Families

Harmonists

Physicalism, discovered meaning, and the priority of the community.

Harmonists look for goods that are already worth recognizing, in a world they take to be physical, and they expect a community to be the place where those goods are kept. Harmony here is not a mood. It is the claim that a shared life can answer to something the members did not vote into being. The family still contains deep disagreements about knowledge, duty, and freedom.

This is not a measure of personality, mental health, intelligence, or character.

• MECDFCCivic Observer

  A community learns a physical world by looking, judges acts by their results, and keeps a discovered good that no member simply owns.

• MECLFCUnforced Steward

  A community can discover, through shared experience, what is worth keeping, without treating the will as already scripted.

• MEDDFCCommon-Good Witness

  Duties bind a community that learns a physical world by observation, and those duties are found rather than drafted.

• MEDLFCWilling Custodian

  A community can carry duties no member simply invented, persons can genuinely choose, and the world those duties concern is physical.

• MRCDFCPublic Reasoner

  Public reasons and consequences guide a community that shares one physical world and a meaning it does not merely vote into being.

• MRCLFCReasoned Neighbor

  A community is given reasons that are more than preferences, the future stays open, and the goods sought are ones argument can show.

• MRDDFCOrdered Companion

  A community can know a moral order by reason, binding even where every choice has causes and the good is not invented.

• MRDLFCConcord Rationalist

  A free community can be answerable to duties and to a good it discovers, not only to a purpose it drafts.