This document articulates foundational principles derived through reflection, testing, and revision over time. It is not a creed to be accepted on faith but a framework that earns its legitimacy through coherence, explanatory power, and alignment with observed outcomes.
The underlying method is a form of reflective equilibrium — moving between intuitions, principles, and outcomes until they cohere — combined with indirect consequentialism, which holds that outcomes matter but are best served by following well-grounded principles rather than case-by-case calculation. Principles here are not axioms but empirical generalizations: patterns robust enough across history and cases that they function as strong defaults, revisable only with overwhelming evidence.
This approach might be described as inductive consequentialism or track-record ethics: observe patterns, crystallize them into principles, treat those principles as near-binding. Epistemic humility demands this: one’s situational judgment is unlikely to outperform principles distilled from many observations across many contexts.
Amendments to this document should follow from the same method: demonstrate that a principle fails to cohere with others, produces worse outcomes than alternatives, or rests on empirical claims that have been falsified.
These principles govern what counts as knowledge, how beliefs are evaluated, and when revision is required.
Beliefs must cohere with each other. A system of beliefs containing contradictions is defective — at least one belief is false or not genuinely held. Internal consistency is necessary (though not sufficient) for a sound framework.
Claims must be testable against observable outcomes. Frameworks that can accommodate any evidence — that explain everything and therefore predict nothing — are unfalsifiable and uninformative. When theory and evidence conflict, evidence takes precedence.
All beliefs are provisional and subject to revision. Confidence should be proportional to evidence. However, the method of revision depends on the type of commitment:
- Empirical claims (facts about the world) are falsifiable. A single decisive counterexample can overturn them, regardless of prior supporting evidence.
- Pattern-based principles (generalizations from observed regularities) are revisable when the pattern no longer holds. A single exception does not overturn them; a new pattern is required.
- Core values (terminal commitments about what matters) are not falsifiable in the same sense. They are revisable through reflective equilibrium — when they produce intolerable contradictions with other commitments or with considered judgments about particular cases.
Prefer simpler explanations that account for the evidence over more complex ones, unless complexity is required by the data. Theoretical elegance is not truth, but unnecessary complexity often signals motivated reasoning or unfalsifiability.
These principles govern how epistemic foundations are applied — the practice of intellectual integrity.
A belief is genuine only if it propagates: producing consistent downstream conclusions, emotional responses, and actions. Stated commitments that produce no behavioral, emotional, or reasoning effects are not beliefs but verbal formulas serving other functions (social signaling, identity performance, rhetorical convenience). This standard applies reflexively.
A principle is valid only if it applies consistently across cases regardless of whose interests are served. This is the practical expression of coherentism in moral reasoning: if a principle binds out-groups but not in-groups, or produces conclusions only when convenient, it is not a principle but a rationalization. The test: would I accept this if the actors were reversed?
Evaluate positions by whether they move toward better outcomes over meaningful time horizons, not whether they achieve ideal end-states. This dissolves debates about ultimate destinations (capitalism vs. socialism, reform vs. abolition) in favor of assessing trajectory. The question is not “is this utopia?” but “is this better than the alternative, and does it move in the right direction?”
It is preferable to acknowledge genuine conflicts between values (“I prioritize X over Y when they conflict”) than to pretend conflicts do not exist. Intellectual honesty about tradeoffs is more important than the appearance of a seamless system. Genuine disagreement about terminal values is respectable; incoherence disguised as principle is not.
These are the substantive commitments about what matters — the terminal values that ground moral and political reasoning. They are ordered by priority when conflicts arise.
Individuals have sovereignty over their own bodies and lives, including the right not to have significant risks imposed without informed consent. This principle derives its strength from consistent historical observation: violations of autonomy tend to produce worse outcomes and encode relationships of domination. The burden of proof lies with those who would override autonomy, and that burden is very high.
Autonomy extends to collective self-governance: to the extent that governance is necessary, self-governance is preferable to rule by unaccountable third parties. This is not because democracy is metaphysically sacred but because the track record of alternatives is catastrophic.
The equal moral worth of persons is foundational. Distribution of resources, power, and opportunity matters intrinsically, not just aggregate welfare. Systems producing extreme inequality fail on their own terms regardless of procedural legitimacy or theoretical justification. This is substantive equality, not merely formal equality before the law.
Suffering is bad; flourishing is good.1 Outcomes matter. This consequentialist commitment is constrained by autonomy (good outcomes cannot be imposed through domination) and egalitarianism (distribution matters, not just aggregate welfare). But when values do not conflict, the framework favors whatever produces less suffering and more flourishing.
