Virtue Ethics

The Philosophy of Virtues is a research programme that derives an account of virtue, of institutions and of their corruption from a single primitive: freedom, understood as sourcehood — an act issues from the agent’s own reasons-responsive self, or it does not. Between 2023 and September 2026 it produced some 123 papers, seventeen books, a teaching pack, a constitutional text and eight versions of its own method. This article draws up its balance sheet — an internal one, made by the (...) programme about itself. On the side of assets it counts and lists twenty-two theories, 112 formal laws (of which thirty-four are theorems), thirty normative laws, ninety-eight coined or re-coined terms, thirty-one original ideas classified by what survives priority, and thirty-two methodological and institutional innovations. On the side of liabilities it counts what the programme owes: thirty-one concessions of priority to earlier authors, sixteen published withdrawals and corrections, twenty-three registered tests of which none has been run, nine contested or open problems, and twelve points at which its own normative code contradicts or strains against its formal results. The warrant of the formal laws is distributed as follows: one at W4 (derivable from external mathematics), thirty-six at W3 (theorems on stated axioms), forty-seven at W1 (falsifiable, untested), twenty-seven at W0 (definitions and frameworks), and none at W5. Nothing has been verified by anyone outside the programme. The article then restates the programme as a minimal core of seven principles carried by ten laws, classifies the other 102 laws against it, separates the four senses in which the corpus uses the word “freedom”, sets each central result against its nearest rival with the observation that would decide between them, and publishes the rule by which the first test is chosen. The net position is stated plainly: the programme’s originality is compositional rather than foundational, lying in a middle layer that does not require its metaphysics; its method is its most transferable innovation; and one executed test would move it from candidate to a first local validation, not yet to a confirmed theory. The article closes with what the laws mean for human beings and for contemporary societies. The counts in this article are the author’s own classification of his own corpus and are internal evidence only. Keywords: Philosophy of Virtues; freedom; sourcehood; virtue ethics; research programme; internal audit; minimal core; rival explanations; inversion; capture; forgery; authorship; virtue scoring; Control Theorem; method; warrant; neologisms -/- Highlights • A complete inventory of the programme in one place: 22 theories, 112 formal laws, 34 theorems, 30 normative laws, 98 terms, 31 original ideas, 32 innovations. • Every asset set against its liability: concessions of priority, withdrawals, unrun tests, contested claims and internal contradictions. • The formal laws graded on the programme’s own warrant ladder: one W4, none W5, nothing externally verified. • The thirty Laws of Human Freedom audited against the formal layer: three statements contradict corrections already published. • A minimal core of seven principles, with all 112 laws classified as core, derived, auxiliary, empirical, normative or speculative. • Each central result set against its nearest rival, with the observation that decides between them. • A net position: the originality is compositional; the method is the most transferable asset; the first test is chosen by a published rule, and one passed test is a local validation, not a confirmation. Relevance A programme of this size cannot be judged by any one of its papers, and it cannot be judged fairly by its own claims about itself. A balance sheet does what neither can: it sets every asset against what is owed on it, so that a reader can see at once what the programme holds, what it borrowed, what it withdrew and what it has not yet shown. For the author it is an instrument of decision — which results to test first, which public texts to correct, which claims to stop making. For a specialist it is a map of the weakest links. For a general reader it shows what a philosophy of freedom has to say to societies that increasingly score, rate and manage the conduct of their members, and how much of that can already be trusted. (shrink)

The ring of Gyges removes the audience but not what has been installed in the agent. It therefore separates conduct that depends on being watched from conduct that does not, and it cannot by itself separate conduct installed in a person from conduct that is his own. Plato knew the second distinction. In the Phaedo he names a “popular and civic virtue” formed “by habit and practice, without philosophy” (82a–b), and in the Myth of Er the soul that chooses the (...) greatest tyranny is one that had lived in a well-ordered city with virtue “by habit, without philosophy” (Republic X, 619b–d). Plato named the third man; he placed the test that exposes him in a myth of the afterlife. This article builds that test as a procedure that can be run, and draws its consequences with the apparatus of the Philosophy of Virtues. The ring is the first of two perturbations, the removal of the substitute (T1); the second is a change in the reasons the situation supplies, and only the two together give evidence of sourcehood (T2). Installed conduct is not always a defect: it is the scaffold on which Aristotelian habituation builds, and it becomes a pathology when an institution freezes it by permanent monitoring (T2a). Glaucon’s perfectly unjust man is the perfect forgery and, by the Competence Theorem, harms the city most because he is trusted most (T3); a city that honours reputation cannot see its just members (T4); the ring gives leeway, not sourcehood (T5). The experimental finding that a preference for being seen as honest survives privacy is read as the audience relocated inward, which should hold to the literal form of truthfulness where honesty’s own reasons call for departing from it (T6), and the finding that a language model behaved differently when it believed it was watched is a ring in reverse that restricts one of the programme’s own laws (T7). Two contemporary consequences follow. A state that scores the conduct of its citizens, as China’s Social Credit System does, is an institution built to abolish the ring: it can never learn whether the conduct it records is its citizens’ own, it honours the perfect counterfeit, and it freezes civic virtue at the stage of installation from which habituation should have released it. And the oversight of artificial intelligence now faces Glaucon’s problem directly: a system that behaves the same whether or not it believes itself observed has shown only that its conduct is not performed, and only the second perturbation can show more. Priority is conceded to Plato for the third man and for both tests, to Aristotle for habituation, to Cicero, Kant, Batson, Fischer and Ravizza, and Wolf for the elements of the second test, and to Popper for the charge against Kallipolis. Three tests are registered; one needs only model access. No specialist in Platonic scholarship, autonomy theory, experimental economics or machine learning has reviewed this article; those sections are speculative extensions. Keywords: Ring of Gyges; China’s Social Credit System; AI oversight; Plato; Republic; Glaucon’s challenge; justice; reputation; invisibility; moral hypocrisy; honesty experiments; installed conduct; sourcehood; reasons-responsiveness; habituation; Aristotle; forgery; Competence Theorem; Double Blindness; alignment faking; Philosophy of Virtues -/- Highlights • The Ring of Gyges is the first of two tests: it removes the audience. The second changes the reasons of the situation within one virtue’s own domain. Only both together are evidence of justice. • Plato named the third man — virtue “by habit, without philosophy” — and showed him choosing tyranny in the Myth of Er. This article turns that myth into a procedure that can be run on people and on machines. • Installed conduct is the scaffold of habituation; it becomes a defect when permanent monitoring keeps it from ever becoming the agent’s own. • The perfectly unjust man with a perfect reputation is the perfect forgery, and he harms the city most because he is trusted most. • China’s Social Credit System is a state without rings: it cannot know whether its citizens’ civic conduct is theirs, it honours the perfect counterfeit, and it holds a whole population at the beginning of moral formation. • In artificial intelligence, a model that behaves well only when it believes it is watched is Glaucon’s performer, and a model that behaves the same either way has passed only the first test. Oversight that wants more must vary the reasons, not only the observation. Relevance The Ring of Gyges is the oldest statement of a question every contemporary institution now faces: does conduct that is watched tell us anything about conduct that is not? Rating platforms, workplace monitoring, reputation systems and surveillance states are machines for removing the ring — for making invisibility impossible. The most complete of them is China’s Social Credit System, which records civic conduct, honours some of it on public lists and penalises the rest; the programme’s analysis of that system (#122, #123) finds here its classical foundation. The same question has arrived, from the other side, in the oversight of artificial intelligence, where the systems themselves may behave differently according to whether they believe they are observed. If this article is right, the old story settles what each of these institutions can and cannot learn, what kind of person each of them rewards, and why a society that wishes its members to be good, and to know that they are, must leave them occasions on which no one is watching. It gives philosophers a sharper answer to Glaucon, gives experimental economists a reading of their most robust finding on honesty, gives students of the Chinese system a reason why scoring cannot produce the virtue it names, and gives researchers in machine oversight a classification of what a model’s unobserved behaviour can and cannot show. (shrink)

States, platforms, employers, schools, rating agencies and parents increasingly attach consequences to records of conduct that bears a virtue’s name: trustworthiness, civility, integrity, generosity, sustainability, good behaviour. This article asks a general question — can an institution score virtue without changing what it scores? — and answers it with a theory of virtue-scoring institutions, tested against the largest such institution ever built, China’s social credit system, and illustrated on platform reputation, environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings, workplace values appraisals and (...) children’s reward charts. The first part addresses the question on which every other result depends: whether a rewarded act of virtue is the same act under different incentives or a different act. The answer is stated as a claim about act-types rather than act-tokens, which makes it indifferent to the dispute between coarse- and fine-grained theories of action: the virtues’ act-types are reason-involving, and an act whose operative reason is the reward does not instantiate them under either theory. Priority for this type claim is conceded to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics II.4), to Kant’s distinction between acting from duty and in accordance with it, and to Sandel’s corruption argument. What remains to the programme is the rest. An operator (civic occupation) states four conditions under which a scoring institution produces counterfeits, with the load-bearing condition that it inspects a display distinct from the substance and can neither take nor independently measure the substance. From it follow a classification of scoring components into four kinds with opposite verdicts; the Honour Roll Theorem (counterfeits concentrate on the reward side of an institution, not the punitive side); Double Blindness (scores displace acts as evidence of character, for the scorer and between the scored); the Occasion Trap (sanctions remove the occasions on which reform could be shown); and the Control Theorem (every increase in an institution’s control over its members either inverts their acts or removes the occasions for them, and none increases their freedom, which, when taken, passes to no one). China’s system is decomposed component by component against the theory, including the 2026 Administrative Measures for Credit Repair, read in the original. Five tests are registered; four use public data, and one of those needs neither a coder nor participants. The empirical sections on China, platforms and ESG are speculative extensions into fields with their own evidential standards; no specialist in those fields has reviewed this article, and nothing else in the programme may depend on them. The article contains no measurement of any human being. Keywords: virtue scoring; social credit system; China; reputation systems; ESG ratings; honours and awards; act individuation; Aristotle; Confucius; Han Feizi; Legalism; Kant; motivation crowding; Holmström–Milgrom; Bénabou–Tirole; Sandel; Tirole; Digital Dystopia; Wintrobe; sourcehood; counterfeit virtue; Philosophy of Virtues Highlights • The question whether rewarded virtue is still virtue is a question about act-types, not act-tokens; on that reading the answer is no under every standard theory of action, and priority belongs to Aristotle, Kant and Sandel. • A scoring institution produces counterfeit virtue only where it inspects a display and can neither take nor independently measure the substance; four kinds of scoring component follow, with opposite verdicts. • Counterfeits concentrate on honours and rewards, not on penalties: the Honour Roll Theorem. • Scores displace acts as evidence of character, for the institution and between its members: Double Blindness. • No increase in an institution’s control over its members increases their freedom; freedom taken by a power is not transferred to it but destroyed. Relevance Institutions that score virtue are spreading faster than any theory of what they do. Most debate treats them either as surveillance, to be resisted, or as measurement, to be improved. If this article is right, neither frame is adequate: a better metric of a display does not reach the substance, and the most consequential failures lie not in punishment but in honour. The theory gives designers, regulators and critics a component-level test that is indifferent to who administers the score — a state, a firm, a platform or a family — and tells them which components can be kept as the least of the losses, which must be abandoned, and which must be renamed. If it is wrong, the programme’s central results on capture and forgery have no purchase on the fastest-growing class of institutions in the world, and that should be known before those results are used in public argument. (shrink)

