You don't find anything ethical because you are not looking at the question of an ethical foundation. — Constance

Please share this firm ground with me, so that I may gain understanding. — Pieter R van Wyk

It is exactly this foundation, this firm ground, that you claim exists, that I am looking for.

I do not deny the validity of the question posed by this thread: What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? You do not refute nor negate my answer, but keep on insisting that the question is the fundamental question of the study of ethics. If it could help I will stipulate: this question is the very fundamental question of the study of ethics. My argument is that, even after thousands of years of study, this study of ethics have not found an answer to this question - by proposing an answer that is apparently outside the ambit of the study of ethics - therefore, apparently, not to be considered.

Let's consider the right or wrong of the decision of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as a salient example. My argument is that there are absolutely nothing ethical (right or wrong) about this decision. It was made purely on political and economic considerations. The horrible deaths and suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima versus the deaths and suffering of a million more US soldiers and the salient possibility of bankrupting the US economy.

Consider: decisions risking their own lives to hide runaway slaves from a posse of slavers or to hide Jews / homosexuals from gangs of Nazis ... or families of murder victims opposing the executions of their murderers ... — 180 Proof

Any person or group of persons can make the decision to disagree with current politics and try to change it or somehow to circumvent the politics that they do not agree with:

• By hiding runaway slaves or even start a war where brother kills brother in order to change a political expedience that was 'right' for some and 'wrong' for others.
• By hiding Jews/homosexuals from gangs of Nazis even though millions of people tacitly supported national-socialism - even to this very day.
• These families of murder victims that oppose the execution of murderers live and presumably voted in those countries and states where murderers are executed.
• By organising riots, throwing stones and burning cars if the electorate has re-elected a 'king' to the Whitehouse.

Anyone can presume some chimerical 'foundation' or 'firm ground' on which this question can be contemplated, then call it ethics. We humans have conducted politics for as long as philosophy has been studied; we still have wars, and poverty, and a growing unbalance between ourselves and our environment. Perhaps it could benefit us to relook our very foundation ... to confirm this assumed firm ground on which we have build our civilisation. Consider:

"Philosophy:= The study of questions without answers. Trying to give an exact meaning of an ambiguous notion in terms of other ambiguous words - at its very best merely an interesting conversation." How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence

We all live under some political dispensation that we sometimes agree with and sometimes not. We can endeavour to change this dispensation but we cannot take it away - it is exactly this dispensation that props up our very civilisation. That gave us some scope to even discuss the very question of what is right and what is wrong.

I am right. You are wrong. Because I say so.

Infallable!

I am right. You are wrong. Because I say so.

Infallable! — I like sushi

If infallibility is self-declared, then I, too, am infallible - and I say you’re wrong. Now what?

What do you mean by "God is a moral concept"? (or by "moral concept' itself?) — 180 Proof

Ask then, what is it for something to be moral? This takes the matter to moral actualities, and strong examples are the most poignant, so, a question: Does the prima facie moral prohibition on torturing others sustain in the case where utility favors torture? Of course, one has to look at the case itself, the manner of torture, the consequences and the nature of the outcome, the precedents for this kind of thing, the culpability of the tortured, and so on, but this very important discussion presupposes a philosophical issue that never really shows up here, which is the question of the nature of what is at stake. This is what you might call an armchair question, fit for philosophy only in the "leisure time" apart from pressing issues. What makes something moral? Not whether an action IS moral or not, but what it is, and for this we go into the issue of torturing, ask what is THERE that warrants the term's application. The term applies IFF there is value at stake. The issue of value takes one to an analysis, and an analysis is a reduction, a putting aside of of incidentals, the merely factual or merely states of affairs, and so what is a "mere" fact? Moonlight is reflected sunlight; this pen is smaller than a typical watermelon. One can see why the term 'mere' is used here, for facts as such carry no significance. They are not even trivial, for the menig of a fact lies entirely in the context of it use, and so the critical question emerges, set side by side, a moral proposition and a merely factual proposition both possess factual content, and when this content is removed the factual proposition vanishes, but the moral proposition does not. This residual survivor is the, in this case, the ethical bad: torture is painful and pain is bad.