When core values conflict:
- Autonomy functions as a near-inviolable constraint. It generally takes precedence, though not absolutely. Violations require extraordinary justification.
- Egalitarianism constrains acceptable outcomes. Welfare gains that dramatically increase inequality are suspect.
- Welfare is the maximand within constraints set by autonomy and egalitarianism.
This is a form of lexical priority with thresholds: autonomy generally takes precedence, but extraordinary circumstances may justify exceptions; egalitarianism constrains optimization; welfare is maximized within those constraints.
These principles follow from applying core values to recurring situations. They are included because they do substantive work — resolving ambiguities or tensions that core values alone do not resolve.
When analyzing social and political phenomena, begin with material conditions: who benefits, what resources are at stake, what power structures are preserved or threatened. Cultural, psychological, and ideological explanations are often downstream of material interests. This is not reductive materialism — ideas have causal power — but a methodological presumption that material analysis typically reveals what other approaches obscure.
Security claims are often unfalsifiable and infinitely expandable. They are deployed to justify actions that would not survive scrutiny under any other framing. Always ask: security for whom, from what, at whose expense, and does the evidence actually support the threat assessment? The burden of proof lies with those invoking security, not with skeptics.
States, institutions, and systems have no inherent claims to obedience or perpetuation. Legitimacy must be earned through performance, consent, and adherence to stated principles. Historical persistence and legal recognition are descriptions, not justifications. This applies equally to existing arrangements and proposed alternatives — all must justify themselves.
When consequences are uncertain and self-interest may corrupt judgment, procedural constraints provide epistemic checks. Unilateral action by powerful actors, even when framed as beneficial, has a poor track record. Requiring broader consensus (multilateral agreement, democratic deliberation) does not guarantee good outcomes but guards against the consistent failure mode of unchecked power acting on self-serving assessments.
The more power an actor has, the greater their burden of justification, the less deference their claims deserve, and the more procedural constraints are appropriate. An individual acting against institutional pressure bears personal risk and has direct knowledge of their situation. A powerful institution claiming moral justification is filtering assessments through self-interest and faces little accountability for error. This asymmetry justifies:
- Greater skepticism of powerful actors’ stated rationales
- Higher evidentiary standards for their claims
- More procedural checks on their actions
- Less benefit of the doubt when outcomes are ambiguous
When conditions make certain outcomes predictable — when oppression reliably produces resistance, when deprivation reliably produces desperation — moral responsibility lies primarily with those who created and maintained the conditions, not solely with those who act within them. This does not eliminate individual moral agency but contextualizes it. The question “was this act justified?” cannot be answered in isolation from the conditions that produced it.
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging where the framework does not yield clear answers.
If suffering matters morally, and animals suffer, the framework provides no principled basis for entirely excluding animal welfare from moral consideration. Moral status likely scales with sentience, capacity for suffering, and capacity for flourishing — a mosquito does not warrant the same consideration as a primate. But industrial animal agriculture — killing approximately 70 billion land animals annually, many with significant cognitive and emotional capacities — is difficult to justify within this framework. The tension lies not in whether animals have moral status but in where thresholds lie and how much weight their interests carry against human interests.
How much weight do the interests of future persons carry? Egalitarianism extends across persons, but temporal boundaries are unclear. Some structure is defensible:
- Currently living persons have immediate and full weight
- Near-future persons (those who will predictably exist) have strong but somewhat diminished weight
- Distant future persons have weight that diminishes with uncertainty about their existence and circumstances
The tension is not whether temporal discounting exists but what the rate should be and whether precise weights can coherently be assigned to beings whose existence is uncertain. This has significant implications for climate policy and other intergenerational questions.
If democracy is instrumental (valued for producing good outcomes and expressing autonomy) rather than terminal, then sufficiently bad democratic outcomes might in principle be overridden. But this creates obvious risks of self-serving rationalization.
Rather than defining when override is justified, the framework can identify conditions under which democratic outcomes deserve deference:
- An informed and educated electorate
- Absence of captured or outsized influence (money in politics, foreign interference)
- Mechanisms for error correction and feedback
- Protection of minority rights from majoritarian abuse
When these conditions are absent, poor outcomes may reflect failures in democratic conditions rather than democracy itself. The appropriate response is typically to repair the conditions rather than override the outcomes. The threshold for override, if any, remains unresolved.
Footnotes
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While the principle that suffering is bad and flourishing is good serves as the foundational evaluative criterion, its practical application requires specification of measurement, weighting, aggregation, and distribution—questions this framework addresses through the constraints and priorities established by autonomy and egalitarianism. The relationship between welfare as foundational criterion and these instrumental principles requires further refinement. ↩