Every major ethics system — Stoic, Kantian, utilitarian, virtue — assumes a kind of stable background reality. But physics doesn’t. Physics says the default direction of reality is decay. Disorder. Heat death.
So here’s what I’ve been sitting with for 30 years:
If entropy is the baseline, then conscious agency — the capacity to locally reverse disorder and create structure — isn’t just philosophically interesting. It’s the rarest phenomenon in the known universe. Which means destroying it isn’t just wrong. It’s a structural crime against reality itself.
That’s the foundation I built my framework on. Ethics derived from physics, not from religion, not from social contract, not from intuition.
Does anyone actually engage with thermodynamics as a moral baseline? Or are we still pretending physics and ethics live in separate rooms?
Entropy is the dualistic counterpart to negentropy, both sides of the same coin known as change. All ethics and morals are distinction based paradigms premised on how to deal with the nature of change:
How to maintain identity within change.
How to change identity so to be aligned with change.
How to institute change.
How to be changed.
Basically, the nature of moral and ethical systems are premised on how, why, where and what changes one is to be attentive too.
Thats not exactly true. There are a plethora of theories where the universe is modelled as cyclical.
Take the Big crunch that presupposes that all matter will eventually come back together, or the notion that even the heat death scenario will eventually collapse the time space framework till everything reverts to a 0 dimension dot just to explode yet again.
The fundamental problem is that matter cannot be erased.
It can be converted into energy and vice versa, but it cannot be simply “deleted”.
And if your premise is that nothing can be truly erased, then you will very quickly arrive at the conclusion that “nonexistence” is in fact not a function of reality, because it cannot not exist.
Reality has no moral framework. You cannot commit a crime against it.
2 weeks from now a wandering planet will impact with earth and everything will be goan. Who committed a crime then and against whom?
Heck, not even life itself has a moral framework.
The closest thing to that would be survival of the fittest, which really doesnt give half a damn about suffering or death, it just wants to go on perpetuating it’s own existence for the sake of existing.
And if its done, its done. There is no echo, no applause after the curtains fall.
Its a decent idea and perfectly valid, but value is still assigned by yourself. Not by the universe, not by reality, not by life or anything else.
The assumption that life is precious because its rare is a value system that is important to you, not to reality.
But from a societal perspective: Sure. This idea is beneficial. It comes to the same conclusion as many other before it, that life is precious and should be prioritized instead of disregarded.