A while back I posted here and got some genuinely useful pushback. I’ve been sitting with it.
Here’s where the argument has landed.
Most ethical systems are built on top of an unexamined starting position.
Divine command starts with a commander. Social contract starts with consent. Utilitarianism starts with “suffering is bad.” Even Kant — for all the rigor — starts with rationality as intrinsically binding. These aren’t derivations. They’re flags planted in pre-assumed ground, then defended brilliantly.
The question I’ve been working on: Is there a floor beneath all of those floors?
I think there is. And it comes from physics, not philosophy.
The short version:
The universe ran for approximately 9 billion years before a conscious being existed anywhere in it. All of it — every star, every galaxy, every particle — moved along a single trajectory: the default path of entropy. No selection. No redirection. Just the Flow.
Then something appeared that could select. That could look at the space of possible futures and make one actual.
That is what agency is, structurally. Not freedom from physical law. The functional utilization of it. The capacity to apply stored energy at bifurcation points — structural forks — and land in a future the universe wouldn’t have reached on its own.
Now here’s where ethics falls out of the physics:
Agents exist inside finite, entangled systems. The possibility space is shared and bounded. And agency is the only mechanism that generates new futures from that space.
Which means: actions that destroy the agency of other agents don’t just harm an individual — they permanently reduce what the whole system can become.
Domination isn’t merely wrong by moral preference. It’s a structural error. It collapses futures. It is, in the most literal sense, cosmologically wasteful.
The formal statement:
Agent i should not deliberately eliminate the agency of agent j — not because of an externally imposed rule, but because agency is the only mechanism that converts possibility into reality. A finite system that systematically destroys its own agency converges on a single outcome: maximum entropy. The heat death of its own possibility space.
Where I think this differs from the closest precedents:
Spinoza derived ethics from substance — but substance isn’t conscious, and the derivation doesn’t run through agency.
Kant derived ethical necessity from rationality — but rationality is still an assumption about what beings are, not a consequence of what the universe structurally requires.
This argument doesn’t start inside ethics at all. It starts with the physics of consciousness — what conscious beings are in the structure of a physical universe — and ethics falls out as a consequence.
The thing I haven’t fully resolved:
If this derivation holds, it generates a minimal ethics — a floor, not a ceiling. It tells you what you structurally cannot do without being a load-bearing error in the system. It doesn’t tell you everything you should do.
Is that enough? Or does a complete ethics require more than a floor?
That’s the question I’m still sitting with. Genuinely interested in where this breaks.
). But this appears to generate an ethical imperative for the individual agent in terms of its own survival or thriving, in terms of not hurting or curtailing its own existence or possible degrees of freedom, yet why must that same being see this imperative for itself as also a thing universally applied to every other being? I agree that it is applied like that, logically speaking, and as seen from the larger perspective of existence as such in terms of how you describe the totality as possessing a finite amount of agency and how this agency acts somewhat as the singular value. But… I also see it is possible or inevitable many entities will not make that step, will only derive the ethical imperative for themselves alone and not see a need to universalize it beyond their own selves.