Pain is, of course, a fact when it exists, but its facticity is exceeded by its existence, which simply means something that hurts is not a proposition in so far as there is hurting, not exhausted by the potentiality of propositional possibilities. As Rorty once put it, there are no propositions over there in those bushes. Of course, he was a qualified naturalist (a pragmatist, like Dewey, whose basic thinking is pragmatics, but who also affirmed the natural sciences to be, well, the only wheel that rolls. I do not buy this at all, but here his comment is useful).

Now, your question about God being a moral concept has some ground. Language possibilities constitute a finite totality of meanings (beingS? That is one way to speak of this) and the pain of being tortured stands apart from this, outside of this, and therefore outside of finitude itself, after all, finitude is determined by the determinateness of this very totality. The long account of this is very long indeed, and cannot be brought to light here. The short version is this: morality deals with that dimension of our existence where our pains and blisses are, and everything contained therein, and the language that speaks of this is finite, and this finitude of language is finitude itself, and what there is that is not language, the pains and blisses, belongs to eternity, if you can stand the term, which simply means it is NOT language. Pain is not language, exceeds the finitude of language's imposition of meanings and delimitations. It is, as John Mackie put it (in order to deny it), in the fabric of the world, issuing from Being as such, or from "the world" in the way early Wittgenstein meant this term in his Tractatus, as well as value, ethics, aesthetics. Pain, and this dimension of our existence, is transcendental, there before us, yet outside of categorical possiblities.

Thus, God is a term the essence of which is found here, in this radical indeterminacy of our value-existence. All things belongs to this indeterminacy, as well as to the conceptual determinacy brings understanding to its threshold, but ethics is sui generis because value is ontologically sui generis vis a vis all other analytics of Being. What is important in this absurdly brief account is that metaethics rests with metavalue. Our ethics is a metaethics at this level of inquiry. This is the ground for religion and its God, the real reason why people had to come up with all of those narratives about Jesus, Zeus, Odin, and the rest: they were "thrown into" moral indeterminacies that by their own nature reach out to remedy, to a meta-redemption and a meta-consummation, which is just what we are talking about when we say a person should or should do something in a given moral case, but the matter being contained within the finitude of language.

Thank you for such a rich and thoughtful elaboration. I deeply respect the metaphysical continuity you describe - from Husserl through Heidegger to Henry - and your insistence that all talk of “reality” already presupposes consciousness or Dasein as its horizon. I don’t reject that lineage; I simply ask a different kind of question within it.

Where you pursue the whatness of Being, I’m drawn to the ought that emerges within Being: the affective and ethical textures through which existence discloses itself. When a child is burned or a slave is whipped, what matters first is not that Being manifests itself in suffering, but that suffering calls us to respond. This “call” is not derivative of ontology; it is equiprimordial with it.

That’s why I invoked Hitchens - not as a metaphysician, but as an ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre. His critique may lack ontological precision, but it exposes the pathic structure of moral life: how conceptual fictions (like “God” or “sin”) can channel either empathy or cruelty. The moment consciousness awakens to that relation, philosophy is already in motion.

So when you ask, “What is ethics?”, I would answer: ethics is the self-manifestation of Being as concern for the Other. It is not an add-on to ontology, nor a sociological derivative, but the dimension in which Being feels its own vulnerability. Perhaps that’s where our projects intersect - your ontological monism and my existential compassionism are two ways of naming the same intimacy between consciousness and value.

I do not deny the validity of the question posed by this thread: What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? You do not refute nor negate my answer, but keep on insisting that the question is the fundamental question of the study of ethics. If it could help I will stipulate: this question is the very fundamental question of the study of ethics. My argument is that, even after thousands of years of study, this study of ethics have not found an answer to this question - by proposing an answer that is apparently outside the ambit of the study of ethics - therefore, apparently, not to be considered. — Pieter R van Wyk

Well, Pieter, I cannot help but notice that your response makes no reference at all to the things I said. Errr, curious.

