Lawful Inventor
M · R · D · D · C · I
A personal purpose is invented under principles the inventor does not think they invented, in a physical order with no uncaused act.
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.
Some acts stay wrong even when their results are better, and the agent is not pictured as standing outside the causal order. The open question is what a duty can require of a will that was going to act as it did.
Meaning is something a person institutes by commitment. Company can matter, but the authority to give a life its point stays with the one who lives it. This is not a claim that nothing is valuable.
The axes in this code
- Reality — Physicalism
- Knowledge — Rationalism
- Morality — Deontology
- Freedom — Determinism
- Meaning — Creation
- Social life — Individual 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 notice when a welcome result would be bought by a wrongful act.
- 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 refuse to dissolve a person into a collective aim.
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 hold a rule so firmly that the harm of keeping it leaves the picture.
- 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 understate debts and dependencies that were never the product of consent.
A pressure in the pairing
A pressure in this pairing: a duty that survives a better outcome has to be addressed to a will already in the causal story. Compatibilism is one reading. It is not supplied automatically by the score.
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.
Duty addressed to a caused will
A constraint that outcomes do not cancel still has to be addressed to someone. If the will was going to act as it did, the sense of “should have refused” needs a reading. Compatibilism is one reading. It is not the midpoint of the agency axis.
A made purpose and a duty not made
Instituting a purpose does not, by itself, repeal a constraint. The two claims answer different questions. Treating the pair as a contradiction would also risk the further mistake of equating created meaning with the thought that nothing matters.
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 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?
- Can a duty bind someone who could not have acted otherwise? What do you mean by “could not”?
- What standard, if any, can show that a purpose you created is a bad one?
Traditions in the neighborhood
Reading, not a syllabus ranking
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
- René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Editorial family: Physicalism, created meaning, and the priority of the person.