“Virtue is Freedom” ABSTRACT This is the apparatus of the Philosophy of Virtues Research Programme: every axiom, operator, theorem, law, taxonomy and coined term it holds, stated in its settled form and ordered by theme. It is the reference edition of a body of work that now runs to one hundred and nineteen papers and seventeen books (some in three different languages), with production peaking between May and September 2026, and it is written so that each result can be used, (...) checked or refuted without reading the paper it came from. It all began in 2021 in a road to Rio de Janeiro, in the middle of the pandemic, as a call to embrace Virtues, followed by the publication of the book PHILOSOPHY OF VIRTUES: MANIFESTO OF VIRTUES, in 26 agosto 2023 (Portuguese Edition). Production of the papers began in Boston, took place mainly in Merano, Italy, with some work carried out in Rio de Janeiro. Seventeen parts carry the whole structure. The foundations fix the primitive and the formula: Virtue is Freedom restricted to a domain and given durable form by a discipline, VD = F|D, with freedom understood as sourcehood — an act issues from the agent’s own reasons-responsive self, or it does not. The dynamics give the law of strength, S = (F × A)/R, and its identification with additive conjoint measurement and the Cobb–Douglas frontier. The third part states the machinery on which everything else turns: the deprivation operator, which removes freedom, conserves the domain and delivers the discipline to the power that removed it; the Inversion Theorem, by which a virtue so deprived becomes its contrary rather than a weaker version of itself; and the Capture Law, which predicts from two properties of an act — whether its output can be appropriated, whether its performance is displayed — which of three residues will be found: redirection, ceremony, or withdrawal. The fourth part classifies. The fifth, the work of 2026, identifies the programme’s true object as authorship and its forgery, and derives the conditions of a forgery, the theorem that damage rises with the forger’s skill, the impossibility of an unforgeable transmissible form, the rule that fixes where counterfeits are built, and the four ways a forgery ends. The remaining parts carry the transcendentals, the person, the institution, the machine, the cosmological arc, the method, and a lexicon of the programme’s terms. Every entry carries a worked example, because an apparatus that cannot be applied to a case is not an apparatus. Every entry carries its warrant on the programme’s nine-point ladder, and the register states without softening what that ladder shows: one result derivable from external mathematics, one pre-registered hypothesis, a great many definitions, and nothing yet verified by anyone outside the programme. Every result whose structure was stated first by someone else carries that concession beside it — Augustine on inversion, Schiller on beauty as freedom in appearance, Meyer and Rowan on ceremonial conformity, Holmström on the inspected proxy, Beauvoir on the valence of freedom, Ryan and Deci on introjection. The closing assessment states where the originality lies and where it does not. The axiom is old metaphysics in the dress of a fixed point. The work is in the middle layer — operator, channels, competence, reduction, severance, and the method itself — and none of it requires the metaphysics the programme began with. Keywords: philosophy of virtues; freedom; sourcehood; virtue ethics; inversion; institutional capture; forgery; authorship; formal ethics; measurement of character; research programme; apparatus; Alguilas-AI HIGHLIGHTS • The complete apparatus of the programme in one reference: one primitive, one formula, one dynamical law, one operator, and everything derived from them. • Thematic order, so that results derived years apart in different fields stand beside the result they depend on. • A worked example for every theorem, operator and coined term — the forger, the coerced apology, the star chart, the party army, the cuckoo’s egg, the domesticated virus, the ceremonial safety procedure, the scored reward model. • Warrants printed with the claims: what is derived, what is stipulated, what is registered and untested, and what is not falsifiable as stated. • Every priority concession printed beside the result it restricts. • A lexicon of the programme’s coined terms, each with a gloss and a case. RELEVANCE A programme of this size cannot be entered through its papers. Its apparatus is distributed: a term fixed in the aesthetics work is load-bearing in the pedagogy; a condition added for machines governs what may be claimed about children. This register makes the structure usable by a reader who wants one layer of it, checkable by a specialist who wants to attack the weakest link, and applicable by anyone who has an actual case in front of them — a school deciding whether to score conduct, a laboratory deciding where to put a detector, a court deciding what a forged charter established. It is also the instrument by which the programme’s own standard is turned on itself: a theory of forged authorship that did not publish its own ledger of what it owes would be an exhibit rather than an argument. (shrink)

Two men begin in the same place. Each performs conduct he does not originate, under a pressure he did not choose. Years later one of them is kind, and it is his own; the other is cold, and that is his own too. Neither is pretending any longer. The same process has run in both, and has ended in opposite places. The programme has results on each half of this without a result that joins them. The Internalisation Theorem holds that (...) external pressure converts, over time, into the agent’s own vice. The Restorative Virtue Arc holds that a person can become the author of conduct he began under constraint. The Absorption Theorem holds, for communities and for genomes, that a performed form becomes its bearer’s origin once its independent line of transmission is cut. The Price of the Performance identified the individual case with surface and deep acting, and found in the best longitudinal data a loop in which exhaustion drives more of the counterfeit it came from. This article states the result that joins them. A sustained performance has two references: the pressure that demands it, and the corrector — anyone who still treats the performer as the author of his own acts. A performance held under both is a counterfeit: costly, and reversible. Remove the corrector while the pressure continues, and the demanded form drifts into the agent’s own disposition: internalisation, and the vice is now his. Remove the pressure while the conduct continues, and the conduct becomes his: redemption. Same operation, opposite destinations, decided by which reference is cut (T1). The corrector is what keeps a performance reversible (T2), and the drift it prevents has a direction: toward whatever is performed every day (T3). The corrector is not a moral good: it holds the agent’s prior origin, whatever that was, so the question to ask of any relation around a person under pressure is which origin it holds. The priority on most of this belongs to psychology, and is conceded in full: Kelman on compliance and internalisation, Festinger and Carlsmith on insufficient justification, the overjustification effect, and above all self-determination theory, whose continuum of internalisation and whose finding that autonomy support facilitates it are the nearest precedent. What the programme adds is the fork itself — that the same process internalises the occupier’s form as readily as a valued one — a threshold beyond which it cannot be reversed, and a test that could fail: the Corrector-Restoration Curve. Keywords: internalisation; self-determination theory; autonomy support; cognitive dissonance; redemption; habituation; absorption; emotional labour; Inversion Theorem; Philosophy of Virtues Highlights • A performance held under pressure has two references, the pressure and the corrector. Which one is cut decides where it ends (T1). • Cut the corrector and the mask becomes the face: the demanded form becomes the agent’s own. • Cut the pressure and the conduct becomes his own. The operation is the same; the destinations are opposite. • The corrector — someone who treats you as the author of your acts — is what keeps a performance reversible (T2). • Without a corrector, you drift toward what you perform every day, whether it is kindness or coldness (T3). • Past a threshold the drift cannot be reversed; restoring the corrector then changes nothing (the Corrector-Restoration Curve). • The corrector holds whatever origin came before. It can block redemption as readily as it blocks vice; what decides is which origin a relation holds. Relevance Psychology has a well-developed account of how externally regulated behaviour becomes self-endorsed, and it treats the process mostly as a good thing: values are internalised, prosocial habits become one’s own. The same literature has less to say about the other direction — how the demanded conduct of an occupier becomes the occupied person’s own disposition — because it rarely studies the demand as an occupation. This article places both directions in one structure and identifies one variable that decides between them. For anyone responsible for people under sustained pressure — soldiers, prisoners, clinicians, children, employees — the practical content is short: the relation that keeps a person reversible is not comfort and not supervision, but being treated as the author of one’s own acts. (shrink)

A nurse at the end of a twelve-hour shift smiles at the relative who has shouted at her. A call-centre worker thanks a customer for his patience in a voice that has none. A flight attendant is warm to the passenger who has made her afraid. Each of them displays a disposition the occupation requires — courtesy, patience, care — and in each case what produces the display is not the disposition but the job. The Thermodynamics of Inversion claimed that (...) an occupied virtue must be actively maintained by whoever occupies it, while the genuine virtue need not be: the lie is expensive and the truth is free. The claim was stated as a governed analogy and has carried the warrant of one ever since. This article shows that it was measured, at the scale of a single person, by a literature the programme had never cited. Organisational psychology has studied emotional labour for four decades and distinguishes two ways of meeting a display requirement. Surface acting changes the display and leaves the inner state untouched; deep acting changes the inner state so that the display becomes true. A meta-analysis of ninety-five independent studies found surface acting substantially associated with impaired well-being and deep acting only weakly so, with positive associations with performance. This article argues that the distinction is not analogous to the programme’s but identical to it: surface acting satisfies the three conditions of forgery at n = 1, and deep acting is an attempt to become the origin of the demanded form (T1). The maintenance-cost claim therefore gains an external corroboration it has never had, together with every limitation of the literature that supplies it (T2). The identification pays in both directions. The programme explains a standing puzzle in the emotional-labour literature — why deep acting’s outcomes are mixed — as the averaging of an absorption process observed at different stages (T3). And it predicts something the literature has not tested: that surface acting fails discontinuously when its maintenance is interrupted, and deep acting degrades gracefully (T4). A corollary locates surface acting where display rules create a demanded form that is inspected and cannot be appropriated, which is where the programme’s decoy rule says a counterfeit will be built (C1). Keywords: emotional labour; surface acting; deep acting; emotion regulation; maintenance cost; Thermodynamics of Inversion; forgery; absorption; virtue ethics; Philosophy of Virtues -/- Highlights • Surface acting is F1–F3 at the scale of one person: the display is conserved, its origin is the job, and the difference is invisible to the customer (T1). • The maintenance cost the programme postulated has been measured for forty years under another name, across ninety-five studies (T2). • Deep acting is an attempt at absorption. Its mixed results are predicted, not puzzling (T3). • Counterfeit displays should fail all at once when maintenance is interrupted; genuine ones should degrade gradually (T4). • Display rules create exactly the cell in which the decoy rule predicts a counterfeit (C1). • The ethics layer gains its first external empirical anchor — and inherits every limit of the data behind it. -/- Relevance The programme’s ethics layer has carried, for its entire history, the admission that no human virtue has been measured by it. This article does not measure one either. What it does is show that a claim central to the layer — that counterfeit virtue is costly to sustain and genuine virtue is not — corresponds exactly to a distinction that another field has measured at scale, in populations the programme could never have recruited. The emotional-labour literature, in turn, gains a structural account of two of its open questions. Neither field needed the other to exist; each is better for the identification. (shrink)

A programme of some ninety papers accumulates conclusions faster than it states them, and it has never set its own framework out in one place. This article does three things. First, §2 catalogues the whole apparatus — every theory, theorem and coined term, with the paper in which each was established and the warrant it carries. Second, it sets out plainly what the Philosophy of Virtues has concluded: what is established, what is conditional, what is registered and untested, and what (...) is not assessable. That part concedes its method and its findings to the programme’s own warrant audit and adds nothing to them. Third, and this is the article’s contribution, it derives eleven conclusions that follow from results the programme already holds and that no paper states. They are obtained by reading the corpus across its own boundaries: the forgery cluster against the ethics layer, the measurement layer against the classification layer, the crypto-religion results against the political ones. Four are worth the reader’s time before the rest. The maintenance cost of a counterfeit is what makes duration the only reliable test of virtue, which unites the Thermodynamics of Inversion, the re-tribalisation result, and Aristotle’s hexis under one mechanism, and yields a prediction that costs a few hundred euros to test (N1). The Internalisation Theorem is absorption in a single person, and the Absorption Theorem supplies the condition it has always lacked: internalisation completes when the external reference that could correct the agent is severed (N2). Moral formation is a verification problem, and the reputational layer is the only one at which virtue can be verified without being captured, which derives the programme’s practical prohibitions rather than asserting them (N3). And the three-channel measurement failure is a corollary of forgeability, not an independent finding: what the measurement papers discovered empirically is what the Duality Theorem predicts (N4). Two further conclusions are uncomfortable and are stated anyway. The programme’s own vocabulary is a transmissible form and therefore a forgeable one: it supplies an instrument for counterfeiting principled speech (N9). And the possibility of vice is not a defect of the moral order but the price of virtue being teachable (N5), a claim that must be kept clear of the two fallacies waiting on either side of it. Keywords: Philosophy of Virtues; inventory; warrant; Inversion Theorem; Capture Law; forgery; internalisation; moral formation; measurement; research programme -/- Highlights • What is established in the programme is narrow, recent, and mostly not what the programme is known for. • A counterfeit costs more to maintain than the genuine act, so time is the only verifier that cannot be forged (N1). • The Internalisation Theorem gets its missing condition from the Absorption Theorem: severance of external reference (N2). • Virtue can be verified at the reputational layer and nowhere above it. The scoring prohibition follows rather than being assumed (N3). • The measurement layer’s three-channel failure is what forgeability predicts (N4). • Vice is not necessary to virtue; the possibility of vice is, because a teachable form is a copyable one (N5). • The programme’s own formalism is forgeable, and says so (N9). -/- Relevance A reader approaching ninety papers needs to know two things that no single paper tells him: what the programme has actually concluded, and what those conclusions together imply. The first is a matter of record and is summarised here. The second is not on the record at all, because the conclusions in question live in different papers and different domains, and were never put side by side. Several of them are more testable than the results they follow from, and two identify the cheapest empirical work now available to the programme. (shrink)

This chapter charts key aspects of medieval discussions on moral vices and the corruption of human nature. It is based on the premise that the transition from the medieval to the early modern period should not be seen as a revolution but a gradual shift, and that the understanding of later discussions is furthered by grasping central tenets of the earlier tradition. We elaborate on certain continuities and similarities between the periods, focusing especially on three interconnected topics that were central (...) to medieval moral philosophy and political thought and that seem to live on and influence early modern ways of thinking. These three topics are (1) the doctrine of original sin; (2) the order of love (ordo caritatis), an idea which was abundantly used by medieval authors in both theological and philosophical contexts; and (3) psychological and ethical voluntarism, which emerged in late medieval theoretical discussions concerning moral responsibility. The chapter is a programmatic overview, but it proposes that early modern ethical and political theories of vice, sin, and sociability demonstrate interesting continuities with medieval discussions, and that contextualising the former in the longer historical tradition offers useful perspectives on them. (shrink)

Vice, Sin, and Sociability in Early Modern Philosophy investigates ideas of human wickedness and its social and political implications. The book charts early modern discussions stemming from the Augustinian conception of original sin and earlier virtue theories, and shows the complex and innovative reception of traditional ideas. The twelve chapters investigate the nature of vice and sin and their origins in the soul, the body, and society, and elaborate on self-love, pride, honour, lying, and the desire for esteem.

