Where I Stand — Working Positions

Status: Living document. This is the short reference for the philosophical commitments I currently hold and operate from. None of these are finished. All of them are defended elsewhere in the garden — this page exists so I (and anyone reading) can see the load-bearing pieces in one place without having to reconstruct them from essays and reading notes.

“Working” is the operative word. I don’t keep these because I’m certain. I keep them because they’re the ones that have survived contact with reality long enough to be worth writing down, and because naming them keeps me honest when I’m tempted to drift.

How to Read This Page

Each entry below is a one-paragraph distillation of a position, plus a pointer to the deeper note where I argue for it (or sit with the open questions about it). The entries are in roughly the order they get used — the metaphysical commitments at the top, the ethical commitments in the middle, the practical and personal commitments at the bottom.

If two positions seem to be in tension, that’s usually because they are. I don’t try to paper over the tensions. The open ones get their own sketches in Continued Study/position-sketches/.

1. Active & Collective Absurdism

The position. The universe is indifferent. It does not hand out meaning, owe us answers, or care whether we suffer. Meaning is not discovered — it’s created, by us, in the act of choosing to push the boulder. The “active” part: rebellion against the absurd is not contemplative. It’s the choice to keep going. The “collective” part: that rebellion is not a private spiritual exercise. It’s the joint struggle to build a more just and compassionate world alongside other people who are also struggling. I built the “collective” piece into my framework before I had read any de Beauvoir; she is the one who later showed me why it isn’t optional — freedom without solidarity is a contradiction, not a missing virtue.

Where this lives. Active and Collective Absurdism · See also 1. The Architecture of an Absurd Morality and the de Beauvoir section of Reading Notes Dostoevsky and de Beauvoir.

Useful as a check against. Despair, retreat into private spirituality, the Underground Man’s curdled lucidity, and the temptation to treat philosophy as a therapy practiced alone in a room.

2. Moral Relativism (with the Open Weight Problem)

The position. Morality is a human-invented technology for cooperation, not a set of cosmic facts I am discovering. It emerged from evolution, biology, and the long social work of building lives together. There is no transcendent moral order, no Platonic Good waiting to be perceived correctly, no divine ledger keeping score. And yet — when I look at a child whose health/education outcomes are predicted better by their zip code than by their genetics, the wrongness of that arrangement does not feel like a personal preference. It lands with the force of something tracked, not something I chose to mind. My metaethics doesn’t fully account for the weight my moral convictions carry.

Where this lives. The Weight Problem is the dedicated sketch for this tension. I expect Nussbaum’s capability approach and de Beauvoir’s account of freedom-as-relational to give me better tools for it; I don’t expect a clean reconciliation any time soon, and I’m not pretending one exists.

Useful as a check against. Both flavors of bad faith — the smug realist move of pretending I have access to moral facts I haven’t earned, and the lazy relativist move of pretending I don’t actually hold convictions with weight.

3. Flourishing as a Luxury

The position. Aristotelian eudaimonia, Stoic virtue, philosophical practice, the cultivation of character — all of these are real and worth pursuing. They are also luxury goods, in the technical sense that they require material and cognitive foundations that are not equally distributed. A child who is hungry, scared, or sick is not in a position to “cultivate virtue.” A person who is one missed paycheck from homelessness is not in a position to practice the discipline of assent. Any philosophy that treats flourishing as a matter of pure will — Stoic, Aristotelian, neoliberal, or otherwise — is either naive about the conditions it presupposes or actively complicit in pretending those conditions don’t matter. The Rawlsian veil of ignorance gets me to the same conclusion from a different angle: no rational agent designing a society from behind the veil would design one in which the foundations of flourishing are distributed by lottery of birth.

Where this lives. Argued through 2. A Secular Foundation for the Good Life, 2. Family Society State - Aristotelian Secular Ethics, and the 6_An_Unexamined_Life_-_Final_Reflection essay. The thesis page itself (Flourishing as a Luxury Thesis) is currently a stub I should fill in.

Useful as a check against. Bootstraps narratives, blame-the-individual moral framings of structural failure, and any ethics that imagines its agents in a frictionless vacuum without bodies, zip codes, or hungry kids.

Caution. This thesis can become a sophisticated way of writing people off — “they haven’t had the conditions to develop critical thinking” can be true and a way to feel structurally aware rather than contemptuous. The Underground Man’s retreat dressed up in better clothes. I have to keep watching for that. The check is in Reading Notes Dostoevsky and de Beauvoir.

