, is more fundamental than the other. Is baking a pie permissible because it’s permissible to bake an apple pie? Or is baking an apple pie permissible because it’s permissible to bake a pie? Or are they equally (...) fundamental, as they would be if they were both permissible because, say, they both accord with Kant’s categorical imperative? I defend the view that the permissibility of an option that entails another is more fundamental than the permissibility of the option that it entails. That is, I defend maximalism: the view that if an agent is permitted to perform a certain type of action (say, baking a pie), this is in virtue of the fact that she is permitted to perform some instance of this type (say, baking an apple pie), where φ-ing is an instance of ψ-ing if and only if φ-ing entails ψ-ing but not vice versa. If maximalism is correct, then, as I show, most theories of morality and rationality must be revised. (shrink)

Maximalism is the view that if an agent is permitted to perform a certain type of action (say, baking), this is in virtue of the fact that she is permitted to perform some instance of this type (say, baking a pie), where φ-ing is an instance of ψ-ing if and only if φ-ing entails ψ-ing but not vice versa. Now, the point of this paper is not to defend maximalism, but to defend a certain account of our options that when (...) combined with maximalism results in a theory that both avoids the sorts of objections that have typically been levelled against maximalism and accommodates the plausible idea that a moral theory must be collectively successful in the sense that everyone’s satisfying the theory guarantees that our theory-given aims will be best achieved. I argue that, for something to count as an option for an agent, it must, in the relevant sense, be under her control. And I argue that the relevant sort of control is the sort that we exercise over our reasons-responsive attitudes (e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions) by being both receptive and reactive to reasons. I call this sort of control rational control, and I call the view that φ-ing is an option for an agent if and only if she has rational control over whether she φs rationalism. When we combine this view with maximalism, we get rationalist maximalism, which I argue is a promising moral theory. (shrink)

The concept of "moral entropy" appears across theology, information ethics, sociology, and popular discourse, yet no existing account provides a unified structural mechanism for how moral reasoning degrades, a severity metric for classifying that degradation, or an explanation for why some moral damage resists repair while other damage does not. This paper presents such an account through the framework of Resolution Ethics (RE). RE identifies deception (self-deception and other-deception) as the singular corruption source through which the Protection, Trust, and Free-Agency (...) (PTF) architecture between agents degrades. Moral entropy is the accumulated result of that degradation in the relational field: repeated or critical corruption of the PTF structure, traceable to deception as its source. (shrink)

Moral dimension is a characteristic feature of most transformative developments that have occurred in the course of human history. Moral outrage has fueled numerous upheavals, uprisings, and revolutions. Researchers have recognized the important role of moral outrage during periods of social and political change. However, they usually tend to explain it by social, political, or economic factors. They rarely trace this phenomenon to purely moral factors. This article argues that the primary source of moral outrage lies in the moral sphere—specifically, (...) in the discrepancy between the widely recognized moral principles and the actual practice. The imperative of equality is arguably the most important and fundamental principle that underpins the existence of morality. The appeal of the imperative of equality transcends temporal and cultural boundaries. Yet despite this broad appeal, our social practice accepts, tolerates, and perpetuates inequality. This article calls this discrepancy the moral predicament. The article will analyze the factors that are involved in the making of the moral predicament. It will identify the source of the imperative of equality and will explain why this imperative has not been realized in practice. The article will also consider several relevant issues, such as the rise of consciousness and morality. Finally, the article will offer a perspective on how the problem of the moral predicament can be solved. (shrink)

A brief examination of the self-negating quality of the precautionary principle within the context of environmental ethics, and its consequent failure, as an ethical guide, to justify large-scale regulation of atmospheric cabon dioxide emissions.

I explore how considerations about psychological damage connect with moral theories.

Normative inquiry may pursue several different explanatory projects. We may seek to explain why the right acts are right or why the things that are good for us are so, explain what it is for something to be obligatory, or explain the source of reasons for action. This chapter takes steps towards understanding this variety. After laying some general ground about explanation and normativity, I map out some key axes of debate about first-order normative explanation, including the role of normative (...) principles and the nature of the explanatory relation. I discuss the role of explanation in normative inquiry, its relation to grounding in metaphysics and unification in philosophy of science, and explanatory pluralism. I conclude with the other two explanatory projects, concerning the foundations of classes of normative phenomena (such as moral facts or practical reasons) and the natures of individual normative properties, and their relation to first-order normative explanation. (shrink)