I gave examples of ethical decisions that were politically defiant and not "expedient" – ethics is not as shallow (or conformist) as you suggest. Read Laozi, Kongzi, Epicurus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Spinoza ... Philippa Foot et al.

Well, Pieter, I cannot help but notice that your response makes no reference at all to the things I said. Errr, curious. — Constance

Errr, do you have an answer to the question (What is right and what is wrong and how do we know)?

I have read, carefully, all the things you said and did not found your answer. If your answer is: it is the study of ethics; my follow up question was: what is the foundation, the firm ground, of ethics, that you claim exists? A question you have not answered, yet.

I gave examples of ethical decisions that were politically defiant and not "expedient" – ethics is not a shallow (or conformist) as you suggest. Read Laozi, Kongzi, Epicurus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Spinoza ... Philippa Foot et al. — 180 Proof

I understand your point, but then you did point out that some decisions are political defiant and others are political not-defiant. Which then begs the question: By who or by what authority can a decision be made that such a decision is ethical or not? Would that be Laozi, Kongzi, Epicurus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Spinoza, Philippa Foot or et al?

I totally agree.

Where you pursue the whatness of Being, I’m drawn to the ought that emerges within Being: the affective and ethical textures through which existence discloses itself. When a child is burned or a slave is whipped, what matters first is not that Being manifests itself in suffering, but that suffering calls us to respond. This “call” is not derivative of ontology; it is equiprimordial with it. — Truth Seeker

I agree with this priority of the ought of moral responsibility, but I find a disagreement in the analytic priority, meaning that one's ability to empathize with another's suffering presupposes the "whatness" of the one that is actually suffering as well as the one empathizing.. Those affective and ethical textures are of the self, and they can only come into play in a relation if one's self's moral constitution is fit to do so. When I mistreat another, I mistreat an another self, and the way for an understanding of this to come to light leads inward. There is a very thoughtful discussion on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQUdSpPv5Zw&t=68s . If this doesn't show up as a link (I really don't know how to do this), then it is on youtube at: Heidegger on the Question of Being and the Origin of Language. With Ivo De Gennaro
It is a discussion to the ground of ethics (though it doesn't talk like this) in the primordialilty of our existence. The German haltung, this notion of first "holding" oneself in the world is argued by Gennero explaining Heidegger foundational thought, and in this holding, this sustaining one's own existence, is PRIOR to mitsein, being with others. It begins with a short paper by Barnett Newman, the abstract expressionist of th 1940's, called The First Man Was an Artist, and it presents the idea that before we were an ethical being, we first were crying out to the world, "holding" fast to our own existence. Of course, the objection would be that actually, to speak in a historical/evolutionary way, they came into being together: we were never isolated, even in the most rudimentary settings of our existence, from each other, and the crises that overwhelmed us were inherently communicatively received, that is, it was a WE that received this world and the receiving was a social phenomenon. On the other hand, this haltung: for Heidgger, the very content of our existence is shared, which he calls "the they", and this shows dasein to be structurally public, but note this fascinating distinction: while all I know and can bring forth belongs to a shared existence, the totality of language and culture, the crucible, if you will, is where actualities manifest is in the singularity of one's dasein. This is why thinking about ethics as a first philosophy must begin with dasein, with the self, for this is the only actuality there is, and again, this is really the only the "place" there IS. Talk about others is talk about other "selves". See e.g., Edith Stein in her Problem of Empathy, (which is a littel tedious, but she does go into detail about the self's primacy).

Thank you, Constance - your response beautifully captures the Heideggerian intuition that any ethical relation presupposes a being who can be related. I agree that empathy or responsibility cannot arise in a vacuum; the one who responds must first be capable of self-holding - of sustaining their own openness to Being. In that sense, the haltung De Gennaro discusses is indeed prior in the analytic order, even if, as you note, not necessarily in the historical or evolutionary one.

Where I was pressing the “ought” as equiprimordial with Being, I didn’t mean that ethics could float free of ontology. Rather, I wanted to resist the tendency - especially in some readings of Heidegger - to treat the moral call as a secondary derivative of Dasein’s self-understanding. The cry of the wounded child doesn’t wait for us to complete an ontological analysis before it claims us. The affective disclosure of suffering and the ontological disclosure of being are simultaneous moments of one event - what Levinas might call the face of the Other breaking through ontology.