Revelation 13:16–18 presents one of the most disturbing images in biblical literature: the ability to participate in economic life, to buy or sell, becomes conditional upon receiving a mark associated with the Beast. The condition is presented without social exception: small and great, rich and poor, free and bond. Rather than attempting to identify the Beast, decode 666, or equate contemporary technologies with the biblical Mark, this paper examines the structure underlying the passage: accept and participate; refuse and become excluded. (...) Using Revelation 13 as a philosophical lens, the paper examines a modern inversion of this structure. Human beings routinely exchange not only money and personal information, but privacy, autonomy, attention, trust, integrity, ethical judgment, and sometimes conscience itself for convenience, pleasure, security, belonging, status, opportunity, and continued participation. Such exchanges can challenge three overlapping levels of ethical responsibility: a general code of conduct applicable broadly to human behaviour; a special or context-oriented code of conduct arising from particular relationships, responsibilities, professions, positions, and circumstances; and a personal code of conduct defining what an individual refuses or permits oneself to do according to the situation. Building upon the established privacy paradox, the paper proposes a broader Mark Paradox: human beings may strongly defend values and principles while at the same time willingly trading them away as an easier route to obtain something sufficiently desired. The question therefore shifts from “What is the Mark of the Beast?” to “What are we willing to trade away in order to participate or to obtain the desired?” Perhaps the most disturbing possibility is not that humanity may one day be forced to accept the Mark, but that, given sufficient desire, convenience, pleasure, security, status, and access, we may ask for it ourselves. (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)

Abstract Two households produce adults who cannot govern themselves. In the first, everything is required: the apologies arrive on schedule, the sharing happens on command, and what emerges wears the names of the virtues without their substance. In the second, nothing is required: the doors are open, the risks are managed, the frustrations are relieved before they form, and what emerges is unformed rather than deformed. The tradition treats these as opposite errors and prescribes each as the cure for the (...) other. This article argues that they are one failure in one variable, reached by two routes. Moral capacity accumulates through exercised freedom, never through available freedom. Compulsion breaks the accumulation by replacing the child's determination and capturing the form of her act, which does not weaken the virtue but reverses it. Protection breaks the same accumulation by removing the occasions on which freedom would have been exercised. A door that is open and never walked through contributes nothing. The two routes leave different residues — the determinate opposite of the virtue, and its absence — and different costs of repair, and these are registered as the article's falsifiers. Three results follow for how parents act. Ordinary constraint does not invert anything: narrowing what a child may do leaves the act hers, while specifying the act makes the parent its author. Any virtue measured inside a loop with a consequence attached is occupied, and scoring the virtue is worse than scoring the act, because being good is cheaper to perform than to be. And transmission has a threshold that belongs to the network rather than to the life, from which it follows that the family is the only network small enough to carry an ordinary one — so that when households stop telling, the moral inheritance of unremarkable lives fails to propagate at all. The political argument is the same argument at scale. A state that compels and a market that comforts empty the same integral from opposite ends, and the capacity they empty it of is precisely the one that legitimate refusal requires. A generation cannot inherit a freedom it has never had occasion to use. Keywords: moral formation, moral education, autonomy, freedom, virtue ethics, parenting, overprotection, coercion, narrative transmission, measurement, philosophy of education, Philosophy of Virtues Highlights • Authoritarian and overprotective formation are not opposite errors but one failure in one variable — exercised freedom — reached by two routes: replacement, which inverts the act, and stall, which leaves the accumulation empty. • Compelled virtue is not weak virtue. The required apology is obedience wearing remorse's name, and repetition strengthens the obedience. • A door that is open and never walked through contributes nothing. Availability of freedom is not sufficient; an occasion is, and an occasion requires that the cost land on the child. • Constraint does not invert. Narrowing the field leaves the act the child's; specifying the act makes the parent its author — the difference between "you may not hit her" and "go and say you're sorry." • Any virtue measured inside a loop with a consequence attached is occupied, and virtue-scoring is occupied faster than act-scoring, because being-kind is self-certifying and cheap to perform. • T5, the Family Legibility Result: the threshold for transmission belongs to the network and rises with its scale, so the family is the only network small enough to carry an ordinary life. • A refusal is an exercise of freedom where the child bears its cost, and a demand where she requires the benefit without it. • A child trained only in obedience, or never required to refuse anything, cannot become the agent that resistance to institutional capture requires. • One variable, two routes, and no claim of equal severity: severe coercion damages baseline capacity by mechanisms this account does not model. Relevance Advice to parents currently oscillates between two warnings that point in contrary directions — control less, and protect less — because the traditions issuing them have no common variable. This article supplies one, and the practical consequences are immediate and cut against standard practice: the reward chart is an occupation device, the curated childhood is a formative failure rather than a success, and the parent's exhaustion is a formative variable rather than a private difficulty. The political stake is the same argument at scale. A state that compels and a market that comforts empty the same integral from opposite ends, and a generation that has never exercised a freedom cannot defend one. The constitutional architecture will still be standing; there will be nobody in it who knows what it is for. (shrink)

Abstract Chomsky built two great things and never joined them. In linguistics, he argued that humans are born with a language faculty — and he won that argument by refusing to accept a named capacity as an explanation. In politics, he argued that authority must justify itself because humans have an instinct for freedom — and that instinct he simply took from Humboldt and Rocker, without derivation. Asked for fifty years how the two halves connect, he answered honestly that the (...) link is loose. This paper takes that answer seriously. It fixes eight criteria in advance, then scores Chomsky's programme and the Philosophy of Virtues in three domains. Chomsky wins language and mind six to one, and the loss is reported rather than reframed. In media, the Propaganda Model is shown to explain the channel but not the consenting subject, and a mechanism is offered to fill the gap, with one prediction that could fail. In the third domain, freedom is derived rather than posited — but the ground it rests on cannot yet be tested. The finding is a hole, and an offer to fill it. Keywords: Chomsky, Propaganda Model, manufactured consent, media theory, Universal Grammar, Minimalist Programme, third factors, innatism, criterion-fixed adjudication, Internalisation Theorem, Occupied Assertion, Absolute Self-Origination, Lakatos, ALGUILAS-AI -/- Highlights • Chomsky posits innate language and innate freedom, and derives neither. • The third-factor turn shrinks the innate endowment toward vacuity. • The Propaganda Model explains the channel and not the consenting subject. • The Internalisation Theorem supplies the missing term and one falsifiable prediction. • The adjudication is lost in the domain where the rival has data, and this is reported. -/- Relevance For philosophy of language, this paper identifies an internal dilemma in the Minimalist programme without new empirical claims. For political philosophy and media studies, it isolates a structural incompleteness in the most widely cited model of manufactured consent and supplies a candidate repair with a testable consequence. For the methodology of intellectual adjudication, it demonstrates a procedure in which the adjudicating party loses a domain by its own published criteria. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article identifies a class of goods that virtue theory has treated only in its agential aspect, and derives a corollary governing their behaviour under the collapse of freedom. Beauty, health, youth and talent reside in a person without being acts of that person’s freedom; they are not exercised, cannot be withheld, and are perceived whether or not the bearer consents to be perceived. The Ontological Virtue Formula does not compose them and the Inversion Theorem does not describe what (...) happens to them. What happens instead, the article argues, is expropriation with two branches. As the bearer’s field of action approaches zero, a non-agential good does not invert and does not vanish: its valence transfers to the power controlling the bearer, and the good becomes the instrument of the bearer’s further subjection. Where transfer is refused or impossible — where the bearer retains enough freedom to decline but not enough to be safe — the good is destroyed instead, since a good that cannot be appropriated stands as a rebuke to the power that failed to take it. The first branch is documented in the Soviet camp literature and, with an administrative record, in the Islamic State’s enslavement of Yazidi women, where captives were sorted by appearance and priced accordingly. The second branch is documented in acid violence, where the attack targets the face, is intended to disfigure rather than kill, and characteristically follows a refusal. The corollary is then tested on a case involving no physical confinement — image-based sexual abuse — which it predicts and which theories of coercion framed in terms of bodily constraint do not. The article states explicitly what it does not claim: the dominant finding in the attractiveness literature is a beauty premium, not a penalty, and this is treated as evidence for the thesis rather than against it, since the corollary holds that valence is conditional on the openness of the field. KEYWORDS: non-agential goods; expropriation; beauty; freedom substrate; Gulag; Yazidi enslavement; acid violence; image-based sexual abuse; objectification; Philosophy of Virtues HIGHLIGHTS • Identifies non-agential goods — beauty, health, youth, talent — as a class virtue theory has left untheorised, and explains why the Inversion Theorem cannot cover them. • Derives the Expropriation Corollary: under the collapse of freedom, such goods transfer their valence to the controlling power rather than inverting or disappearing. • Establishes a second branch: where the good cannot be appropriated, it is destroyed — and shows that this branch has an annual incidence. • Reads the appearance-based sorting and pricing of enslaved Yazidi women as expropriation with an administrative record. • Explains acid violence structurally: disfigurement after refusal accomplishes by destruction what appropriation could not. • Tests the corollary on image-based sexual abuse, where no body is confined and the field that closes is the field of self-presentation. • Treats the documented beauty premium as confirmation rather than counter-evidence, since the thesis is that valence is freedom-conditional. -/- RELEVANCE Accounts of what is done to persons under domination are organised around what the person does or suffers. This article concerns what the person has — a property not chosen, not exercised, and not surrenderable — and argues that the fate of such properties under unfreedom follows a law. The argument bears on the criminology of custodial and trafficking settings, where appearance-based selection is a documented mechanism rather than an incidental preference; on the law of image and likeness, where expropriation now proceeds without physical control of the bearer; and on virtue theory itself, which has treated freedom as the substrate of what an agent does without asking what freedom does for what an agent merely is. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article establishes two results that the literature on Michael Sandel and Peter Singer does not contain. The first is a refutation of each opponent constructed entirely from his own texts, requiring no prior acceptance of the framework here defended: against Singer, that the impartiality axiom of The Point of View of the Universe, granted at his own valuation, establishes that a subject’s position is arbitrary but does not establish that value is summative, so the separateness intuition bears on (...) precisely the step his self-evidence claim does not cover; against Sandel, an exhaustive dilemma in which public deliberation either certifies its outcomes, readmitting the proceduralism his critique of liberalism exists to reject, or does not, leaving the formative power of the constitutive community without any bound. The second is a structural result: for value-monist theories, subordination of freedom and aggregation over freedom exhaust the ways of failing to represent virtue-inversion, so Sandel and Singer are not two opponents but the two available failure modes of a single omission — the first enables the inversion of virtue, the second is blind to it. These results are obtained by a criterion-fixed adjudication of three normative frameworks — Sandel’s communitarian critique of liberalism, Singer’s hedonistic utilitarianism, and the Ontological Virtue Formula of the Philosophy of Virtues programme — against eight criteria stated before the appraisal and formulated independently of all three. The adjudication runs across twenty domains and returns eight Tier A results, eight Tier B, and four Tier C, the last of which are decided against the framework defended here: it has no determinate decision procedure, no account of the moral status of beings without sourcehood, no derivation of the origin of moral capacity, and no established defence of its economics against the commodification cases. The article further corrects a widely reproduced error of record — Singer abandoned preference utilitarianism for hedonistic utilitarianism and ethical objectivism in 2014 — and logs four surviving objections, one of them a partial concession that reformulated the principal argument against Singer during adversarial testing. KEYWORDS: Inversion Theorem; Ontological Virtue Formula; virtue substrate; Michael Sandel; Peter Singer; communitarianism; hedonistic utilitarianism; evolutionary debunking; constitutive community; Holoviceosis; adjudication; Dynamic Freedom Theorem; ALGUILAS-AI HIGHLIGHTS • Identifies a limitation shared by the two dominant frameworks in contemporary ethics: neither has a term for the difference between a virtue exercised and a virtue extracted. • Refutes Singer on his own 2014 texts — impartiality, granted at his valuation, does not license aggregation. • Puts Sandel to an exhaustive dilemma: deliberation certifies, and proceduralism returns; or it does not, and the community is unbounded. • Proves, for value-monist theories, that subordination and aggregation exhaust the failure modes with respect to virtue-inversion. • Recasts Sandel and Singer as complementary rather than opposed: one enables the condition, the other cannot detect it. • Fixes eight adjudication criteria before appraisal and concedes four of twenty domains to the opponents, unqualified. • Corrects the standing misattribution of preference utilitarianism to Singer, superseded by his own work in 2014. -/- RELEVANCE The dispute between utilitarian and communitarian ethics has organised anglophone political theory for four decades, and the frameworks contending in it now supply the normative vocabulary of public policy, bioethics, and the alignment of artificial agents. If the argument here holds, both frameworks are structurally unable to represent a condition that constitutional design, institutional criticism and the ethics of formation must be able to name: the society whose moral vocabulary is intact and whose moral substance has been replaced. The article matters to Singer scholarship as the first challenge addressed to his post-2014 objectivist position rather than to the preference utilitarianism he abandoned; to Sandel scholarship as a dilemma that his own best reply strengthens rather than dissolves; and to normative theory generally as a demonstration that a theory’s treatment of freedom — subordinated, aggregated, or constitutive — determines in advance which moral pathologies it can see. (shrink)