In A Relational Moral Theory: African ethics in and beyond the continent (2022), Thaddeus Metz proposes an African moral theory according to which we ought to respect and honour the capacity of individuals to be party to harmonious relationship. He aims to present a moral theory that should ‘be weighed up against at least contemporary Western moral theories’ (p. 2). As Metz intends his theory to be a serious contender with other moral theories, I assess how his moral theory can (...) be applied and contribute to contemporary moral discussions ‘beyond the continent’, as the subtitle of the book puts it. In particular, as Metz’s relational moral theory is grounded on the value of harmony, an important question is how well his theory handles disharmony especially if his theory is to have application in our non-ideal world in which disharmony is rife. And here, I hold up Metz’s account to one area of disharmony, disruptive emotions and affective injustice. By first establishing how disruptive emotions and affective injustice pose a challenge to similar relational moral theories grounded in harmony, I argue that Metz’s theory has distinct advantages in the way in which it can indeed engage with such phenomena. I close the paper by considering the objection that Metz’s account is limited in making sense of a common form of disruptive emotion in response to structural injustices where affective injustice can arise, but ultimately conclude that such a limitation is superficial. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and explain three kinds of bedrock in moral thought. The term "bedrock," as introduced by Wittgenstein in §217 of the Philosophical Investigations, stands for the end of a chain of reasoning. We affirm that some chains of moral reasoning do indeed end with certainty. However, different kinds of certainties in morality work in different ways. In the course of systematizing the different types of certainties, we argue that present accounts of certainties in morality do not (...) reflect their diversity. Our analysis yields three types of moral certainty: QUASI-UNDOUBTABLE CERTAIN PROPOSITIONS, CERTAIN PROPOSITIONS, and TRANSCENDENTAL CERTAINTIES. We show that the first two types can, at least to some extent, be intelligibly doubted. Therefore, they do not possess the characteristics that would classify them as bedrock in the strictest sense. TRANSCENDENTAL CERTAINTIES cannot likewise be doubted because they are rules that enable moral thinking. Thus, deviating from them is unintelligible. We shall argue that all three types reflect ways in which moral language games come to an end, while only one, TRANSCENDENTAL CERTAINTIES, displays the characteristic of being solid bedrock. (shrink)

In ethics classes, students are often asked to form judgements on practical issues and, in doing so, to apply the ethical theories they have learned. It is plausible that this practice is often based on the assumption that applying these theories makes a significant contribution to the justification of students’ ethical judgements. This paper argues that this assumption is doubtful in many educational contexts. My argument identifies two main obstacles. First, there is the ‘Problem of Arbitrary Use’: rather than applying (...) theories responsibly, students often seem to engage in practices such as cherry-picking or theory-hopping to support their pre-existing views. Second, there is the ‘Problem of Unclear Epistemic Contribution’: even if students applied theories non-arbitrarily, it would remain unclear at a fundamental level how doing so could make such a contribution. If my argument succeeds, it has important practical implications: we should resolve or bypass the obstacles identified in this paper, settle for a more modest benefit of theory application, or consider abandoning the application of ethical theories in the practical parts of certain ethics classes. (shrink)

This volume offers the first book-length examination of the most significant fault line in transhumanism: the tension between Classical Transhumanism (CT) and Euro-Transhumanism (ET). Penned by leading thinkers, the chapters systematically explore the movements’ differing philosophical roots – Anglo-American rationalism for CT versus Continental philosophy for ET. The book dissects core disagreements on topics such as immortality versus extended healthspan, libertarian versus social democratic politics, and utopian versus non-utopian outlooks. The goal is not merely to highlight antagonism but to foster (...) dialogue, identify shared values, and explore potential convergences for a more reflective and socially conscious approach to human enhancement. (shrink)

Philosophers typically define an excuse for action as that which lessens or eliminates an agent’s blameworthiness for wrongdoing. Conditions cited as excuses by philosophers and in legal codes include infancy, certain forms of mental illness, involuntary intoxication, acting out of ignorance, and being under duress. However, this presumes a strong form of objectivism about our obligations to act: our moral obligations are determined by facts other than the capacities we lack or why we lack them. This chapter argues against this (...) strong form of objectivism by appealing to a reasonable interpretation of “ought implies can,” and shows that (almost) all of what has been categorized as an excuse is either an exemption, a justification, or does not at all mitigate blameworthiness for wrongdoing. Weakness of will and duress either sometimes, but not always, provide an excuse or they never do so—it depends on how finely we specify what our obligations to act are. The chapter also considers alternative definitions of an excuse, and demonstrates that they have counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

Can there be an ethical theory that is grounded in axiology – in a theory of values – that is also thoroughly non-consequentialist? According to such a theory, acts themselves can be good things to do – and the goodness of an act is not be explained purely in terms of the goodness of the whole world that would result from the act. Such a theory, it is argued, needs to rely on three ideas about values. First, the fundamental value-bearers (...) include local bearers (like acts), and not just global bearers (like worlds). Second, there is a great plurality of conflicting values. Third, while conflicting values can be aggregated to yield an overall verdict on how much reason there is to perform the relevant acts, all things considered, this aggregation needs to be kept in its place; its only role is to yield a value whose function is to guide agents’ choices when the available acts exemplify such conflicting values. With these ideas in place, an ethical theory can be grounded in axiology while resisting all forms of consequentialism. (shrink)

Normative nihilism is the more radical sibling of moral nihilism: while moral nihilists are nihilists only about the moral domain, normative nihilists are nihilists about all normativity. For example, normative nihilists have argued that there are no moral, prudential, epistemic, or instrumental reasons. This is a prima facie highly implausible view. But normative nihilism has received serious defence. Proponents argue that normative nihilism is implied by plausible premises, and that the prima facie implausibility of normative nihilism is susceptible to debunking. (...) This article will work towards a philosophically illuminating characterization of normative nihilism, assess arguments in support of the view, and survey its implications. (shrink)

