After years of study, consolidation, destruction, rebuilding, shifting, redefining….it eventually stops, I promise. It doesn’t go on forever, for all intents and purposes. Functionally we don’t have to know everything to know enough. We can know what is good, simply by knowing enough.

Studying objective reality, watching the consequences of subjectively driven beings setting certain principles but failing to evaluate the consequences of their insistence drove me to investigate to understand.

Life itself is the true currency, and it emerged deterministically before experience. We participate in it, but the largest most important share of this ordering engine is determinism. Chains of contingency that started toppling thousands / millions / billions of years ago. We can pick up on this through common sense and a compiled knowledgebase.

Our morality is a human morality. Our ethics a human ethics. Our human ethics are driven by attributes that both afford some lateral causal power, as well as an ever-present shifting determinism that constrains. Our common sense tells us life itself is rare and determined to emerge by factors beyond our control. Our agency was delivered to us by deterministic contingencies that built up before the inevitable emergence of our sense experience. Your agent apparatus has a deterministic individuality fixed spatiotemporally. You have no choice but to be a quantified individual.

Your individuality is determined, but, the determined physical reality you’ve been unleashed into affords you some choice and some freedom. It’s not absolute, nor is it perfectly distributed. We can seek out goals that give us more freedoms, or fall into holes that limit it again. We can understand all the different potential possibilities over at r/trolleyproblem….😁…if you want to torture yourself.

After years of distillation, reforming, renaming, recategorization I came to this final form to show how Universal Humanism is founded through determinism. This is an attempt to show how morality, ethics, justice, goodness as well as evil emerge as a needle moving back and forth between The Preservation of Life and the destruction of it.

I. Preservation of Life (Do what you should.) The only self-sustaining endpoint. Does not require the failure of others to function. Scales from the individual to the civilizational without contradiction. Every other attractor depends on this one existing somewhere in the system to survive.

II. Selfishness (Do what you can.) Coherent at the individual level but parasitic at scale. Requires a cooperative substrate it does not contribute to. Functions only while others don't adopt it universally. A free rider on Preservation of Life. Collapses into either the first attractor or mutual destruction when universalized.

III. Ignorance (Not a position at all.) The raw default state. The unexamined life. Most people spend most of their lives here, drifting toward whichever attractor their environment selects for.

The hierarchy is not preference. It is logical stability. Each attractor below the first is less coherent than the one above it.

I’ve been through the gauntlet myself. We’re all born into a state of ignorance in which our local social environment moves in and dominates our minds. We then have to do the work to “Question Everything.” But, questioning everything as an unending principle leads you to, and fixes you at relativism. When you have your gardening space free of invasive weeds, then it’s time to start experimenting and watching the consequence of your actions.

Some never begin the process of thinking for themselves as individuals. As a matter of consequence, children raised in good areas by parents who are aware do the right thing as a matter of coincidence to the individual child. It’s less about choice and more about determinism in the beginning. The more awareness we gain, the more capability we will have in outlier situations to do the right thing.

You are one and I am one. You can kill me and I can kill you. We live in a world of limited resources. This is the situation that was delivered to us by determinism and destined to happen before any living human being today, and their sense capabilities even existed. This is the universally determined system that our morality, ethics, justice and goodness emerge from. Our morality is human morality. Our ethics is a human ethics. Our justice a human justice. Yes, it does extend to the rest of life, but what hope do we have to understand the larger order if we reject even the dividing lines that we were given deterministically. We’d be banished to relativism…and I hate to say…deservedly so.

We all share the same needs, and we share the same limited system. No single individual created the system, so, what right does somebody else have to determine whether you should live or die. It’s implied we all have a right to our lives, and individuals are ends in themselves. If you can accept this, you’re on the first step to understanding that the endgame is universality and respect for every individual’s right to justice and fairness, starting at the level of necessity.