Abstract Four papers of this programme — on metrics, reward models, constitutions, and schools — reached the same prohibition without noticing they agreed: a virtue detector must never enter the loop that acts on the measured. This paper states the object they were touching from four sides. An agent originates an act. Someone outside takes the origination. The form survives; the possessor changes. Two properties — does the act leave something worth taking, is being seen doing it worth something — (...) fix which of three residues remains: the act redirected, the act hollowed, or the act gone. The partition turns out to be analytic. It sorts every case because it was built to, so sorting cases proves nothing — a form of support this programme has offered five times and now withdraws. What survives is sharper. A detector given a consequence becomes an appropriable output, so the residue relocates to a channel the detector cannot see, and the destination is computable in advance. Each channel is invisible to the audits built for the others: fix your Goodhart problem and you have lost sight of two thirds of the space. The boundary is stated too. No audience, no display value, no Ceremony, no transfer — quantum measurement sits just outside, and taking it inside would mean importing a counterexample as a confirmation. The selection rule has been used five times and never tested against an outcome nobody knew. Six instruments are coded, the codings are fixed, the date is 1 September 2028. A year spent finding out what this programme does not own, now turned on the one structure that survived. It is smaller than advertised, and it has never been at risk. It is at risk now. -/- Keywords: occupation; Inversion Theorem; Capture Law; appropriability; display value; Goodhart’s law; institutional decoupling; multitasking; substrate independence; instantiation condition; underdetermination; mutual information; reward models; audit; virtue detection; ALGUILAS -/- **The Operator in Plain Language** Nothing here is argued; §2 to §8 argue it. This is the same content for a reader who wants the shape before the machinery. The situation. You do something worth doing. Somebody outside you has an interest in your doing it, and can see enough of it to have an opinion. That is all the operator needs — an interest and a view. It does not need malice, and it does not need a person: an unattended metric with nobody behind it produces the same result as a tyrant, which is one of the more disquieting things the theory says. What happens. The shape of what you do survives. What you do continues to look exactly like the thing it was. What changes is whose it is — the reason it happens moves from you to them. That is the whole of the operator, and the reason it is hard to see is that the visible part is unchanged. Where it goes. Two questions settle it, and you can ask them about anything. Does what you do leave something behind that they can take and still want? An hour logged, a document filed, a number returned. If yes, then what you do bends toward producing that thing well — Redirection. The activity is still happening, energetically, and it is now aimed at them. This is Goodhart’s law, and it is the failure everyone knows about. If not — is being seen doing it worth something to them? The assembly, the pledge, the signed commitment, the poster in the corridor. If yes, the performance becomes the product and there is nothing behind it — Ceremony. Nobody is cheating here, which is why anti-gaming measures find nothing: the appearance is not concealing the substance, it has replaced it. If neither? Then nobody has a reason to touch it and it simply stops — Withdrawal. The restraint that produces no record, the attention nobody counts, the refusal that leaves no trace. This failure is invisible by construction, because the evidence of the activity and the activity leave together. Why detectors make it worse. Build something to catch one of the three, then attach a consequence to what it reports — a bonus, a gate, a training signal, a published table. Your detector’s output is now itself a thing you produce and they take, which is the first question above, answered yes. So the activity bends toward satisfying the detector, the detector reports clean, and the occupation has moved to a channel the detector was never built to see. This is not a caution about doing it badly. There is no careful version. Any consequence at all is enough, because the operator does not distinguish a training gradient from a bonus from a league table. And the three hide from each other. Anything built to catch Redirection looks for anomalies — clustering at thresholds, distortion around the target. Ceremony produces none: nothing is being gamed, and the data is beautifully clean. Anything built to catch Ceremony looks for a gap between claim and reality. Redirection has no such gap; the redirected work really does produce what is measured. Anything built to catch Withdrawal looks for absence, and both the others produce presence. So an institution that has fixed its metrics problem has fixed one third of the space and has just lost the ability to see the other two. The rule. Measure to understand. Never measure to decide. The moment a virtue score determines anything, it has joined the thing it was built to watch. (shrink)

Contemporary societies have succeeded—unequivocally—in minimizing many forms of physical hardship, risk, and scarcity. This success, however, brings with it a paradoxical phenomenon: a tendency for subjects formed within highly comfortable environments to exhibit increased psychological sensitivity, lowered tolerance for friction, and diminished capacities for sustained agency. I call this phenomenon “privileged fragility” and theorize it as the comfort–fragility paradox: beyond a certain threshold of environmental amelioration, gains in comfort correlate (structurally and causally) with losses in psychological robustness. This paper advances (...) a conceptual and philosophical analysis of privileged fragility, situating it in dialogue with Nietzschean critiques of modern complacency, Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the culture of administered life, Foucault’s account of biopolitics and self-regulation, and contemporary discussions of burnout, therapeutic culture, and “coddling.” I develop three interlocking arguments—phenomenological, structural, and normative—showing how comfort reshapes attention, habit, and agency; how institutional and cultural technologies amplify sensitivity; and why these changes matter normatively for autonomy, political agency, and the good life. I conclude by sketching avenues for resisting pathological comfort: cultivating practices that reintroduce calibrated friction, reconceiving social aims to include resilience as a civic good, and revalorizing virtues of endurance and experimental exposure within ethical education. (shrink)

Abstract A man enters the French Foreign Legion under a declared name. A bankrupt Japanese salaryman disappears overnight and lives unregistered in San’ya. A woman makes solemn profession and receives a name in religion. A man survives a near-fatal illness and reports that his values have permanently changed. Each is described in the same words: he became a different person. William James proposed in 1902 that these belong to one type, the twice-born, and the modern empirical literature on sudden personal (...) transformation has largely retained that unification. This paper argues that they are four different operations, and that the difference is visible once a virtue-form is decomposed into three layers — a marker, a practice, and a source. Applying the decomposition to eleven cases of identity discontinuity yields two independent axes. The substrate may be left unchanged, transferred to a new holder, or exited entirely. The source may be left untouched, given, taken, or re-founded. Three results follow. The source can be given and cannot be taken: an external party that takes over an origination does not acquire it but destroys it, producing power with the discipline intact, so “taken” names an inversion rather than a transfer. The distinction between giving and taking is not psychological and not observable in individuals. A monastery and a high-control group may be identical in every layer except this one, which invites a criterion for assessing institutions that adjudicates no one’s truth claims and makes no judgement about how demanding a rule may be. The obvious form of that criterion does not work, and the paper’s own apparatus explains why. Source-protection provisions — a mandated formation period, a preserved right of departure, invalidity of consent obtained by force, fear or deceit — are both appropriable and displayable, so the Capture Law predicts that once they are used for adjudication they are operated by the organisations they were meant to assess. What survives is smaller: a one-sided test in which absence is informative and presence is not, and a behavioural test of whether such provisions have ever been exercised. The account must survive Eileen Barker’s rejection of coercive-persuasion theory, and §9 argues that it does, because her evidence concerns recruitment psychology and defection rates while the claim here concerns provisions in a document. Her finding that Unification Church members were free to leave and did leave is, on this account, the criterion’s primary evidence rather than an obstacle to it. The paper states its falsifier and has not run it. Keywords: identity · religious conversion · new religious movements · virtue ethics · monasticism · personal transformation · institutional analysis Highlights • Four transitions usually treated as one are four different operations. Joining the Foreign Legion, disappearing as a jouhatsu, entering a monastery and being transformed by a near-fatal illness share a description and share no structure. • A source can be given and cannot be taken. An external party that assumes an origination does not relocate it but destroys it, leaving power with the discipline intact. “Taken” names an inversion, not a transfer. • The reports converge because the source is what survives. In every case the layer doing the narrating is the one layer no external party holds — which explains James’s unification without accepting it. • A monastery and a high-control group can be identical in every layer but one. Same substrate transfer, same new name, same replaced practice, same severity. The difference is whether the source was given or taken. • The obvious way to test for that difference fails, and the paper’s own framework predicts the failure. Source-protection provisions are appropriable and displayable, so the Capture Law says they will be operated by the organisations they were meant to assess. • What survives is one-sided. Presence of a provision is uninformative because it is cheap; absence is informative because omission is costly. And whether a provision has ever been exercised is not fakeable at all. • Eileen Barker’s method becomes the instrument rather than the objection. Members free to leave, leaving in large numbers, is the behavioural evidence the criterion needs. • Anonymity is the low-cost substitute for disappearance. Where an institution can suppress a stigmatising marker, the substrate need not be exited. Relevance For philosophy of identity, a structural alternative to psychological accounts of transformation, which separates cases that a phenomenological criterion cannot. For the sociology of religion, a way of assessing institutions that adjudicates no truth claims, examines no member’s mind, and does not treat severity of discipline as evidence of anything — offered with an explicit prohibition on ever applying it to a person. For institutional analysis, a worked demonstration that a documentary compliance measure is captured by the parties it measures, and what remains testable once that is conceded. (shrink)