So perhaps the priority I meant was phenomenological, not logical: in lived experience, the ethical summons arrives first, even if conceptually we can only make sense of it against the backdrop of selfhood and worldhood. The “holding” of oneself in Being and the “being claimed” by another’s vulnerability may be two aspects of the same existential structure - the self as simultaneously sustaining and exposed.

Your point about the crucible of Dasein as the “only actuality there is” resonates deeply. Yet what strikes me is that this actuality - this singular locus of disclosure - is always already permeated by others. Even our most solitary “holding” is linguistically and affectively mediated. In that sense, the first cry of the artist or the infant is both self-affirming and world-summoning. It is a reaching outward that presupposes no prior metaphysics of self or society, only the raw openness of existence calling to itself through others.

Perhaps ethics, then, begins not after ontology but as its trembling edge - where Being feels its own finitude and vulnerability through us.

That’s why I invoked Hitchens - not as a metaphysician, but as an ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre. His critique may lack ontological precision, but it exposes the pathic structure of moral life: how conceptual fictions (like “God” or “sin”) can channel either empathy or cruelty. The moment consciousness awakens to that relation, philosophy is already in motion. — Truth Seeker

"Ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre" is not clear to me. The father of phenomenology is Husserl, but the grandfather is Kant. Prior to this is I assume what you are referring to; or am I mistaken? But what could this be? And ontology, you know, this term is very explicitly defined in Heidegger's thought, and this carries through to the present discussions. What I have read of Hitchens, it seems he keeps his statements about ontology confined to the "ontic" matters of general affairs, which is found in his references to biology, physics, and naturalism, and this amounts to an ontology of physicalism or materialism, and this is the kind of thing that has not yet crossed over into a phenomenological ontology. Am I wrong about this?

God and sin as conceptual fictions: this is, of course, by my thinking, right, and certainly these keep alive a great many other fictions that you, Hitchens and I would like to see disappear from culture, as with the traditional beliefs in heaven and hell, or that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, or that belief that Jesus is God on earth is the only way to salvation, and so many other things grounded in ancient dogma that have such a stubborn hold on popular thinking.

My thinking is that philosophy IS metaphysics, and it is kept in the dark mostly because of the modernist movement away from foundational issues. Ask a scientific naturalist, which we all are in the general dealings with the world, about such issues and you will get a blank stare. For thousands of years conversation would be spontaneously forthcoming as the metaphysical threshold was filled with narrative, but now, these "grand narratives" are falling away, and the residuum is the "nothing" of epistemological, ontological and ethical nihilism. Critical attacks on these narratives has been essential, and part of a necessary progress, but what is not understood is that metaphysics is IN the physics, not beyond it, but is IT ITSELF. The word that comes to mind is sublation which is famously used by Hegel to describe the essence of dialectics: the at once overcoming and preserving of the ordinary, such that what is the language that creates the p[ossiblities for more more penetrating analysis is also the language IN WHICH the these possibilities are realized. I prefer to think f this in terms of the metaphor and irony: how are new meanings produced out of an existing delimited language that cannot speak of anything beyond the horizon of its meanings? The question goes, of course, to our own elaborative and elucidative language taken for granted. What used to be standard is now greatly overcome, augmented and displaced, and the nature of this overcoming lies with the openness of language itself: any and all language devices stand never by themselves, but in collective diffusion of their collective meanings. (The paradox of Derrida: the word 'collective' is itself an emerging "trace" which cannot be pinned in any way: the trance speaks of the trace and this occurs within the trace. Language, in this radical hermeneutics [Caputo, see his Radical Hermeneutics a terrific pov on this], I try to argue, describe, is utterly transcendental, it stands outside yet within; outside in that it is an "index" to this reality imposition because through language we are torn from mundanity. The question!, any question, the question as such, is freedom itself, and once it is exercised, language opens, and ultimately it opens to Being, and such is the analytic ground of our existence, that profound indeterminacy discovered only in the determinateness of the metaphorical and ironic possiblities of the totality in which we all find ourselves.

