Open Idealist
I · R · D · L · F · I
A free person can, by reason, find a duty and a meaning in a reality the physical description does not exhaust.
This is not a measure of personality, mental health, intelligence, or character.
Reality is taken to have a rational depth that is not identical with physical process, and argument is trusted to approach that depth. Experience prompts the inquiry. It is not the final court.
Some acts stay wrong even when their results are better, and the agent is treated as able to have refused them. The constraint has force, on this picture, because the person could have honored it.
Meaning is something a life answers to, and the one who answers is the person. Other people may help the search. They do not own it.
The axes in this code
- Reality — Idealism
- Knowledge — Rationalism
- Morality — Deontology
- Freedom — Libertarian free will
- Meaning — Discovery
- Social life — Individual priority
What this stance can see
- You refuse to treat consciousness as an embarrassment to be defined away.
- You look for the difference between a coincidence and a reason.
- You notice when a welcome result would be bought by a wrongful act.
- You protect the thought that a person can be the source of a turn not already written.
- You can care about a value you did not happen to prefer.
- You refuse to dissolve a person into a collective aim.
What this stance can miss
- You may underweight the ways a mind-independent world corrects a cherished picture.
- You may trust an elegant argument after the world has already spoken against it.
- You may hold a rule so firmly that the harm of keeping it leaves the picture.
- You may ignore how much of a choice arrives already shaped.
- You may treat your reading of what was “already there” as if it were not also an interpretation.
- You may understate debts and dependencies that were never the product of consent.
A pressure in the pairing
A pressure in this pairing: duty and an open alternative reinforce each other, and they can hide the luck already inside the ability to comply. A free refusal is not yet a full account of fairness.
Questions this combination has to face
Mind and correction
If reality is not independent of mind, it still has to be possible to be wrong. Otherwise “reality” names only what one already thinks. Idealists have offered different accounts of that possibility, from Berkeley’s God to later distinctions between appearance and a public world of meaning.
Luck inside an open will
If more than one act was open, the ability to take the better one may still be a matter of luck in character, upbringing, or timing. Galen Strawson pressed a related regress: a free act seems to require a self that is already responsible for the way it chooses. The regress is a problem for this pole, not a refutation delivered by the questionnaire.
Debts that were not consented to
A strong priority for the person still meets relationships, languages, and care that no one contracted for. The profile can keep the person as a limit and still ask which of those debts are real.
Questions for reflection
- What would count as the world correcting you, if reality is not independent of mind?
- Which of your convictions about the world would still stand if you had never had the relevant observations, and why?
- When you say someone should have refused, is that because a better result was available, or because the act was forbidden even if the result had been worse?
- What would it be to find a meaning that is yours, without inventing it and without inheriting it unexamined?
Traditions in the neighborhood
Reading, not a syllabus ranking
- René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
- The Analects, a later compilation of Confucian teaching
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Editorial family: Idealism, discovered meaning, and the priority of the person.