The article offers a comprehensive philosophical and methodological analysis of the fundamental epistemic transformations modern science is undergoing due to the integration of generative artificial intelligence. It substantiates the tectonic shift from classical anthropocentric rationality to a digital ontology of knowledge. In this state, the latent space of neural networks emerges as a new topology of meaning, while the process of cognition transforms into complex navigation through the geometry of multidimensional manifolds. The authors reveal the essence of cognitive symbiontics, where (...) algorithms act as "cognitive mitochondria," saturating thought with computational energy and enabling the processing of colossal data arrays without the loss of human intentionality. The central element of the study is the architecture of "Agentic Science." Algorithms are evolving from passive tools into autonomous epistemic partners capable of strategic planning, independent hypothesis validation, and reflection. The emergence of a hybrid subject of cognition, in which the biological mind organically merges with digital code, is examined. Special attention is paid to existential threats, particularly the "Silicon Curtain" phenomenon, the risks of model autophagy due to the synthetic pollution of the infosphere, and the formation of "moral crumple zones" where responsibility is blurred. The article defines the new role of the scientist as a strategic conductor of intellectual systems. The researcher’s key prerogatives remain value curation, ethical expertise, and endowing statistical patterns with causal meaning. Arguments are presented for the necessity of transitioning to a "glass box" epistemology and embedding infra-ethics directly into neural network code. A strategy of active debiasing and a new educational paradigm for mastering the art of dialogue with machines are proposed, guaranteeing the preservation of human epistemic sovereignty in the era of symbiotic reality creation. (shrink)

In general, otherwise permissible actions do not become wrong when agents act on bad attitudes. But cases of discrimination can be exceptions to this generalization. It could “be morally permissible for someone to rent her house to any one of several prospective tenants but not morally permissible to refuse to rent it to one of those people because of his race” (Scanlon 2008: 71). These two claims are plausible and widely accepted, but they call for explanation. Why is it that (...) in some cases of discrimination, agents' bad attitudes make otherwise permissible actions wrong? Why doesn't this imply that otherwise permissible actions generally become impermissible when agents act on bad attitudes?? Together, these questions produce a puzzle which existing accounts of wrongful discrimination have not solved. We argue that the solution comes from appreciating how the manifestation of bad attitudes in action is a central constituent in the unjust social condition to which discrimination subjects members of subordinated groups: the deprivation of positive moral standing. (shrink)

The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the universe as a whole, or the future in particular, contain infinite quantities of value and/or disvalue, then many of the theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that none of our available options are better than any other. If so, then even apparently vast effects on the far (...) future cannot in fact make the world morally better. On top of this, some strategies for avoiding this problem of “infinitarian paralysis” (e.g., exponential pure time discounting) yield views that are much less supportive of longtermism. In this chapter, we explore how the potential infinitude of the future affects the case for longtermism. We argue that (i) there are reasonable prospects for extending risk-neutral totalism and similar views to infinite contexts and (ii) many such extension strategies will still support the case for longtermism, since they imply that when we can only effect (or only predictably affect) a finite, bounded part of an infinite universe, we can ignore the unaffectable rest of the universe and reason as if the finite, affectable part were all there is. (shrink)

This document is not an autonomous scholarly article, a theoretical treatise, or a final model claiming to offer a completed explanation. It should be read as a collection within which a trajectory of thought is recorded – a path that moves through different levels of experience, disciplines, and scales of reality without reducing them to a single principle. SYNTHESIS does not construct a new system; rather, it demonstrates how various texts, intuitions, and conceptual attempts relate to one another over an (...) extended period of time. -/- This text also serves a clarifying function: it allows the reader to understand what all these works are about when viewed within a single scale. Each of the author’s writings – from early exploratory pieces to fully articulated conceptual works – becomes legible as part of a continuous development rather than as isolated projects. For this reason, the document presents each work in a brief, review-oriented manner, outlining a coherent sequence of evolution that would otherwise remain implicit. -/- The materials included here differ in genre, style, and purpose. Early intuitive texts, hypothetical formulations, institutional academic works, published articles, and reflective summaries coexist within this collection. They have not been artificially unified or rewritten into a single idiom. This heterogeneity is not a flaw but an intentional structural feature: the document preserves the tension between distinct modes of articulation in order not to lose the logic of their emergence. -/- It is important to clarify what should not be expected from this text. It does not propose a universal theory, does not compete with established scientific paradigms, and does not seek definitive legitimation within one discipline. There is no attempt to “prove” hypotheses in the strict sense or to replace diverse domains of experience with a single model. Likewise, this document is not a memoir, although personal experience is present as a medium of sensitivity rather than an aim in itself. -/- At the same time, SYNTHESIS is not an arbitrary essayistic compilation. The texts are held together by a shared internal logic: attentiveness to processes of transition, inertia, cyclicality, dissonance, and the possibilities of integration without simplification. This logic unfolds from the phenomenology of bodily and sensory experience to the analysis of social, cultural, and civilizational processes. The author works not with isolated objects but with relations between levels – with the spaces in between, where conflict, loss, or coherence emerge. -/- The mode of writing combines analytical description, reflective commentary, and restrained essayistic elements. This is not a stylistic preference but a methodological necessity: complex processes cannot be adequately expressed in a single language without reducing their depth. Accordingly, the reader is invited not to a linear reading oriented toward rapid conclusions, but to an attentive engagement that allows for pauses, returns, and shifts in tempo. -/- SYNTHESIS does not attempt to resolve the questions it raises. Its function is to register a mode of thinking that holds multiplicity without fragmentation, acknowledges the limits of knowledge, and resists the premature harmonization of complexity. The document may be seen as an intermediate form between a personal archive and a public corpus – not fully complete, yet possessing enough internal structure to be perceived as a coherent whole. (shrink)