This thinking is a bit out there, I know. But then, you do take things in with understanding. Impressive.

Thank you, Constance - your reply is characteristically rich and generous. I’ll try to clarify what I meant by “ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre,” and then engage the larger point about metaphysics, language, and sublation.

By that phrase, I didn’t mean to credit Hitchens with inventing phenomenology before Husserl, but to suggest that - without a phenomenological vocabulary - he was already doing something akin to ethical phenomenology: describing the pathic structure of moral experience as it shows itself. His critique of the “God-concept” exposes how the affective dynamics of guilt, obedience, and awe shape lived consciousness. In that sense, he was tracing the phenomenology of moral emotions, not their ontology. Of course, he stayed at the ontic level, as you rightly note - within a naturalistic frame - but even there he revealed how language and power constitute the moral field. I saw in that an unthematized phenomenological insight: the “givenness” of moral experience before metaphysics.

I completely agree that this doesn’t yet cross into Heidegger’s ontological project, where Being itself is what gives the horizon of moral and cognitive sense. But perhaps that’s where Hitchens’s critique is instructive by contrast: his limitation to the ontic makes visible the need for a deeper account of why such moral structures appear at all. In other words, his lack of ontology points us back toward ontology.

Your reflections on metaphysics as the inner life of physics resonate strongly with me. The modern impulse to banish metaphysics misunderstands that physics already presupposes a metaphysical grammar: measurement, causality, time, identity. What Hegel calls sublation - the overcoming that preserves - captures precisely the movement I see in philosophy today: a self-surpassing language that still carries its inheritance. The physicist who speaks of “fields,” “vacua,” or “information” is already enmeshed in a metaphoric web that opens onto Being, whether acknowledged or not. In that sense, I share your view that metaphysics isn’t something beyond the empirical but the intelligible depth of the empirical itself.

And yes, Derrida’s trace completes that thought: every act of meaning both posits and defers, revealing an openness that no closure can finally master. The very question, as you beautifully put it, is freedom - not the possession of answers, but the trembling of language at the edge of its own horizon. Philosophy lives in that interval where language interrogates itself.

So perhaps where we converge is here: the ethical and the ontological are not two regions but two inflections of the same opening. The cry of the suffering child and the concept of Being are both ways the real addresses itself to us. Hitchens hears the cry and answers in moral outrage; Heidegger hears the silence of Being and answers in thought. Both responses, in their different registers, attest to the same fact: existence calls, and we must respond - whether with compassion, with questioning, or with both.

the ethical and the ontological are not two regions but two inflections of the same opening — Truth Seeker

What of Levinas' meontological notion of 'ethics as first philosophy' (from Totality and Infinity)?

Thank you very much for your excellent question. Levinas’s meontological move in Totality and Infinity is precisely what I had in mind when I spoke of the ethical and the ontological as “two inflections of the same opening.” For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy because it arises not within Being but before it - me ontos, beyond-Being. The face of the Other interrupts ontology’s self-enclosure; it calls me from a height I did not posit, demanding responsibility prior to any theoretical stance. In that sense, Levinas radicalizes Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness): I am not only thrown into Being but summoned beyond it.

Where I diverge slightly is in emphasis. Levinas’s meontology can sound like a complete rupture - an absolute outside to Being. I read it, rather, as the self-transcendence of Being itself, its capacity to exceed its own totalization through the ethical relation. In other words, the ethical call is not alien to ontology but its deepest disclosure: Being showing itself as vulnerable and relational. The “firstness” of ethics is not chronological or hierarchical but modal: the primordial tone of existence as care, exposure, and obligation.

If we hold these together - Heidegger’s ontological disclosure and Levinas’s ethical interruption - we glimpse a fuller picture: ontology opens the space for encounter; ethics keeps that space from closing into self-sufficiency. They are indeed two inflections of one openness - the event of meaning itself oscillating between comprehension and compassion.

That’s the sense in which I see Compassionism (my own evolving framework) as both ontological and ethical: Being is never a neutral substrate; it is always already an appeal to alleviate suffering. The “beyond-Being” that Levinas names as meontology is, for me, the pulse of compassion within Being - the refusal of indifference that makes the universe intelligible at all.

