Designing Member
M · R · C · D · C · C
Shared arrangements are reasoned out in a physical world and judged by their results, with the knowledge that the purposes are made.
This is not a measure of personality, mental health, intelligence, or character.
Reality is taken to be physical, and reason is trusted to reach something of its structure. Observation still matters, but a demonstration of what must be so can outweigh a first look.
Acts are judged by what they produce, and they are read as the outcome of earlier conditions. If praise and blame survive, they survive as ways of shaping causes, not as verdicts on an uncaused will.
Meaning is something people institute together. A common project can be genuinely weighty without having been a purpose the universe already had, and without reducing each member to a tool.
The axes in this code
- Reality — Physicalism
- Knowledge — Rationalism
- Morality — Consequentialism
- Freedom — Determinism
- Meaning — Creation
- Social life — Communal priority
What this stance can see
- You keep explanations answerable to a world that can resist them.
- You look for the difference between a coincidence and a reason.
- You keep harm and benefit in view when a principle starts to feel abstract.
- You take the causes of character seriously, including the ones no one chose.
- You take a sustained commitment to be capable of giving a life weight.
- You see that a life is formed with others and can owe them something.
What this stance can miss
- You may decide too quickly that a physical description has already said what experience is.
- You may trust an elegant argument after the world has already spoken against it.
- You may talk yourself into using a person once the sum looks favorable.
- You may conclude too quickly that a caused act leaves nothing to call responsibility.
- You may underdescribe the standards a project answers to that its author did not create. This pole is not nihilism.
- You may let “the community” speak without asking who is unheard inside it.
A pressure in the pairing
A pressure in this pairing: once outcomes lead and the will is caused, it is easy to replace “who is answerable?” with “what will change the effects?” The replacement may be right. It should be noticed.
Questions this combination has to face
The explanatory gap
A physicalist picture has to say what a completed physics would have done with the fact that seeing, hurting, and understanding are like something. Some physicalists treat the difficulty as a limit on our concepts. The difficulty is not yet a formal contradiction.
Who speaks as the community
A priority for common life has to say who may speak for the whole, and what a member may refuse. Without that question, “the community” is only the loudest voice.
Questions for reflection
- What would count as a reason to say that some part of experience is not captured by a physical description?
- Which of your convictions about the world would still stand if you had never had the relevant observations, and why?
- If a harmful act was going to happen because of earlier causes, what, if anything, is the point of blame beyond changing what happens next?
- How should a group tell that a purpose it created together is one a member may still refuse?
Traditions in the neighborhood
Reading, not a syllabus ranking
- The Analects, a later compilation of Confucian teaching
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
- René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Editorial family: Physicalism, created meaning, and the priority of the community.