Co-Author of Ends
M · R · C · L · C · C
People can invent a common purpose together, justify it by reasons and results, and still have been able to refuse it.
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 the agent is treated as someone who could have produced something else. Responsibility tracks a difference the person could actually have made.
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 — Libertarian free will
- 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 protect the thought that a person can be the source of a turn not already written.
- 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 ignore how much of a choice arrives already shaped.
- 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: an open alternative matters because the results could have differed. It is worth asking whether that is the whole of responsibility, or only the part this profile uses.
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.
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.
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 person could have done otherwise, does that matter because the outcomes would have differed, or for some further reason?
- 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
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
- The Analects, a later compilation of Confucian teaching
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
- René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Editorial family: Physicalism, created meaning, and the priority of the community.