[O]ntology opens the space for encounter; ethics [even more than "love" pace Iris Murdoch/Plato] keeps that space from closing into self-sufficiency [solipsism, egoism, narcissism]. — Truth Seeker

:fire:

Yes, thanks for this insightful formulation.

You are most welcome.

Thank you very much for your excellent question. Levinas’s meontological move in Totality and Infinity is precisely what I had in mind when I spoke of the ethical and the ontological as “two inflections of the same opening.” For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy because it arises not within Being but before it - me ontos, beyond-Being. The face of the Other interrupts ontology’s self-enclosure; it calls me from a height I did not posit, demanding responsibility prior to any theoretical stance. In that sense, Levinas radicalizes Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness): I am not only thrown into Being but summoned beyond it.

Where I diverge slightly is in emphasis. Levinas’s meontology can sound like a complete rupture - an absolute outside to Being. I read it, rather, as the self-transcendence of Being itself, its capacity to exceed its own totalization through the ethical relation. In other words, the ethical call is not alien to ontology but its deepest disclosure: Being showing itself as vulnerable and relational. The “firstness” of ethics is not chronological or hierarchical but modal: the primordial tone of existence as care, exposure, and obligation. — Truth Seeker

Does this include non-human animals? Forgive me a few quesions as I find this difficult to follow - and I am unclear how ethics can arise in this way. Doesn't a capacity to describe ethics presuppose an account of what is?

What you have written also sounds highly abstract and metaphorical. How can one demonstrate that ethics is the “deepest disclosure” of Being?

These are excellent questions - thank you for asking them.

Yes, I do intend the scope of the ethical call to include non-human animals, and indeed all sentient life. Levinas himself remained primarily anthropocentric - his face of the Other presupposes language and mutual address - but if we take the “face” not literally but as the phenomenon of vulnerability, then any being capable of suffering already presents that summons. The cry of a wounded animal, even without words, calls us to responsibility in precisely the sense Levinas describes: it demands a response before reflection or ontology. In that sense, ethics extends wherever suffering discloses itself. I am a vegan because I care about all sentient beings.

As for how ethics can “arise” in this way: I don’t mean that ethics emerges as a factual property within Being, but that in the event of encounter - when another’s vulnerability impinges on me - Being shows one of its fundamental modes: relational exposure. Ontology tells us what is; ethics tells us how being is with being. The claim that ethics is the “deepest disclosure” of Being is not empirical but phenomenological: it describes what experience reveals when we attend to its affective depth. We discover that to exist is already to be implicated in others’ existence. Ethics, then, is not an optional layer placed on top of ontology but the felt recognition that Being is never solitary substance but shared finitude.

To put it less abstractly: when we encounter pain - human or non-human - we do not first deduce an ethical rule; we are already moved. That movement of concern is the disclosure of Being’s relational core. Demonstration, in the logical sense, is replaced here by revelation through encounter: what Levinas calls the “saying” prior to the “said.” The ethical moment is not inferred from what-is but given with what-is; it’s how Being manifests its own openness.

I don’t mean that ethics emerges as a factual property within Being, but that in the event of encounter - when another’s vulnerability impinges on me - — Truth Seeker

Thanks for the clarification.

To put it less abstractly: when we encounter pain - human or non-human - we do not first deduce an ethical rule; we are already moved. That movement of concern is the disclosure of Being’s relational core. — Truth Seeker

Certainly, this seems true in the cultures I know. But what about cultures that appear deaf to the suffering of tribes not their own, those who cheerfully kill children? That too seems an authentic expression of human behaviour across millennia. Is it possible to determine which is the more natural relational core: the urge to conquer, maim, and vanquish, or the call for empathy? I’ve always assumed that with humans, it could go either way.

That’s a crucial question, and I agree that the record of our species reveals both tendencies in abundance: tenderness and atrocity, rescue and massacre. The human condition seems bifurcated between empathy and domination.