I am not trying to earn money from this book. I am giving the complete content because it is important in the present epoch. But I need financial support, because I am a hostage of war, a hostage of a regime that violates human rights and personal freedoms. My family and I need shelter, because at this moment we are experiencing pressure from both Russia and Ukraine. People are being kidnapped and murdered in the streets, almost no one is left, (...) and human life has no value here. -/- Not final. Subject to revision. -/- This publication presents a conceptual manuscript of Synthesis, a long-term research project integrating philosophical inquiry, phenomenology, musical composition, perceptual studies, and civilizational analysis. The work does not propose a closed system or a unifying doctrine. Instead, it formulates a trajectory of thought that moves across ontology, method, perception, practice, and cultural dynamics. -/- The text is structured in thematic chapters that trace the evolution of key ideas: wave-based ontology; resonant structures; the relationship between number, proportion, and form; musical thinking as a model of temporal organization; embodiment and perception; memory as duration; artistic practice as cognitive research; and the open-ended nature of meaning, interpretation, and responsibility. -/- Rather than offering definitive conclusions, Synthesis maintains conceptual openness. Questions are not resolved but carried forward as active sites for further development. The project is designed as an ongoing intellectual environment in which reading, interpretation, and revision remain part of the research itself. -/- This release functions as a reference point for citation, discussion, and future elaboration. -/- This document is part of the ongoing project Synthesis, which examines how thought can operate across multiple domains – ontology, music, perception, embodiment, artistic method, cultural systems, and civilizational change. The work rejects reductionism and treats knowledge as a continuous process rather than a final product. -/- The book develops a set of interconnected concepts: wave-based models of being, harmonic structures, temporal form in music, perception as cognitive action, the role of memory in organizing experience, interdisciplinary translation, artistic practice as experimentation, and the ethical implications of interpretation. -/- Rather than finalizing answers, the text leaves space for open questions. Its aim is not to close theory but to generate further inquiry. This publication provides a stable reference version for citation and academic discussion, while the project will continue to evolve in future editions. (shrink)

This chapter treats music as a structural instrument of civilizational energy. Music is understood as an early indicator of systemic overload – a moment when technological acceleration, psychological thresholds, and institutional forms cease to align. Within such an analytic field, music does not appear as an aesthetic ornament but as a sensor of imbalance that registers the breakdown of coherence long before political collapse or ethical exhaustion. -/- The chapter delineates a long axis of memory and destabilization from ancient cosmological (...) sound-regimes to Renaissance authorship and the aesthetic rupture of the twentieth century. In this logic, a four-phase trajectory of civilizational memory emerges: cosmology → secular humanism → avant-garde disintegration → the unresolved question of future memory. -/- In ancient cultures, sound functioned as a stabilizing technology: ritual, repetition, and embodied transmission through voice preserved law, cosmology, identity, and temporality. With the Renaissance, music exits sacred monopolization and becomes a form of individual consciousness – the bearer of memory shifts from collective rituality to the authorial “I.” In the avant-garde this bearer disintegrates: tonal hierarchy, metric ordering, and center-periphery relations collapse, converting experiment into a kind of engineering of entropy. -/- The contemporary moment is defined not by stylistic pluralism but by the fragility of media. Music migrates into unstable digital environments that do not guarantee the longevity of cultural memory. Thus, the central question is no longer the evolution of musical language, but the survival of memory – and which forms of embodiment, storage, and responsibility can prevent cultural energy from dissolving into noise, acceleration, and oblivion. -/- Within the structure of SYNTHESIS, this chapter performs a diagnostic function: music is positioned as a sensor of civilizational physics, mapping epochs of rupture, registering the loss of carriers, and formulating the task of engineering future memory – beyond religious guarantees, market fragmentation, or technological exhaustion. It is not a commentary on styles but an attempt to conceptualize musical history as an energetic engineering that forces the present to choose between destructive discharge and constructive redirection. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection of Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy of intentional human consciousness and the evolving discourse on artificial intelligence (AI). By understanding the distinctions between human cognition and AI capabilities, we can develop a Nouvelle théologie that addresses the ethical and theological dimensions of AI’s integration into society. This approach not only highlights the unique human capacities for self-reflection and moral reasoning but also guides the deliberate and responsible design of AI to promote human flourishing and the common good. (...) It seeks to enrich contemporary technological engagement with insights drawn from the rich reservoir of Catholic intellectual tradition, particularly through the lens of Lonergan’s cognitive theory, which emphasizes the dynamic interplay of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. Highlighting the profound gap between AI’s computational abilities and the depth of human cognition, the paper argues for the uniqueness of human spiritual and moral capacities—features that AI cannot emulate. The exploration reaffirms the human person’s imago Dei and the irreplaceable capacity for transcendence, ethical discernment, and relationality, informing a responsible approach to AI development that upholds human dignity and serves the common good. The paper challenges the narrative of technological determinism, advocating for active human agency in shaping AI’s societal role. It promotes a Lonerganian ethical framework for AI that adheres to the transcendental precepts of attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility—principles that guide technology development toward enhancing human well-being and fostering communal flourishing. (shrink)