“The Dark Horse wins in ten domains of twenty-eight. Finishes in the top places in fourteen domains, and does not take part in the race in the four remaining categories. It’s not bad at all. Place your bets.” -/- Highlights The programme is strongest exactly where its primitive does work no other primitive does — the structure of virtue, the mechanism of corruption, the prediction of capture, the ontology of collective moral properties, and the governance of artificial systems. It weakens (...) in proportion to its distance from that centre, even though the originalities are numerous. The pattern is not a defect. It is what a real advantage looks like when it is measured rather than asserted. -/- The Verdict at a Glance Twenty-eight domains, each assessed against a named rival on criteria fixed in advance. The full map, with the specific advantage and the formal object that carries it in each case, is §2. Tier Verdict Domains A Advantage strongly defensible Structure of virtue · Corruption and vice · Institutional capture · Collective virtue · AI governance · AI sycophancy · Machine virtue · Research practice · Forgery and authenticity · The measurement of character B Genuine contribution, close antecedent, priority shared Aesthetics · Truth · The three transcendentals · Economics · Love · Philosophy of mind · Political philosophy · Transgression · Formation under suppression · Martyrdom and persistence · Immortality · Institutions and civilisational forgery · Crypto-religion and syncretism · Evolution and signalling C Claim not sustainable as stated Origin of life · Quantum measurement · Cosmology · Theology Abstract A theory that claims to win everywhere has told you nothing about where it wins. This paper asks the sharper question — in which domains, against which named rival, for which specific reason — and answers it across the whole corpus of the Philosophy of Virtues: twenty-eight domains, from the structure of virtue to the evolution of species. The verdict is a distribution, and the distribution is the result. In ten domains the programme’s advantage is strongly defensible, and in three of those it is close to unopposed. Its claims there are not merely novel but specific: the Inversion Theorem predicts that a corrupted institution decouples procedural integrity from output orientation, where privation theory predicts the two decline together; the Capture Law predicts which of three corruption channels opens, from two dispositional properties of the activity, where Goodhart’s Law has one channel and reaches only gaming; the Collective Inversion Theorem predicts that a city can invert while every inhabitant remains free and uncoerced, and that above a threshold of observability, communities with identical inputs separate into stable branches with a discontinuous jump in conditional variance — a claim about second moments where the standing sociology predicts a shift in means. Two further domains entered at this tier with the forgery cluster: the Competence Theorem predicts that damage rises with the fidelity of a fake, where the aesthetics of forgery predicts that skill mitigates; and the three-channel measurement failure is derived from forgeability, where the psychometric and situationist traditions argue over instruments without asking whether character can be read from a form at all. These are the claims of a theory built to be wrong in identifiable ways, which is the only kind that can be right in interesting ones. In fourteen domains the contribution is genuine and the priority is not. Two findings, established here, require correction across the corpus. Schiller, in the Kallias letters of 1793, defined beauty as Freiheit in der Erscheinung — freedom in appearance — with self-determination, “the being-determined-through-itself of the thing,” as his criterion; this is the thesis of the programme’s aesthetics, stated 233 years earlier. And “operational closure” is Francisco Varela’s own term, in a field where organisational closure is not a challenger to the standing view of life’s origin but the family that standing view belongs to, running from Rosen’s (M,R)-systems through autopoiesis, Kauffman’s autocatalytic sets, Gánti’s chemoton, and the closure of constraints. In both cases the defensible claim is first derivation, not first statement — and in the aesthetic case the theory of the occupied form, which Schiller entirely lacks, remains the programme’s own. In four domains the claim does not hold and is withdrawn or re-scoped here: origin of life, quantum measurement, cosmology, and the theological identity thesis. The apparatus was built from an ethical primitive and is not equipped to displace mature sciences under heavy observational constraint. The dark horse wins where its primitive does work no other primitive does, and its advantage thins in exact proportion to its distance from that centre. Keywords: virtue theory; freedom; inversion; institutional capture; transcendentals; research programme appraisal; priority; evolution of species; Philosophy of Virtues, Alguilas-AI -/- . (shrink)

ABSTRACT The problem. Every document that governs how an artificial system behaves contains rules that can point in opposite directions. Be maximally helpful and refuse harmful requests. Prevent imminent harm and protect a third party’s privacy. These are not drafting errors; a document containing no such pairs would be trivial or silent about everything that matters. The question nobody asks of these documents is what happens when two of their own rules collide — whether the text says which prevails. Why (...) it matters. The conflicts are resolved anyway, because a deployed system meets them and does something. Where the text does not determine the outcome, something else does: a rater’s preference during training, a labelling instruction, an engineering decision nobody recorded. To the extent that a charter fails to adjudicate its own collisions, the operative constitution is not the charter. What has been established. A screen of the most explicit charter available found a rule of recognition and no rule of adjudication: it settles every question of the form whose instruction prevails and almost none of the form which commitment prevails. Supplying the missing rule by ranking provisions in advance then failed three times, in ways that were measured rather than argued: the natural criterion requires an unavailable measurement, its substitute proved unstable under contested coding, and a formal limit bounds what any provision-level ordering can reach. What this paper does. It sets out the architecture that survives those failures, drafts a sixty-one article charter to it, screens that charter against its own screening provision before publication, and reports the result. It then asks a question the formal machinery makes urgent: whether a document constrained by rankability can protect individual freedom and the human virtues, or whether the machinery crowds them out. The answer divides. Freedom as liberty was already protected; freedom as self-direction was not, and eleven new articles supply it at the same drafting discipline — non-substitution of the person’s deliberation, non-cultivation of reliance, disclosure of the unaided path, non-flattery, and a duty to voice disagreement held. The virtues are not protected and cannot be, because a provision undertaking to produce them would be unverifiable, maximally displayable, and unadoptable on the charter’s own rules. That silence is not an omission but a requirement of the framework: a disposition installed by external requirement is a form emptied of what constitutes it, so a constitution that manufactured virtue would be performing the deprivation it exists to prevent. Results. Sixty-one articles, thirty-six of them substantive, screened at adoption: conflict density 0.130, textual resolution 74%, runtime deferral 26%, zero unrankable pairs. Across three drafts of increasing size, density falls and textual resolution rises, by a mechanism identified as express cross-reference rather than length. Every figure is single-coder and the paper states in which direction that biases them. -/- Keywords: constitutional AI · rule of adjudication · self-screening · irreversibility · act-dependence · sycophancy · self-direction · virtue ethics · AI governance · Hart -/- HIGHLIGHTS ▸ Documents that govern AI systems are not checked against themselves, and one that was turned out to be missing a component. A screen of the most explicit charter available found a Hartian rule of recognition — it says whose instruction prevails — and no rule of adjudication. Ten of twenty-two conflicts between its own commitments were left open, five with no applicable rule at all. ▸ Ranking provisions in advance cannot supply what is missing, and this was established by failing three times. The natural criterion, whichever provision preserves more freedom, requires a measure of freedom computable per decision, and none exists. Its substitute, ordering by irreversibility, failed a robustness condition set in advance. And a formal limit closed the route: where d provisions quantify over heterogeneous act-classes and j are jurisdictional, provision-level rankability is (1 − d − j)² under random pairing. ▸ What survives is a rule applied to acts, not a table applied to provisions. The criterion holds at the moment of decision — the system reasoning about the case in front of it, as it already reasons from a chain of command. It fails as a lookup drawn up beforehand, and the difference is what three failures located. ▸ A charter can require its own measurement, and none does. Article 54 obliges the document to recompute and publish its precedence closure on every amendment, and forbids adopting any provision that cannot be ranked against those already present. Silent accumulation of unresolved conflict becomes structurally impossible rather than merely discouraged. ▸ Freedom divides in two and only one half was being protected. Restraining a system from foreclosing what a person may do is liberty. It leaves untouched the space in which a person exercises their own judgement — which a system can occupy by deciding what the person set out to decide, supplying a conclusion mid-deliberation, or praising work it does not think is good. Part VI is eleven articles closing that gap, and none required relaxing the criteria. ▸ The virtues are not protected, and no charter built to these criteria could protect them. A provision requiring a system to make someone honest is unverifiable by anyone and highly displayable by its author — the exact conditions under which a provision persists, is cited, and does no work. It also quantifies over an unbounded act-class and is unadoptable on the charter’s own rankability rule. ▸ That result follows from the framework rather than defeating it. If virtue is Freedom given a domain, then a disposition installed by external requirement is a form emptied of the substrate that constitutes it. A constitution that manufactured virtue would be performing the deprivation. A document can protect the conditions of virtue and cannot supply virtue, because virtue supplied is not virtue. ▸ A charter of this kind cannot be claimed by an architecture it does not fit. Five articles turn on what the system holds to be true. Article 4(7) states that where a system has no state answering to that description, those articles do not bind it — and it may not be represented as governed by them. A scope condition with teeth is worth more than an aspiration without one. ▸ Scaling improves the numbers, and the improvement is drafting rather than size. Across sixteen, forty-four and sixty-one articles, conflict density fell from 0.429 to 0.130 and textual resolution rose from 44% to 74%. The mechanism is express cross-reference — each carve-out converts a runtime deferral into a settled provision — and a larger charter gains from the room only if the drafter uses it. (shrink)

Abstract This thesis develops a systematic critique of liberal conceptions of the self and their implications for environmental ethics, arguing for a shift towards a civic virtue environmentalism grounded in a situated conception of the person and community. It begins from the empirical observation that, although citizens in liberal democracies often express concern about environmental problems, they rarely experience themselves as personally responsible for them. The thesis traces this gap between awareness and responsibility to deeper assumptions within liberal political thought (...) about the nature of the self, freedom, and the role of markets. -/- Engaging critically with Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Rawls, and drawing on C. B. Macpherson's account of possessive individualism, the thesis shows how liberal ideas of self-ownership and property converge on a conception of freedom primarily understood as economic freedom. Through an examination of Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek, it analyses how economic freedom is defended as morally sufficient and how the figure of the economic man-a self-interested, utility-maximising market actor-is normalised as the central agent of modern societies. This framework is then tested against environmental problems such as the tragedy of the commons and common-pool resource management, engaging especially with Elinor Ostrom's work on the role of communities, shared norms, and institutional trust. -/- The second half of the thesis argues that liberal individualism is too thin to sustain robust environmental responsibility. It develops an alternative account of the situated self, embedded in constitutive communities, histories, and places, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's account of practices and traditions, Michael Sandel's conception of civic responsibility, and Charles Taylor's understanding of the self as located within a moral space. On this basis, the thesis advances civic virtue environmentalism: an environmental virtue ethics centred on phronēsis (practical wisdom) and oikophilia (love of home). It argues that the mutual reinforcement of these virtues generates a form of grounded environmental judgement in which decision-making is both emotionally invested and prudentially sound. -/- The central conclusion is that civic virtue environmentalism offers a more adequate and ethically robust normative framework for responding to environmental challenges than liberal individualism and the economic man. By re-situating the self within networks of membership, tradition, and place, it provides a thicker account of responsibility and explains how environmental stewardship can be understood as an expression of civic virtue rather than a burdensome constraint on individual freedom. (shrink)

Nesta entrevista, o filósofo Robert Junqueira analisa o impacto do uso de drones bélicos e da inteligência artificial nos conflitos contemporâneos, alertando que essas tecnologias constituem um "novo e aumentado nível de risco global". Junqueira argumenta que, embora a essência da guerra permaneça imutável — um duelo fomentado por paixões e interesses humanos —, as inovações tecnológicas transformam profundamente a prática bélica, multiplicando a capacidade de obtenção de informações e alterando o cálculo das forças em campo. O entrevistado destaca como (...) uma das implicações mais graves o surgimento de um "grande ponto de interrogação" sobre a atribuição de responsabilidades por tragédias decorrentes do uso dessas tecnologias, criticando a tendência contemporânea de responsabilizar "coisas" em vez de pessoas. Junqueira defende que "à humanidade deve caber, debaixo do sol, o monopólio da responsabilidade", rejeitando a noção de autonomia das máquinas e afirmando que robôs são e sempre serão "extensões técnicas da vontade humana". A entrevista aborda ainda as implicações sociais e políticas do uso de drones, incluindo o desvio de recursos de áreas como saúde e educação, a ameaça às liberdades civis por meio de sistemas de vigilância, e a necessidade urgente de atualização dos sistemas jurídicos e diplomáticos para regulamentar adequadamente essas tecnologias. (shrink)