My claim that the movement of concern discloses Being’s relational core isn’t an empirical generalization about what humans always do; it’s a phenomenological statement about what moral experience means when it occurs. The fact that many ignore or suppress this responsiveness doesn’t make it less primordial - it only shows that consciousness can close itself against its own depth. The possibility of cruelty presupposes the capacity for empathy, just as lying presupposes language. One can negate compassion only because one already stands within the sphere where the other’s vulnerability matters.

Culturally and biologically, both impulses - aggression and care - have evolutionary roots. But phenomenologically, only care reveals relation as relation: the recognition that the other’s being concerns mine. Violence objectifies and thereby conceals that relation; compassion exposes it. In that sense, cruelty is not another “core” but a rupture, a refusal of disclosure. It flattens the encounter back into ontology without ethics.

So when I say compassion is the more natural relational core, I don’t mean it is the statistically dominant behaviour, but that it reveals the more fundamental truth of coexistence. Empathy is what allows coexistence to appear as such; conquest denies that appearance. The ethical call is fragile, easily drowned by fear, ideology, or tribal conditioning - but its fragility is part of its meaning: Being’s openness is not enforced, only offered.

In this light, Compassionism isn’t the claim that humans are compassionate, but that compassion names the deepest possibility of what it means to be. The conqueror and the caregiver are both human, but only the latter manifests what humanity is capable of when it fully hears its own ontological vocation.

I agree that the record of our species reveals both tendencies in abundance: tenderness and atrocity, rescue and massacre. — Truth Seeker

I often think this is like an Ouroboros....without atrocity we wouldn't discover self-sacrifice and healing. Can it be that both are necessary? (Personally I don't think so but it scans superficially).

I'm going to ask some tougher questions and I'm not intending to sound rude. :pray:

So when I say compassion is the more natural relational core, I don’t mean it is the statistically dominant behaviour, but that it reveals the more fundamental truth of coexistence. — Truth Seeker

But how do you demonstrate this? Isn't this just a statement of your belief rather than an evidence based claim?

In this light, Compassionism isn’t the claim that humans are compassionate, but that compassion names the deepest possibility of what it means to be. The conqueror and the caregiver are both human, but only the latter manifests what humanity is capable of when it fully hears its own ontological vocation. — Truth Seeker

But that only holds if you've already decided that compassion is better than conquest. That sounds more like a statement rooted in a nominal Christian value system. So how can you actually demonstrate that compassion is better? What makes it superior, philosophically or practically?

To me, you can reach your conclusion if you begin with the axiom that human wellbeing should be our goal and build from there. But that’s a choice you have to consciously make. I don’t think it’s self-evident.

I love your questions. Thank you for asking them. These are exactly the questions that matter, and you raise them with admirable clarity.

You’re right that “compassion is the more natural relational core” cannot be demonstrated in the same way one demonstrates an empirical law. It isn’t an evidential claim about frequency or dominance, but a phenomenological and pragmatic one about coherence. When we look at the range of human possibilities - cruelty, indifference, care - which mode most fully realizes the structure of relation itself? Only compassion recognizes the other as subject rather than instrument. Violence treats the other as object, thereby erasing relation. That erasure may succeed in practice, but conceptually it’s parasitic: to negate relation, it must first presuppose it.

As for “better,” I don’t mean “better” by inherited theology but by existential intelligibility. Compassion is better not because a God commands it, but because it sustains the very conditions under which meaning, community, and dialogue can exist. I am not a Christian. Please see: https://www.evilbible.com and https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com if you want to know why I am not a Christian. The moment we decide that conquest is equally valid, we undermine the shared world that makes any valuation - including the valuation of conquest - possible. Compassion, in that sense, is self-validating: it preserves the possibility of coexistence that all discourse presupposes. I am a vegan because of my compassion for all sentient beings. To say “better” at all implies that flourishing, not annihilation, carries weight. If we reject that, then we don’t just abandon compassion; we forfeit the basis for any normative distinction whatsoever. The nihilist and the sadist can live consistently only if they cease to ask why anything matters.