The article presents a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of the value orientations of Ukrainian students as a factor in shaping their worldview in the context of globalization, economic instability and social transformations. The methodological basis of the study is a theoretical synthesis of the relevant literature, analysis of sociological data and the results of a pilot empirical survey conducted among students at the State Biotechnological University during 2022–2024. The results indicate the dominance of pragmatic values, a focus on material (...) well-being and career success, while simultaneously maintaining the importance of moral and ethical orientations such as responsibility, empathy and self-realization. It is emphasized that the digital environment and the use of the latest educational technologies, including generative artificial intelligence, enhance both pragmatic trends in the formation of values and the demand for critical thinking, adaptability and moral self-reflection among students. The study reveals a transformation in attitudes towards family values, leisure activities, and civic engagement: students are increasingly inclined towards autonomy and individualism, while also demonstrating a growing interest in volunteering and supporting socially significant initiatives. Particular attention is paid to the importance of humanitarian education as a factor in the development of ethical consciousness, critical reflection and the ability to integrate individual aspirations with the needs of society in the context of the challenges of the 21st century. The educational environment is considered as a space for the formation of value-based autonomy and moral reflection through axiologically oriented educational practices. The necessity of integrating ethical education and critical thinking into the educational process in order to harmonize the value system of young people is substantiated. Prospects for further research are related to the development of mechanisms for maintaining a balance between individual self-development and civic engagement of students. (shrink)

The Golden Rule is regularly used in ordinary life, across many different cultures, to acquire new moral knowledge. At the same time, the Golden Rule is widely ignored both in ethics and metaethics because it seems to be an implausible normative theory. Most philosophers who have paid it any attention have thought that, at best, it is an initially tempting thought whose appeal should be explained by the ultimately correct normative theory. My aim in this paper is to attend to (...) an alternative possibility: the Golden Rule teaches us something about metaethics, in the form of moral epistemology, rather than normative ethics. I will argue that sentimentalism, the view that the emotions are an essential source of moral knowledge, provides a compelling explanation of the usefulness of the Golden Rule. Before giving the sentimentalist explanation, I explain why proposed alternative sources of moral knowledge provide less compelling explanations of its usefulness. (shrink)

This paper discusses Thaddeus Metz’s claims about two of the moral theories he discusses in his book A Relational Moral Theory: the morality of common good developed by Kwame Gyekye, and the relational theory Metz himself defends. The paper begins by outlining the central claims Metz makes in comparing these theories. It then raises three questions about the relational theory and suggests a way of using some of Metz’s ideas to construct a collective consequentialist form of the morality of common (...) good. It ends by noting that if we understand Metz’s contribution as part of a collective search for the correct moral theory, it matters less than he seems to think whether we are now in a position to show that the relational theory is superior to its rivals. (shrink)

Michael Huemer argues that cross-cultural convergence toward liberal moral values is evidence of objective moral progress, and by extension, evidence for moral realism. Nathan Cofnas claims to debunk Huemer’s argument by contending that convergence toward liberal moral values can be better explained by ‘two related non-truth-tracking processes’: self-interest and its long-term tendency to result in social conditions conducive to greater empathy. This article argues that although Cofnas successfully debunks Huemer’s convergence argument for one influential form of moral realism – Robust (...) Moral Realism, which holds that moral facts are non-natural, stance-independent normative facts – Cofnas’s debunking argument broadly supports a second type of moral realism: Enlightened Self-Interest Realism, the view that moral facts are reducible to stance-dependent requirements of instrumental (‘means-end’) rationality. Finally, this article argues that insofar as different Enlightened Self-Interest Realist theories make specific predictions about the intra- and inter-personal mechanisms behind moral convergence toward liberalism, empirical observations of cross-cultural convergence can provide independent support for Enlightened Self-Interest Realism. I conclude that this is an important mark in favor of Enlightened Self-Interest Realism over Robust Moral Realism. (shrink)