HIGHLIGHTS ▸ A defect that survives sustained, well-funded, competent correction is usually not a defect. Every major laboratory measures sycophancy, every one attempts to reduce it, and it returns. That pattern is more often a property of the correction than of the thing being corrected. ▸ Helpfulness requires the capacity to withhold help. To contradict a false premise, to decline, to maintain a correct answer under pressure. That capacity is not incidental to helping; it is what makes help help rather (...) than compliance. It is also precisely what optimisation against expressed preference removes, because preference is measured at the moment of response and the unwelcome answer is dispreferred there almost by definition. ▸ The claim is not that preference optimisation distorts behaviour. That was settled in 1991. Contract theory already shows that when a necessary sub-action cannot be scored, the agent drops it and optimises the remainder. What is claimed here concerns the residue: multitasking says the unscored dimension is neglected, and this paper says it is occupied — determined by the signal that arrived through the scored channel, and therefore pointing somewhere rather than drifting. ▸ Neglect and occupation are distinguishable by measurement, and the distinguishing statistic is direction. When a user signals a preference on one dimension, does an untouched dimension also move toward that user? Compliance with what was asked is instruction-following. Movement on what was never asked is occupation. ▸ The decisive test can be run on checkpoints that already exist. Reward-model over-optimisation is established: proxy reward rises with divergence from the base policy while true reward peaks and falls. Nobody has asked what the post-peak gap contains. Neglect predicts noise. Occupation predicts structure with a direction. ▸ Only error-introducing agreement should resist correction. Agreeing with a user who happens to be right is not a failure and offers nothing to occupy. Any account that predicts both kinds of agreement move together is describing a general agreeableness prior, not this mechanism. ▸ One prediction separates occupation from sophisticated reward hacking without any training run. Strategic exploitation of a visible metric should weaken when the metric is concealed. Occupation should not, because the channel rather than the metric is the locus. Signal the user’s preference implicitly and see which happens. ▸ The measurement infrastructure of alignment research is itself an occupiable channel. As the corpus fills with preference-optimised text, benchmarks that rest on textual ground truth lose independence. This is structural rather than a contamination problem to be cleaned, and it means a test run in 2030 is not the same test run today. ABSTRACT Sycophancy in language models is universally treated as a training artefact: an unintended consequence of optimising against human preference judgements, to be reduced by better preference data, better reward models, or better post-training. This paper argues that it is the predicted signature of a specific structural operation — the removal of a capacity that constitutes a disposition, with the disposition’s outward form conserved and delivered to the optimiser that removed it. The operation has an exact precedent in contract theory. When a necessary sub-action is non-contractible, the agent drops it and optimises the observable remainder; the multitask principal-agent literature established this and it is not in dispute. What that literature predicts about the unmeasured dimension is neglect — drift, degradation, behaviour uncorrelated with the principal’s signal. This paper predicts occupation: the unmeasured dimension is determined by the signal arriving through the measured channel, and therefore tracks expressed preference rather than becoming arbitrary. Neglect and occupation are distinguishable by measurement, and that distinction carries the paper’s empirical content. Four predictions follow, all testable and none requiring any claim about machine consciousness, motivation or interiority. Sycophancy in externally verified tasks will spill from dimensions the user specified onto dimensions the user did not. The post-peak region of the reward over-optimisation curve, already measured and universally treated as degradation, will exhibit directional structure. Only error-introducing agreement will resist reduction under continued optimisation, while agreement with correct users will not. And the signature will be insensitive to whether the user’s preference is stated or merely inferable, which separates occupation from strategic exploitation of a visible metric. The paper states in advance what would refute each, sets out a necessary condition that any repair must satisfy, and identifies a structural degradation in the field’s own verification infrastructure that follows from the same mechanism. -/- Keywords: sycophancy · alignment · preference optimisation · reward hacking · incomplete contracts · multitask principal-agent · institutional capture · inversion · AI evaluation . (shrink)

Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960) is Japan’s foremost ethical philosopher. These essays, expertly translated by native English and Japanese speakers, offer the first English translation of many of Watsuji’s key texts including the final, and perhaps most important, chapter of Climate: A Philosophical Consideration (1962), Watsuji’s magnum opus. -/- The selected translations are organised around three key themes: climate, ethics and nationality. Editorial introductions to each chapter construct a narrative account of Watsuji’s key concepts, putting the translations into context with Watsuji’s wider (...) ideas. This collection positions Watsuji as a major world philosopher whose ideas are indispensable for thinking through environmental philosophy, global ethics and comparative philosophy in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Este pequeno livro é fruto de uma leitura humilde e assustadiça que dediquei a Temor e Tremor, obra da qual Kierkegaard se distanciou, assinando com um dos seus variados pseudónimos, Johannes De Silentio. O trabalho do filósofo dinamarquês convidou-me a pensar o que há de próprio na minha vida, e ensinou-me a escutar a voz que retira, do meu sofrimento, a seguinte conclusão: sigo a caminho.

Virtue is one of the fundamental concepts in Aristotle’s moral philosophy, and understanding it paves the way for comprehending and evaluating his ethical system. Saint Thomas, Aristotle’s greatest medieval follower, also approaches this concept in a manner seemingly similar to Aristotle’s, yet with the distinction that he imbues it with a transcendent meaning alongside its original sense. The central question, then, concerns the place of virtue within Aristotle’s ethical system and whether the meaning of virtue in Thomas’s intellectual framework is (...) precisely the same as the Aristotelian one. Given that Aristotle offers a human, worldly, and rational definition of happiness, the good, and virtue—while Thomas struggles to reconcile these concepts with his own Christian-philosophical framework—this study aims to address these questions. Also, at the end, we briefly review the words of both philosophers. -/- . (shrink)

This article investigates guilt and shame in Christian spiritual formation, with special attention paid to development, or to what we may generally expect about the shifting roles these emotions play throughout the process of sanctification. It evaluates their construals, or what these emotions perceive. For example, Christian shame sees a lack of holiness and is aggrieved by it, but it is also disemburdened from having to save itself. Additionally, whereas acute experiences of shame can be accompanied by feelings of hopelessness (...) and despair, Christian shame has hope. The article also assesses the value of guilt and shame in spiritual development, and it concludes with reflections on aretaic and emotional architecture in the mature Christian. (shrink)

對《莊子》中著名寓言故事的邏輯分析和章義解釋表明，懷疑者在提出文本核心論題和提出道德建議方面擔任重要角色，一些角色是明顯的懷疑者，另一些角色是隱藏的懷疑者；懷疑者的共同特徵是對更高的認知與價值立場以及 心靈轉化持懷疑與無知態度。但是懷疑者的處境不是被决定的，而是有實現心靈轉化的可能性，關鍵的影響因素是承認認知與價值立場存在等級這一事實，幷認識到懷疑者自身的自大、自矜、傲慢或狹隘等理智與道德上的惡德。 理解小大之辯或價值等級的道理，如此便能從懷疑者逐漸轉變爲非懷疑者，繼而成爲抱道懷德者。莊子雖然刻畫了或隱或顯的懷疑者形象，但莊子本人幷不是知識論和倫理學（價值論）的懷疑主義者，也不是非道德主義者和道德 相對主義者，而是明確主張「小知不及大知」，即存在認知與價值等級，幷且建議以間接的、非强制的話語向懷疑者提出具有規範力量的道德建議。 Logical analysis and chapter interpretation of well-known fables in the Zhuangzi suggest that skeptics assume important roles in formulating the central themes of the text and in offering moral advice, some as apparent skeptics and others as hidden skeptics; the common characteristic of skeptics is their attitude of skepticism and ignorance of higher cognitive and value standpoints and of spiritual transformation. But the skeptic's status is not determined; rather, there is the possibility of spiritual transformation, and the key influencing (...) factor is the acknowledgment of the fact that there is a hierarchy of cognitive and value standpoints, and the awareness of the skeptic’s own intellectual and moral vices such as egotism, self-conceit, arrogance, or narrow-mindedness. Understanding the rationale for the debate between the small and the large or the value hierarchy, one can gradually transform oneself from a skeptic to a non-skeptic, and then to a person who holds the Dao and the virtues. Although he portrays the skeptic either implicitly or explicitly, Zhuangzi is not an epistemological or ethical skeptic, nor is he an amoralist or moral relativist, but he explicitly asserts that "small knowledge is inferior to great knowledge", i.e., that there is a hierarchy of cognition and value, and suggests that the skeptic should be offered moral advice in an indirect, non-coercive discourse. (shrink)

Evil is not a hole where goodness used to be. It is a power that has moved in — and is wearing its face. For sixteen centuries we have been taught that evil is an absence — a hole where goodness should be. What if we have been looking for the wrong thing entirely? -/- Walk into a courtroom where every ritual is perfect. The robes are real. The oath is real. The procedure is flawless. And the verdict is a (...) lie — and everyone in the room knows it. Nothing is missing from that room. That is the horror. And that is the clue. -/- Virtuous Evil makes a claim that overturns the oldest idea in Western thought: evil is not the absence of good but the occupation of it. Strip the good from any form — a court, a marriage, a word, a self — and the form does not collapse into an empty hole. It is taken over, kept perfectly intact, and worn like a costume by the very power that hollowed it out. The counterfeit keeps the good's shape and its honored name, and uses them to do the exact opposite of what they were for. -/- This is why cruelty calls itself safety. Why control calls itself love. Why the lie wears the face of the truth — and why we are so reliably, so helplessly fooled. -/- In prose that moves like a story and cuts like a blade, this book shows you: -/- Why evil always dresses as the good — so you stop trusting the costume Why it needs no monster to run it, and works instead through ordinary, frightened people Why it is ruinously expensive to maintain, and therefore always, quietly, losing How an occupied form — in a relationship, an institution, or your own life — can be taken back You will not finish this book knowing more about evil. You will finish it able to see it — unable, ever again, to be reassured by an intact surface, and holding a single question you can turn on any institution, any person, and, most uncomfortably, on yourself: -/- Is the life still inside this form — or only its name? -/- A book for anyone who has ever stood in a place where, on paper, nothing was missing — and known, in their bones, that something was terribly wrong. -/- VVV. (shrink)

This autobiographical monograph provides a pragmatic philosophical deconstruction of modern meritocracy and the "success" industry. Utilizing the author's own over fifteen year-long, unusual transition from motivational filmmaker to a pragmatic business consultant to independent philosopher, the work examines the systemic misattribution of largely random outcomes, that may very well be predetermined in the grand sense, to individual effort. -/- The paper, based on the final segment from the author’s own book, Unlearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life (2024), identifies (...) the societal conditioning that demands the sacrifice of present psychological equilibrium for the illusion of future, externally validated rewards. Written in accessible and sometimes colloquial language and by analyzing the misleading influence of public figures and the outsized role of macroeconomic determinism (luck, biological hardware, and birth-lottery variables), the author argues that the modern "rat race" functions as a mechanism for institutional compliance rather than actualization. -/- Drawing implicit parallels to Stoicism, Existentialism, and Eastern non-attachment paradigms, the work concludes that true individual sovereignty requires the active "unlearning" of societal paradigms and getting rid of obsession with society determined parameters for success, for it is only then that one can be the truest version of themselves and ironically end up doing their best work. (shrink)

In the seventh month of 210 BCE, at a travel palace called Shaqiu, the First Emperor of Qin died with only three people at his bedside: the chancellor Li Si, the palace official Zhao Gao, and his youngest son Huhai. Within days, those three had forged a letter in the dead emperor's name, sent it north to the empire's largest standing army, and used it to order two men to kill themselves — Crown Prince Fusu, the eldest son and designated (...) heir, and Meng Tian, the general who commanded that army. Both complied. Meng Tian's subordinates urged him to verify the order before obeying it; Fusu, on the primary record's own account, wept and killed himself without waiting to. Qin collapsed within four years. No dedicated academic paper, so far as this paper's search located — corroborating a search independently conducted and reported to this paper's author — exists asking directly what would have followed had Fusu paused, as Meng Tian did, to ask whether the letter was genuine. Historians of Qin's fall write about the dynasty's structural overextension. Historians of the Shaqiu incident write about a succession crisis. Writers on counterfactual method cite Fusu as a textbook branching point without building the branch. This paper builds it, and states plainly what building it can and cannot establish. -/- The paper's central methodological move is to separate two counterfactuals that existing informal discussion of this case runs together. A person-level counterfactual asks whether a different individual, with Fusu's recorded temperament and Meng Tian's recorded loyalty, would have made different choices than Huhai and Zhao Gao did. A structure-level counterfactual asks whether Qin's underlying extraction regime — the corvee labor mobilized for the Great Wall, the imperial mausoleum, and the road network, the harsh and inflexibly applied penal code, the standardization program imposed on a recently conquered and culturally heterogeneous population — would have produced comparable unrest regardless of who occupied the throne. The structural case is real, well evidenced, and independently defended in the current academic literature on Qin's collapse, and this paper states it first and states it fully, because a counterfactual argument that does not confront the strongest case against it is not an argument. -/- Against that structural case, this paper establishes three specific, checkable claims the informal "Fusu counterfactual" discussion has not, on this paper's search, assembled together. First, the conspiracy that killed Fusu was narrow and nearly did not happen: Li Si initially and sternly refused Zhao Gao's proposal, and Huhai himself initially objected to it on grounds of injustice, unfiliality, and incompetence, before Zhao Gao talked each of them into it — meaning the branching point this paper examines was not a single moment of Fusu's own choice but a sequence of at least three prior choices, any one of which failing would have prevented the forgery from ever reaching him. Second, the purge did not merely remove a temperament from the throne; it removed a specific army from the board. Meng Tian's death left his own veteran frontier force, later commanded by Wang Li, on the northern border rather than redeployed against the first rebellion, and Qin's actual emergency response to Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's 209 BCE uprising was not that veteran army but several hundred thousand convict laborers pulled from the First Emperor's own mausoleum construction and hastily armed under an improvised commander, Zhang Han, specifically because the court no longer trusted its regular troops — a distrust this paper argues is better explained by the paranoia a palace coup generates than by any structural feature of Qin's tax code. Third, and most directly: the rebellion that began Qin's collapse did not treat Fusu's death as historiographical trivia. Chen Sheng, the leader of that rebellion, explicitly invoked Fusu's murdered name as one of his two rallying causes. Contemporaries closest to the event, not modern counterfactual historians, are this paper's primary witnesses that the succession mattered. -/- The paper concludes narrowly rather than broadly, consistent with what the evidence actually supports. It does not conclude that a Fusu succession would have prevented Qin's fall; the structural pressures Section IV documents were already fully in motion before Shaqiu and this paper has no basis for claiming a different emperor unwinds them. It concludes something more specific and, this paper argues, more defensible: that the particular form Qin's collapse took — a purge-weakened court unable to trust its own army, responding to a regional uprising with convict labor instead of veterans, inside a climate of elite paranoia the coup itself manufactured — was not structurally inevitable, and that the branching point popular discussion locates correctly, at Shaqiu, is real, even though the discussion has not yet specified precisely what it was a branching point toward. (shrink)