So I see Compassionism not as an ungrounded belief but as the minimal metaphysical condition for an intelligible world: if meaning is possible, some form of care must already be operative. The Ouroboros image you mention captures this beautifully - yes, suffering and healing seem entwined, but the loop only closes through response, not indifference. Without compassion, the circle breaks into chaos.

Without compassion, the circle breaks into chaos. — Truth Seeker

True ... and yet, yinyang-like, "compassion" presupposes "chaos" (just as every ceasefire presupposes a war), no?

Yes - beautifully put. Compassion does indeed presuppose chaos in the sense that it awakens in response to vulnerability, loss, pain, disease, injury, harm or disorder. Without a fracture, there would be no need for mending. In that way, compassion and chaos form a polarity rather than an opposition: compassion arises because there is chaos, yet it points beyond it.

But I’d add a nuance. While compassion depends on suffering to manifest, it doesn’t depend on it to exist in principle. Even in a perfectly harmonious world - if such a thing could be - the relational openness that makes compassion possible would still be the same ontological structure, only without wounds to heal. What we call “chaos” is the circumstance that reveals compassion, not the ground that creates it.

The yin-yang metaphor is apt if we take it dynamically: each side generates and limits the other. Chaos exposes finitude; compassion answers it. The two are rhythmically entangled, but not equal in aim. Chaos describes what is; compassion describes what can restore relation. In that sense, compassion is not the mirror of chaos but its transformation - the movement through which Being reclaims coherence from fragmentation.

:fire:

So I see Compassionism not as an ungrounded belief but as the minimal metaphysical condition for an intelligible world: if meaning is possible, some form of care must already be operative. The Ouroboros image you mention captures this beautifully - yes, suffering and healing seem entwined, but the loop only closes through response, not indifference. Without compassion, the circle breaks into chaos. — Truth Seeker

Thanks for your thoughtful response. Food for thought. I’ve generally held that my response to life is more of an aesthetic, emotivist one. I avoid systems and diligent rationality. The problem with this is that you mostly remove yourself from the discourse. What I have is how I feel about things; intuition and hardly a robust basis with which to convince others.

Despite this I find myself arguing with other members who seem to think they have an objective basis for their beliefs. Do you see yourself as a moral realist of a sort?

I understand the appeal of the aesthetic-emotive stance very well. There’s a kind of honesty in admitting that our first contact with value is felt, not deduced. What you describe as intuition is, I think, the raw material of any genuine ethics: the moment when reality moves us before we have a theory about why.

As for your question - whether I’m a moral realist - the answer depends on what kind of realism we mean. I’m not a metaphysical realist in the sense that “goodness” or “compassion” exist as freestanding entities somewhere in the universe. But I’m also not a pure subjectivist. My position is what might be called phenomenological or relational realism: values are not “out there” independent of minds, yet they are not arbitrary projections either. They arise in the space between beings, as the disclosure of what sustains or destroys relation.

In that sense, compassion isn’t an invented rule but an encountered reality - the felt structure of coexistence itself. When I harm another, I don’t merely break a social convention; I diminish the field of meaning that connects us. The “realness” of ethics lies in that experiential invariance: wherever sentient beings coexist, the possibilities of care and harm appear as objectively distinct modalities of relation.

So yes, I would say I’m a moral realist of a weak, experiential sort: ethics is not a cosmic property but a condition of intelligibility. We discover it the way we discover gravity - by noticing what happens when we ignore it.

Your aesthetic approach, far from being opposed to this, may actually be its most authentic expression. Feeling and intuition are the first phenomenology; reason arrives later to articulate what we already know.

In that sense, compassion isn’t an invented rule but an encountered reality - the felt structure of coexistence itself. When I harm another, I don’t merely break a social convention; I diminish the field of meaning that connects us. The “realness” of ethics lies in that experiential invariance: wherever sentient beings coexist, the possibilities of care and harm appear as objectively distinct modalities of relation. — Truth Seeker

:fire:

This conception of compassion reminds me even more of Buber (dialogic I-Thou) than Levinas (infinition of the Other) and almost naturalistic instead of just existential (e.g. – in ethics I think it's reasonable to trust "intuitions" (pre-cognitive biases) only to the degree they align with concrete circumstances).