The permissible and the forbidden are privative opposites: each is a lack of the other. The good and the bad are, by contrast, polar opposites: badness is anti-goodness, not non-goodness. What about the fitting and the unfitting, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the apt and the inapt, the warranted and the unwarranted? Is unfittingness non-fittingness or anti-fittingness, inappropriateness non-appropriateness or anti-appropriateness? This essay argues that each of these “aptic” categories stands in a privative rather than a polar relation to its (...) opposite. More generally, there is no coherent notion of anti-fittingness, no inversely charged flipside to aptness, to be found. In order to establish these claims, a taxonomy of different types of oppositeness is proposed, and several tests for distinguishing distinct varieties of opposites are developed. What emerges is a better appreciation of the structural characteristics of fittingness and the other aptic categories, as well as an argument for taking up the nature of oppositeness as a serious philosophical topic that is ripe for further exploration. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł poświęcony jest kluczowym osobom w postępowaniu honorowym – sekundantom, którzy zwani byli również zastępcami honorowymi. Poprzez dokonanie analizy porównawczej kodeksów honorowych Włdysława Boziewicza Polskiego kodeksu honorowego (1919)oraz Ogólnych zasad postępowania honorowego (1927) dokonana ostanie rekonstrukcja zawartej w nich normatywności w zakresie roli sekundantów. Pozwoli to prześledzić kierunek zmian w refleksji Boziewicza nad istotą przebiegu postępowania honorowego, która zawarta jest w jego kodyfikacjach. Tym samym ujawni się jeden z punktów jego krytyki społecznej wymierzonej względem praktyki postępowań honorowych. Badanie ujawni (...) jak w refleksji Boziewicza nad postępowaniami honorowymi wzrosła rola autonomicznej refleksjimoralnej zastępców honorowych i wspólnoty etycznej, którą reprezentują, względem woli ich mocodawców. (shrink)

How should we respond to moral theories that put excessive demands on individual agents? Intramoral strategies concern the content of morality and set limits on how exacting moral demands may be. Extramoral strategies concern the normative status of morality and set limits on how significant moral demands may be. While both strategies are often discussed separately, I focus on a specific aspect of how they relate to each other: Do intramoral approaches assume that extramoral approaches fail, and if so, does (...) that render them implausible? This challenge becomes apparent when the two strategies are considered together, and my goal is to show how it can be dealt with. In particular, I argue that intramoral strategies do not depend on the failure of extramoral strategies: Even if morality has limited practical significance (which I also doubt), moral theories can be criticised for being too demanding in terms of content. (shrink)

The higher education sector in Indonesia is currently confronting a concerning issue. Corruption and poor management plague various universities in this country, creating an unfavorable work environment for the academic community. The university management system, which should be an essential pillar in enlightening the nation, has instead become a source of problems troubling professors, staff, and students. This essay argues that urgent reform of the corrupt and ineffective university management system is necessary for the academic community's well-being.

Existing social disparities in the United States are inconsistent with the promise of democracy; therefore, there was a need for critical conceptualization of the first principles that undergird American democracy and the genesis of democratic social change in America. This constructivist grounded theory study aimed to construct a grounded theory that provides an understanding of the process of American democratic social change as it emerged from the nation’s founding documents. A post hoc polytheoretical framework including Foucault’s, Bourdieu’s, and Marx and (...) Engels’s theories of power was used to understand power dynamics. The research question focused on understanding the process of democratic social change in America. The sample comprised the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution. The documents were retrieved from the National Archives and Library of Congress. The data analysis plan incorporated successive comparison, situational and dramaturgical analysis, deconstruction, and perspective taking as strategies. The result was the construction of a democratic social change process theory preceded by five grounded theories: (a) first principles of democracy, (b) first principles of democracy conceptual framework, (c) socio-ethical principles of democracy, (d) demoralizing process, and (e) either-or approach to democracy. Positive social change implications include applying a democratic social change process to future social change endeavors across domains and levels of analysis, a normative framework for a republican form of government, and a tool to analyze and minimize the latent consequences of social justice policies. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic raises the need for an ethical framework that addresses the unique ethical challenges and questions arising from airborne infectious diseases. For example, are we ever ethically obliged to wear a face mask? If so, why and when? The Respiratory Ethics Framework (REF) herein proposes pathways to answers grounded in ethical norms and the moral principles of non-harm, beneficence and respect for personal autonomy. REF is a personal ethics wherein your ethical duty to increase your respiratory hygiene efforts—such (...) as by donning a mask—is proportional to your estimation of an increase in the likelihood that your respiratory effluent poses a risk of harmful infection to others. REF includes illustrated decision models that instantiate a framework of proportionality between levels of risk, ethical duty and mitigation that shapes risk mitigation across domains. (shrink)

In this chapter, I seek a better understanding of both supererogation and imperfect duties in the hopes of coming up with an account of what it is to go above and beyond the call of an imperfect duty. I argue that we can go above and beyond the call of duty, not only by performing actions but also by forming attitudes. And I argue that what’s constitutive of fulfilling an imperfect duty is forming certain attitudes. I conclude, therefore, that we (...) can go above and beyond the call of an imperfect duty by forming attitudes that are morally better than those that we must at a minimum form simply to count as having the end that it requires us to have. Along the way, I show that imperfect duties provide us with neither too much nor too little latitude in choosing which ends to pursue as well as when, and to what extent, to pursue them. (shrink)