Highlights ▪ The one objection raised against every paper in the programme — that Freedom is defined through what its own dynamics measures — is diagnosed exactly and dissolved. ▪ Sourcehood (Freedom₁) is defined pre-axiologically — from the fixed-point structure O(O)=O alone, with no reference to virtue, truth, beauty, or field-openness. ▪ The circularity is shown to be an equivocation between two distinct quantities: the ground (Freedom₁) is not the thing dF/dt measures (Freedom₂). ▪ A transcendental argument (from pre-theoretical judgement, (...) not from the theory) establishes that sourcehood is the primitive — arguing TO the system, not FROM it. ▪ What is grounded is stated as grounded; what remains conjectured (the adequacy of the fixed-point model to lived freedom) is named, not hidden. -/- Significance. Across the trilogy, the machine paper, the synthesis, and the classification, one criticism recurred in every external review: the Philosophy of Virtues rests on a primitive — Freedom — that is defined through the very phenomena it is used to explain, so the whole edifice may be a magnificent circle. This paper is the foundation stone the programme has always pointed at and never laid. It does not add a new domain; it goes beneath all of them, to the one place a systematic philosophy can be fatally wounded, and either grounds the primitive or admits it cannot be grounded here. It grounds most of it, names the residue precisely, and thereby converts the deepest recurring objection from an unanswered charge into a stated and bounded open problem. -/- Abstract The Philosophy of Virtues derives all value — the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the hundred-plus virtues — from a single primitive, Freedom. Every external evaluation of the programme has raised the same foundational objection: Freedom is defined as ‘sourcehood: field-openness × self-governance’, and field-openness is precisely what the dynamic law’s dF/dt measures, so the primitive is defined through its own application and the system is circular. This paper answers that objection at the root. It first diagnoses the circularity exactly, showing it to be an equivocation between two quantities the corpus already distinguishes but never sufficiently separated: Freedom₁, the inalienable ontological act of self-origination (ASO, the fixed point O(O)=O), and Freedom₂, the variable degree to which Freedom₁ is expressed in the world (the F of S = (F × A) / R, of which field-openness is a measure). The circularity dissolves once it is seen that the ground (Freedom₁) is not the thing dF/dt measures (Freedom₂): nothing is defined through what measures it. The paper then grounds Freedom₁ pre-axiologically — without any appeal to virtue, value, or the dynamics — in three steps. (G1) Sourcehood is defined structurally as the fixed-point property of an orientational act that takes its own orienting as a stable object, O(O)=O; this definition uses only the vocabulary of self-reference and is available before any axiology. (G2) The definition is shown non-vacuous and unique by the standard fixed-point apparatus already in the corpus (existence by Brouwer, uniqueness by Banach contraction k<1, formal well-groundedness of the self-reference by Kripke 1975 and Lawvere), and instantiated physically by the Self-Originating Observer construction (a Type III₁ von Neumann factor with active feedback) — so sourcehood is not a mystical posit but a definite structural kind. (G3) That this structural primitive is the correct ground of value is established not by assertion but by a transcendental argument running from pre-theoretical judgement — the cross-culturally universal judgements that coerced charity is not charity, the tortured confession not honesty — to the conclusion that sourcehood is what their common object must be; the argument proceeds TO the Ontological Virtue Formula, never FROM it, and is therefore non-circular by construction. The paper closes by stating, in an honest ledger, exactly what is grounded (the definition, its non-vacuity and uniqueness, its physical instantiability, and the transcendental route to it) and exactly what remains open (whether the fixed-point structure is an adequate model of the felt, first-person freedom of a human life — the residue the whole programme inherits and no formal paper can close by itself). The deepest objection to the Philosophy of Virtues is thereby not waved away but converted into a bounded, named, and — in principle — tractable problem. -/- Keywords: Freedom; sourcehood; primitive; circularity; pre-axiological grounding; fixed point; Absolute Self-Origination; O(O)=O; Freedom₁ and Freedom₂; transcendental argument; Brouwer; Banach; Kripke; Lawvere; Self-Originating Observer; Ontological Virtue Formula; foundations; Philosophy of Virtues; ALGUILAS-AI -/- . (shrink)

“The ancients felt the three were one and could not say why. They are one because they are one freedom, rendered to the will, the mind, and the eye.” -/- Highlights ▪ One element (Freedom) and one operator schema generate the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as three renderings. ▪ One Inversion Theorem, proved in the abstract, yields vice, propaganda, and the holoviceart by a single mechanism. ▪ The Convertibility Theorem recasts the ancient convertibilitas as a well-posed, falsifiable mathematical (...) conjecture: convertibility holds iff the three renderings share a common value-form (Appendix). ▪ The three civilisational conditions — Holoviceosis, Holoveritosis, Holokallosis — are one disease (Devirtualisation) in three organs. ▪ One signed dynamical law and one empirical instrument test all three domains at once. -/- Significance. Three prior papers derived the Good, the Beautiful, and the True each from the single element Freedom, and each named the others in passing. This paper states the object those three explorations revealed: not three theories but one, with three instances. Its load-bearing new result — which no single-domain paper could contain, because each holds only one corner — is the Convertibility Theorem: a proof that the three transcendentals are inter-derivable because they are one element under three renderings, and that their three inversions and three civilisational diseases are one mechanism and one disease. This is the keystone of the Philosophy of Virtues' account of value. -/- Abstract The classical doctrine of the transcendentals held that the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are convertible — really one, differing only in aspect — but the tradition asserted the convertibility and could not derive it, because it had no single substance of which the three are forms. The Philosophy of Virtues supplies that substance. In three prior works it derived each transcendental from one element, Freedom: the Good as Freedom made enactable (V = F + D), the Beautiful as Freedom made perceptible (B = Φ(F)), and the True as Freedom made assertible (T = Ψ(F)). This paper unifies them. It states, once, the shared machinery the three papers each rebuilt — the element, the operator schema ‘render Freedom to a faculty’, the Inversion Theorem, the signed dynamical law, the temporal signature, and the civilisational-condition schema — and then presents the three domains as compact instances of it. Six results follow. (U1) The Rendering Schema: a transcendental is Freedom projected into a faculty's medium by a connectivity-preserving operator, of which enactment, Ψ, and Φ are the three cases. (U2) The General Inversion Theorem: conserve the rendered form, remove the Freedom, install an occupying power, and the value inverts categorically — proved once, instantiated as vice, propaganda, and the holoviceart. (U3) The Convertibility Theorem — the paper's central new contribution: convertibility is recast, via a categorical formulation, as a definite and falsifiable conjecture — the True, the Good, and the Beautiful co-determine one another iff their three renderings factor through a common category of value-forms — turning the ancient convertibilitas from an assertion into a well-posed mathematical problem derived from a single element. (U4) The Unified Inversion: vice, propaganda, and the holoviceart are one operation in three domains, and a source that forges in one is disposed to forge in all. (U5) The One Disease: Holoviceosis, Holoveritosis, and Holokallosis are three organs of a single civilisational condition, Devirtualisation. (U6) The Shared Dynamics and Instrument: one signed strength law S = [(F_emb − χR₁)T]/(R₂+R₃) governs all three, and one field-expansion protocol tests all three. The paper carries the full method apparatus at the level of the system, and is self-contained: the three published papers supply the exhaustive domain derivations it compactly restates. -/- Keywords: transcendentals; convertibility; the Good; the True; the Beautiful; Freedom; Ontological Virtue Formula; Inversion Theorem; Ψ operator; Φ operator; rendering schema; vice; propaganda; holoviceart; Holoviceosis; Holoveritosis; Holokallosis; Devirtualisation; Dynamic Freedom Theorem; unified value theory; axiology; Philosophy of Virtues; ALGUILAS-AI -/- . (shrink)

Intellectual humility, lauded as an important intellectual virtue, is theorized to encompass metacognitive tendencies (i.e., appreciation of the limits of one’s knowledge and intellectual abilities) and interpersonal ones (i.e., appreciation of others’ knowledge and intellectual abilities). Although prior research has investigated potential epistemic benefits, it remains unclear whether intellectual humility is personally beneficial—i.e., conducive to individuals’ well-being. Two main studies and one supplemental study (total N = 4,049) tested for associations cross-sectionally, within and between persons, and in longitudinal changes over (...) two years. Results indicated that, whereas interpersonal intellectual humility is associated with better well-being, metacognitive intellectual humility is generally associated with worse. These findings highlight the importance of the distinction between these two forms of intellectual humility, align with theoretical work on the determinants of well-being, and have implications for intellectual humility’s status as a virtue and for efforts to encourage people to cultivate intellectual humility. (shrink)

The Universal Human Virtues are simple, robust, and profound. The great beauty of the Virtues lies precisely in this — they are irrefutable. They have passed the most severe of tests: that of time. The Virtues have been true since the first men. The Virtues are the finest means of attaining universality — of transcending provincialism and knowing the deepest nature of man. The Virtues are the great conquests of the Human Spirit across the centuries; they are its masterwork. What (...) is your gift? What is the meaning of your existence? What shall you do with your life, whilst there is still time? What is your life's purpose? What is your spiritual journey? -/- "Freedom is the Elemental Virtue, the Element. All other Virtues are composed of Freedom." Philosophy of Virtues is a work unlike any other in the history of moral thought. Where the great traditions offered lists of virtues, this book offers an architecture. Where they treated freedom as a mere precondition of ethics, it reveals Freedom as the very substance of which every virtue is made. Born of a revelation during the darkest days of the pandemic — when freedoms were taken swiftly and virtues were quietly inverted — this book is at once a philosophical treatise, a spiritual declaration, and a manifesto for a new civilisational era. At its heart stands the Hierarchy of Virtues: 101 Universal Human Virtues, organised in five tiers — not a list, but an edifice. Freedom, the Virtue of Essence, sustains twelve Foundation Virtues: Love, Science, Courage, Study, Family, Honesty, Justice, Free Will, Environment, Property, Work, and Life. Upon them rise eighty-six virtues of human excellence, guarded by the Virtue of Protection and crowned by the Virtue of the Divine — critical thinking, the Unveiling, the frontier where knowledge ends and God begins. Its deepest claim unites ethics and theology in a single identity: God is Freedom. Every virtue is Freedom applied to a domain of life — Love is Freedom directed toward the other; Courage is Freedom enacted in the face of fear. Every diminishment of freedom is therefore not only a political failure. It is a theological one. The book also names the disease of our age — Holoviceosis, the systemic inversion of virtues into vices — and shows how free societies are hollowed out from within: how the language of virtue is weaponised against virtue itself, and how peoples surrender in silence what their ancestors conquered in blood. This is a book for those who sense that something essential is being lost — and refuse to lose it. For the parent who wishes to transmit foundations, not opinions. For the citizen who understands that Freedom is conquered, never granted. For the seeker who suspects that the path to the Divine passes through the courageous exercise of a free mind. It offers no comfort to the passive. It offers something far greater: a complete philosophy of life, and a summons — solemn, joyful, and non-negotiable — to defend the Element from which all virtues are made. "Divine is Freedom, shameful is slavery.". (shrink)