4. Stoic Toolkit, Not Stoic Metaphysics

The position. I take the practical methods the Stoics developed — the discipline of assent (the gap between impression and judgment), the dichotomy of control (sort everything by whether it’s actually yours to act on), premeditatio malorum (premeditation of adversity), the daily examination, the practice of catching yourself failing and gently dragging yourself back — without buying the metaphysics underneath them. The classical Stoics grounded the whole apparatus in the Logos, a divine rational order of the cosmos that they believed they were aligning themselves with. I don’t believe in that order. I believe the methods work anyway, because they’re pointed at facts about how human attention, emotion, and judgment actually function — facts that are true whether or not the universe is a rational whole. Marcus Aurelius is the one I keep returning to, partly because of the methods and partly because the Meditations read like the journal of a man who keeps catching himself failing at the same handful of things. That’s the practice working.

Where this lives. Threaded through the entire Continued Study folder; most explicit in Practice Really Hearing- Marcus Aurelius, My Father, and Learning to Shut Up and the metacognition discussion in the CNS Treatment blog draft.

Useful as a check against. The temptation to either reject Stoicism wholesale because of its theology or to swallow it whole because the methods work. Take the tools, leave the cosmology.

5. Secular Atheist, Not Militant

The position. I’m an atheist. I was raised in a household where Christianity was nominally claimed but never practiced, which gave me space to arrive at my own conclusions, and the conclusions I arrived at are that the religious accounts of the universe don’t survive scrutiny and don’t need to be true for human meaning to be real. I’m not interested in evangelizing against religion. I’m not interested in scoring points off believers, or in pretending my own metaphysical commitments are more “rational” in some clean sense than theirs. I am interested in being honest about what I think and why, and in extending the same honesty to anyone who wants to talk about it.

Where this lives. Implicit throughout the Essays; mentioned in 2. Family Society State - Aristotelian Secular Ethics and the de Beauvoir reading notes.

Useful as a check against. New Atheist–style contempt, which I find both philosophically lazy and practically corrosive in exactly the way Marcus Aurelius warned about. Contempt makes you stupid. It replaces curiosity with smugness, and smugness is just unreflective certainty in a different costume.

6. Father-Centered Ethics

The position. My daughter is the center of my ethical universe in a way that no abstract principle can outrank. This is not a deduction I arrived at from a moral framework. It is the fact from which my moral framework has to make sense, or fail. If a philosophy tells me that strict impartiality requires me to weigh her well-being equally against the well-being of strangers, that philosophy has discovered a fact about itself — that it’s not livable for me, and I suspect not livable for most of the people who claim to hold it. The honest move is to say so up front and build the rest of the house around it. The work of my ethical life is to extend the moral seriousness I feel for her outward, to other people’s children, to other people’s lives — not to dilute what I feel for her down to some impartial average. That outward extension is where solidarity comes from. It’s also where my version of Flourishing as a Luxury is grounded: I want every child to have what I want her to have.

Where this lives. Explicit in 2. Family Society State - Aristotelian Secular Ethics. Threaded through almost everything I write because she is in the room (literally and metaphorically) for almost everything I write.

Useful as a check against. Any framework that treats love as a bias to be corrected rather than as data about what kind of creature is doing the philosophizing. Also useful as a check against my own intellectual drift: if a position I’m working out can’t survive being applied to her, that’s a tell that I’ve gone wrong somewhere.

What’s Missing From This Page (On Purpose)

A theory of free will. I don’t have one I’m satisfied with. I’m a soft-determinist in practice and a “the question is probably ill-posed” agnostic in theory, and I’m not going to dignify that with a numbered position until I’ve done more work on it.
An aesthetics. I have strong opinions about art, music, and writing, but they don’t yet form a defensible position that belongs on a page like this one.
A complete metaethics. See entry 2. The whole point of The Weight Problem is that I don’t have one yet.
A political philosophy. The seeds are in entries 1, 3, and 6 but I haven’t written the integrating piece yet. When I do it’ll get its own entry here.

When to Update This Page

When a position genuinely changes (not when I have a passing doubt — when I no longer hold the position the way it’s written here).
When a tension between two positions resolves, sharpens, or moves to its own sketch.
When a missing position from the section above gets enough work behind it to be added.
When something I read forces a revision I hadn’t expected — that’s exactly the kind of thing this page exists to track.

This page is supposed to be honest, not stable. Stability would mean I’d stopped thinking.