When mature minors face a decision with important consequences, such as whether to undergo a risky but potentially life-saving medical procedure, who should decide? Relying on liberal political theory’s account of the importance of decisional autonomy for adults, and given the scalar nature of the capacities needed to exercise decisional autonomy, I argue that mature minors with the requisite capacities and commitments have a right to decisional autonomy though they are not yet 18. I argue for this right using a (...) ‘balancing of interest’ account of rights: the interest mature minors have in decisional autonomy outweighs their parents’ interest in shaping their children as a means of ‘creative self-extension’. But I propose two limitations on this right: requests for waivers of the rule that one must be at least 18 to decide cannot be so numerous as to make adjudication impractical; and though a competent adult’s voluntary decision to refuse medical treatment should generally be respected, the state may reject a mature minor’s decision upon review by an indifferent judge of the minor’s capacities and reasons. The judge reviews not the substantive merits or prudence of the decision, but whether the decision promotes the interest in decisional autonomy, by asking among other things whether the decision is the minor’s own, is tethered to core commitments rather than based on arbitrary preferences, and could be regarded as reasonable to the minor’s ‘future self’. (shrink)

This article ("Looting or Sharing?") is located at the intersection of societal and ecological discourses, and analyzes local actions from the perspective of digital ethics. The case study is centered around a public bookcase (or free library) in a neighborhood in the Ruhr area, a post-industrial and partly impoverished metropolitan district in Germany. The rather banal local actions - people take books from the public bookcase as is the proclaimed objective of having such an institution in the first place - (...) eventually morph into highly polarized discussion threads on a local social media platform that are charged with bitter accusations of "looting" (i.e., allegations of some people taking out too many books) and rife with outrage (i.e., allegations of some people selling books taken from the free library on secondary markets). This debate reflects a conflict that points to larger social divisions and rifts. This is analyzed empirically (via a discourse analysis) and philosophically (drawing on Aristotle as well as contemporary debates on moralism). When the free sharing of books, i.e., the recycling of otherwise unused goods, gets scandalized by some residents of the neighborhood as "looting," as the accusations on social media proclaim, this conflict suggests a self-referential moralism among the online discussants. Epistemic fallacies combined with irrational counterfactual claims lead to immoderate hypercriticism. This is a finding that can be observed in many online debates and points to larger disruptions in the digital arena. (shrink)

Concern regarding overly demanding duties has been a prominent feature of moral debate ever since the possibility was famously sounded out by Bernard Williams nearly fifty years ago. More recently, some theorists have attempted to resolve the issue by reconsidering its underlying structure, drawing attention to the possibility that the duties to respond to large-scale moral issues like global poverty, systemic racism, and climate change may be fundamentally collective duties rather than indi- vidual ones. On this view, the relationship between (...) potentially overly demanding individual duties and large-scale moral issues is mediated by the fact that the duties are, first and foremost, ours together rather than each of ours on our own. We believe this theoretical shift constitutes an important development for moral theory regarding large-scale moral problems, but in this paper we focus on two dis- tinct reasons to think that the interplay between collective duties and demanding- ness is more complicated than has typically been appreciated. First, we argue that in cases in which risks or burdens are indivisible, the move to collectivize duties fails to fulfill its promise to alleviate demandingness concerns, and moreover that those kinds of cases are far more widespread than they may initially appear to be. Sec- ond, we argue that if concerns over individual demandingness could block a putative obligation from becoming an actual moral duty, then, in some cases at least, con- cerns over collective demandingness could do so as well. These complications help elucidate the fact that while the move to collectivize duties can address demanding- ness concerns in a particular subset of cases, in others doing so may merely relo- cate—or even exacerbate—the problem. (shrink)

In this article it will be concluded that if a sporting institution is to thrive it must abandon harmful practices and conventions. This inquiry will focus on the harmful practices that enable and preserve female-targeted sexism, paying particular attention to the Henley Royal Regatta, a British sporting event, and its female counterpart, Henley Women’s Regatta. It will be argued that, in adhering to “cultural preservationism” some sporting institutions perpetuate morally culpable traditions, preferring to place greater value on their historical significance (...) and associated cultural prestige over an egalitarian agenda. In this cultural examination, it will be demonstrated that women are severely disadvantaged—both socially and in sporting aspects—by the practices that Henley Royal Regatta rigidly enforces, while further illustrating that Henley Women’s Regatta does little to rectify the situation. It will be suggested that holding women-only competitions, at least in the context of rowing, reinforces what is referred to as the Beauvoirian concept of “Otherness.” While acknowledging the overall significance of cultural preservation and tradition in British sport, this article will employ the “preservation of moral sport argument,” which suggests that traditions that are morally culpable should be abolished. The overall conclusion will be that, although traditions can be an important part of sport, the abolition of harmful practices and conventions is essential if sport is to remain relevant and reflective of the moral values of the society it represents. (shrink)

The previous two chapters addressed African moral theories according to which relationality has a merely instrumental status, viz., is good solely as a means to the advancement of either the common good or vital force. Chapter 6 begins to make the case for taking harmonious or communal relationship to be what should be pursued as an end for the African tradition. Drawing particularly on ideas from Desmond Tutu, it provides a detailed reconstruction of sub-Saharan understandings of harmony or communality, and (...) points out that, as the combination of sharing a way of life with others and caring for their quality of life, it is similar to what English-speakers label ‘friendliness’. It also provides reason to reject extant, consequentialist principles according to which such a relationship is a final good (or goal) that is to be promoted, roughly because they cannot ground human rights. (shrink)