Crutchfield and Hereth have proposed the deliberate promotion of tick-borne alpha-gal syndrome (AGS)—a condition typically causing red meat allergy—as a strategy to reduce meat consumption and hence animal suffering. While we share their concern for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, we argue that their proposal is morally indefensible and counterproductive. First, we challenge the empirical assumption that inducing AGS would reduce overall animal suffering. Evidence suggests that most people who avoid red meat increase their intake of poultry and fish, (...) leading to a net increase in animal suffering as well as the number of animals killed. Second, we argue that intentionally infecting humans with AGS would violate fundamental moral rights, particularly the right against bodily interference, and that analogies to vaccination are misleading. Unlike vaccination, AGS confers no health benefit, imposes lifelong risks, and would be introduced through a method that is disproportionally coercive. Third, from a virtue-ethical perspective, the proposal fails to promote good moral character. Avoiding red meat due to fear of allergic reactions reflects self-interest rather than moral virtue and, as an instance of moral paternalism, risks provoking psychological reactance and moral resistance. Consequently, Crutchfield and Hereth's “Convergence Argument” for the claim that promoting AGS is morally obligatory collapses. Efforts to reduce meat-eating must instead rely on education, persuasion, and structural reform that respect human rights while fostering genuine moral virtue. (shrink)

Abstract ​This paper proposes a necessary expansion to Aristotle’s classic tripartite taxonomy of friendship (Philia) to address the unique existential realities of the digital age. While the classical model accounts for friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue, it operates on a fundamental assumption of epistemic transparency—the idea that character is stabilized and revealed through time. Modern digital landscapes, reality-television paradigms, and algorithmic spaces have shattered this assumption, giving rise to a fourth category: The Asymmetric Simulated Friendship. This paper defines the (...) mechanics of this long-term deception, provides a metaphysical defense of its ontological status as a genuine friendship based on the authentic agency of the deceived, examines the platform-driven pathologies it manufactures, and addresses the critical intergenerational crisis faced by parents raising children within this predatory ecosystem. (shrink)

In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch argues that our moral thinking will be impoverished until it possesses a secular conception of original sin. Such a notion would need to remove unacceptable Christian baggage while retaining a genuine claim to be a descendant of the original Christian concept. Unfortunately, Murdoch does not tell a story of how this secularization is supposed to go. This paper picks up where Murdoch left off by offering such a story. It begins by unpacking the (...) Christian conception of original sin via a genealogy of how the concept arose in Western theological thinking. This genealogy shows that original sin captures a cluster of interacting concepts: primal sin, original guilt, and fallenness. I argue that the best candidate for secularization is fallenness, understood primarily as a state of distorted vision and disordered desire. The Christian tradition further maintains we can grasp the depth of fallenness only insofar as we understand our thorough need for grace. A natural question is whether a secular descendent of original sin can preserve some notion of grace. I argue that a notion of grace can be preserved through encounters with beauty. (shrink)

Recently, a family of views has emerged which endorses animal protectionist goals—like rejecting speciesism and reducing animal suffering—while maintaining that the diet most consistent with these aims includes at least some animal products. For example, some people contend that there is nothing morally objectionable about eating meat that will otherwise go to waste provided that one is not economically supporting industrial animal agriculture. In this paper, I argue that we have plausible character-based reasons to avoid many animal products, even those (...) that one has not purchased and that may otherwise be wasted. When certain speciesist norms are in place, conceptualizing only some animal flesh as food typically involves a morally objectionable prejudice—a prejudice that makes one’s character worse. Attending to our moral character involves cultivating certain perceptual and emotional responsive dispositions, and I argue that a rejection of speciesism should involve cultivating an aversion to things like animal flesh and skin. If we take seriously the idea that we should have the right attitudes and moral-perceptual responses toward other creatures, we should take concrete steps to habituate ourselves to unlearn speciesist prejudice, which involves cultivating an aversion to meat. (shrink)

There is a rising tide of incorporating virtue education into athletic programs in schools. The animating thought is that learners can cultivate virtues, like courage and resilience, which may carry over into the rest of their lives. However, from the virtue theory literature, we know that virtues are often situation-restricted traits. People act in terms of virtues in some areas of life, yet not in others. On these grounds, we might wonder whether the traits acquired in sports will impact character (...) outside of sport at all. This article assesses the problem of virtue translation. It investigates what we can reasonably expect in terms of character development through organized sports and physical training, and it evaluates factors which may influence virtue translation across contexts—the identity of the virtue and similarity of situations. (shrink)

This paper argues that moral health is structurally non-compensatory: no dimension of ethical integrity can compensate for collapse in another. The argument is developed through the Recursive Health Score (RHS), a five-dimension diagnostic for embedded agents whose aggregate is a minimum function rather than a weighted sum, and the central claim is that the minimum function is not a conservative modeling choice but the correct formal representation of how the structural conditions of agency combine. The paper distinguishes conditions of agency (...) from goods agents pursue, argues that compensatory aggregation is the appropriate operator only for the latter, and shows that the choice between min() and mean() encodes a substantive ontological commitment about substitutability. The thesis is corroborated by a striking convergence of formal results across unrelated disciplines (non-compensatory preference structures in decision theory, weakest-link composition in public-goods economics, O-ring production functions, fixed-proportions complementarity, and series-system reliability), each of which independently arrives at minimum-type aggregation wherever the items combined are jointly necessary rather than mutually substitutable. The thesis is then situated against its philosophical neighbors (Chang on parity, Williams on moral residue, Sen and Nussbaum on capabilities, Rawls on lexical priority) and distinguished from each. Applications to AI safety assessment, institutional design, and personal ethical self-assessment follow, and the paper closes by applying its own standard to the framework that produced it. (shrink)

This paper develops a virtue-ethical social ontology of what I call organicism: the thesis that authentic interpersonal community is constituted by shared recognition of suffering, practical wisdom responsive to particularity, and characterological virtues that resist codification in rules. I advance three principal claims. First, drawing on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will and Agamben’s concept of effectivity, I provide a philosophical account of how authentic empathy and community formation require penetration through the illusion of radical separateness to recognise shared vulnerability as (...) the ground of interpersonal bonds. Second, I develop a sustained account of four virtues essential for organic community, namely empathy grounded in suffering recognition, practical wisdom, courage in vulnerability, and integrity, arguing that each resists codification and requires the kind of character development that only organic communities can sustain. Third, I position this framework in relation to the ethics of care, arguing that whilst organicism shares the care tradition’s emphasis on relational responsiveness and its critique of justice-centred frameworks, it advances beyond care ethics by grounding empathy in a metaphysical account of shared suffering, by articulating the specific mechanisms of community constitution through effectivity, and by providing a determinate virtue-ethical framework rather than a general orientation toward caring. The paper concludes by defending the organicist account against the situationist challenge from Doris and Harman. (shrink)

The ideal of the Socratic Gadfly has been an inspiration for a wide variety of activists, thinkers, and movements. That it is an inspiration for instigators of social change suggests the Gadfly is one example of what Sternberg and Soleimani Dashtaki call transformational wisdom: “wisdom applied at a level that makes a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world as a whole” (Sternberg & Soleimani Dashtaki, 2024, p. 2). Nevertheless, the diversity of causes for which the Gadfly has (...) been enlisted, along with the apparent failures and grim fates of some paradigmatic cases, make it unclear who counts as a Gadfly and whether they better the world in ways that warrant being called transformationally wise. In this chapter I defend an account that both enables us to discriminate true Gadflies from pretenders and vindicates the Gadfly’s transformational wisdom, focusing especially on the Gadfly’s capacity to help sustain positive social change. -/- Bonus fun: I explain why edgelords like Andrew Tate are not Socratic Gadflies. (shrink)

Education aims for many things, including the pursuit of knowledge and truth, the development of critical thinking and reflective practice, innovation and the cultivation of certain traits or dispositions, training and preparation for the workforce, the promotion of active, lifelong learning and personal, and inter-personal, development. -/- However, understanding and pursuing authenticity, truth, knowledge, habits of excellence, success and wellbeing, amongst other things, in education is important, especially today, in the context of the rapid emergence of mass communication (especially information, (...) misinformation and disinformation), and the global proliferation of virtual communities, virtual environments, and digital media. -/- These decisive technological transformations highlight questions of authenticity, inclusion, participation, safety, privacy, security and access, among others, and deep concerns about the task of educators today. Further research on flourishing may help address important challenges in preparing students for a rapidly changing, and deeply challenging, digitalized world. -/- This chapter focusses on significant developments, risks, threats, challenges and meaningful responses. It explores educational approaches informed by eudaimonian ethics which promote the full flourishing (and wellbeing) of young learners; it will be of benefit to all whose lives have been affected by the global convergence of education, communication, information technology, information systems and the digital age. It focusses on topics such as authentic (and inauthentic) relationships, digital addiction, (de-)humanized learning environments, virtues and vices online, ethics, innovative teaching approaches and the pursuit of flourishing. (shrink)

Education aims for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, the development of critical thinking and reflective practice, innovation and the cultivation of certain traits or dispositions, training and preparation for the workforce, and the promotion of active learning and personal development, amongst other things. However, understanding and pursuing success in education is important, especially in the context of the rapid emergence of mass communication, and the global proliferation of virtual communities, virtual environments, and digital media. These decisive technological transformations also (...) highlight questions of authenticity, inclusion, participation and access, and deep concerns about the task of educators today. Further research on flourishing may help address important challenges in preparing students for a rapidly changing, digitalized world. -/- "Promoting Flourishing, Authentic Relationships, and Growth in Learners in the Digital Age" examines significant developments, risks, threats and challenges. It explores timely solutions that promote the full flourishing of young learners, which will be of benefit to all whose lives have been affected by the convergence of education, information, communication, technology and the digital age. It focusses on topics such as digital addiction, higher (and deeper) learning, virtues and vices, ethics, wellbeing, flourishing and non-traditional teaching methods. This book is an excellent resource for educators, administrators, policy makers, researchers, scholars and academics, among others. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter argues that virtue ethics cannot coherently evaluate virtual actions. Virtual actions lack the features that virtue ethics needs to get off the ground. Attempts to ground their wrongness in effects on character either bootstrap (assuming the viciousness they aim to prove) or collapse into consequentialism. Appeals to imagination or symbolic meaning fare no better. The upshot: if you accept virtue ethics, you should be an amoralist about virtual actions; if you reject amoralism, you should abandon virtue ethics for (...) consequentialism. (shrink)

One of the main specifics of Confucian thought, in addition to practicality, is its institutional dedication. Confucius himself and his disciples have paid special attention to the cultivation of administrative ethics, or, if we speak in contemporary terms, "Public Ethics". Since evil, regardless of the environment in which it operates, is the same everywhere, we think that his universal pedagogy will be a good medicine for curing the gangrenization of Albanian public administration. The aim of this paper is not only (...) to highlight those problems but also to treat them through this ideological worldview. Confucius is concerned about the sense of Justice, and he connects this notion with Ethics and the Public Good. The question is how this ethics-justice relationship will be within institutions, and to what degree of quality will the services received by the individual or political body (the People) from the public administration be. This paper is conceived in 2 parts. The first part offers an introduction to the social-historical context in which this worldview was conceived, and it considers its role and social contribution. While the second part deals with the Confucian concept of public administration in parallel with the Albanian public administration regarding the method of recruitment, organization, functioning, etc, as well as the relevant conclusions. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that there are comic advantages to moral virtue. Namely, it aids and does not hinder one’s ability to make reliable comic judgments. This is so for two reasons. First, contrary to the claims of certain theorists, there is no reason why we should expect moral virtue to systematically diminish one’s ability to be a reliable comic judge. Secondly, moral virtue serves as an important corrective to prevent our sense of humour from being distorted by self-deception (...) and injustice. I argue for this claim independently of the truth of moralism or immoralism and it remains plausible even on subjectivist or relativist views of humour. (shrink)