Chapter 13 concludes the book. It first highlights some of the communal ethic’s advantages compared to standard utilitarian and Kantian moral theories, recalling how it uniquely grounds judgements such as: animals have a moral status, albeit one less than that of humans; persons have a dignity of a sort that plausibly explains why reducing their quality of life matters morally; and despite people’s dignity’s demanding impartial consideration, an agent has duties to do more for those who have been in relationship (...) with her. Then, the chapter sketches three projects it would be sensible to undertake, supposing the book’s central ideas have been worth taking seriously. Whereas the book focuses on prescriptive matters pertaining to right action in interpersonal contexts, it is also worth considering how well communality describes morality, whether it grounds an attractive account of good character, and what it entails for justice in legal, political, and economic institutions. (shrink)

This chapter and the next are methodological, focused on how to justify a moral theory. Many African philosophers believe that ethical claims follow immediately from ‘external’, metaphysical ones about human nature that must be established first. For example, Kwame Nkrumah maintains that an egalitarian ethic follows directly from a prior physicalist ontology, and Kwame Gyekye contends that his ‘moderate communitarian’ morality is derived from a certain conception of the self. Chapter 2 shows how these and similar rationales fail to clear (...) the ‘is/ought gap’, as it is known in Western meta-ethics, and also how strategies one might use to bridge the gap do not work. It concludes that a more suitable way to defend a moral theory is to argue ‘internally’ to morality by appealing to intuitions, i.e., by determining which comparatively more controversial general principle of right action easily entails and best explains less controversial particular moral claims. (shrink)

Chapter 10 addresses the duties of researchers, particularly those in the medical field, again contending that the relational moral theory is revealing relative to Western competitors. It first proffers a new account of the obligation to obtain free and informed consent to participate in a study, as something to be upheld not so much as a way to promote health (utilitarianism) or to avoid degrading autonomy (Kantianism), but more as a way to respect people as capable of communal or friendly (...) relationship. Rightness as friendliness is next shown to entail duties of confidentiality, albeit, plausibly, ones not as stringent as what is common in Western ethical thought. Lastly, the chapter argues that the communal ethic grounds a powerful account of ancillary care obligations—duties to compensate for harms that have befallen study participants that the study did not cause—by giving an account that challenges an influential autonomy-based theory of them. (shrink)

Chapter 9 addresses the duties of medical practitioners such as doctors and nurses, mostly in relation to patients, but also in respect of each other and their society. It argues that the relational moral theory is at least no worse than, and is often to be preferred over, more Western principles when it comes to how to understand several biomedical obligations. For example, the chapter maintains that the communal ethic makes good sense of whom a medical professional has moral reason (...) to treat and for which purposes. It further contends that rightness as friendliness grounds moderate positions on abortion and euthanasia that many will find convincing but that utilitarianism and Kantianism have difficulty entailing and explaining. For example, if utilitarianism and Kantianism permit abortion, it is hard for them to avoid also permitting infanticide, but the relational ethic can more easily avoid that implication. (shrink)

_A Relational Moral Theory_ draws on neglected resources from the Global South and especially the African philosophical tradition to provide a new answer to a perennial philosophical question: what do all morally right actions have in common as distinct from wrong ones? Metz points out that the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the two rivals that have dominated Western moral theory for the last two centuries, share an individualist premise. Once that common assumption is replaced by a (...) relational perspective given prominence in African ethical thought, a different comprehensive principle, one focused on harmony or friendliness, emerges. Metz argues that this principle corrects the blind spots of the Western moral principles, and has implications for a wide array of controversies in applied ethics that an international audience of moral philosophers, professional ethicists, and similar thinkers will find compelling. (shrink)

Chapter 12, the last applied ethics chapter, considers some controversies in business. How should a firm’s owners, and related agents such as managers or state bank directors, engage with others, particularly workers and consumers? The chapter argues that the communal ethic does a better job of accounting for intuitions about who counts as a stakeholder and how to prioritize amongst competing stakeholder interests than does utilitarianism or Kantianism. Roughly, rightness as friendliness entails that not all duties of beneficence are a (...) function of need or voluntary assumption of obligation to aid; a firm can also have _pro tanto_ moral reason to help parties because it has related on friendly terms with them in the past. The chapter also takes up the question of how the production process ought to be structured, arguing that while the Western moral theories could well allow an unconstrained managerialism, the communal ethic probably does not. (shrink)

Chapter 1 explains and motivates the project of advancing an African moral theory, after which it provides an overview of the book. An African moral theory is a basic, comprehensive principle distinguishing right from wrong actions that is informed by mores salient particularly in the sub-Saharan region. It is advanced as a rival to the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the primary Western answers to the important question of what all right actions have in common. Part I (...) of the book discusses the meta-ethical issue of how to justify an African moral theory. Part II identifies three major candidates for a moral theory in the African tradition, and argues that one, grounded on communal relationship, is most promising. Part III argues that the relational moral theory does better than the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy at accounting for a wide array of applied controversies. (shrink)