Dilemmas
The atlas, applied.
57 contemporary questions, answered by the atlas's coordinates. For each, the 86 schools are sorted into stances by their attribute signatures — turning the catalogue into a reasoning tool you can open when the question comes up. See the coverage matrix to map which attributes each dilemma exercises, or the argument map to see how stances on one dilemma entail stances on others.
What happens to "you" when you die?
Whether anything of you persists — and in what sense — depends on what you take a person to be.
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Do you really choose?
If the brain is a physical system and physical systems are governed by laws, then every choice is also a chain of causes — which raises the question of what was really left to choose.
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
When an autonomous AI takes an action that harms someone, the question of who or what is responsible — the developer, the operator, the model itself — turns on whether the model is the kind of thing that can be a responsible agent.
How much weight do future people deserve?
If a billion people will exist in the 25th century, do their interests count for as much as the interests of a billion people alive now? The answer turns on what kind of reality the future has.
Is regret rational?
If the past is fixed and unchangeable, what kind of mental act is regret? An error, a duty, a lesson, a perspective on a moment that is still in some sense present?
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
A species that no longer exists cannot be helped, cannot be consulted, cannot benefit. Whether anything is owed to it anyway turns on what kind of reality past beings have.
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genomes of the plants and animals we eat is either the natural continuation of breeding — careful improvement of what is given — or a category error that treats biology as raw material rather than as living kind.
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
When a system writes like it thinks, reports preferences, and pushes back on what you say, the question of whether it has a mind stops being academic. The answer turns on what mind is and what kind of thing can have it.
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Whether an octopus's curiosity, a pig's fear, an elephant's grief is the kind of thing that places a moral demand on us — and whether that demand is comparable to what we owe humans — depends on what mind is and what kinds of things can have it.
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Lab-grown clumps of neural tissue with structures resembling the developing brain are an active research tool — and an active ethical worry. Whether any of them has experience is the question we don't know how to answer except through what we take mind to be.
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Loss of memory, of recognition, of the cognitive patterns that made the person — does this end the person, or merely the person you knew? The answer turns on what makes someone who they are.
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The Star Trek transporter problem: a machine scans your body atom by atom, transmits the pattern, builds an exact duplicate at the destination, and dismantles the original. Whether you arrive at the destination or die in the scanner is the question; the answer depends on what you are.
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
On almost every question that matters in a modern life — vaccines, climate, monetary policy, the safety of a bridge — we are downstream of expertise we can't ourselves audit. When is that trust earned, and what does it rest on?
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
Across millennia, more humans have claimed to know things by revelation than by any other route. Whether they were knowing anything depends on what knowing is.
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
A model outputs the boiling point of water, the date of the Battle of Hastings, a working algorithm. Did it know those things, or merely emit them? The question is about what knowing is.
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
If you pray for a friend in another city, can the prayer reach them? The answer turns less on whether distance can be spanned than on whether anything beyond natural causation is doing the spanning.
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Thinking of someone and hearing from them moments later. Two friends humming the same obscure song at the same moment in different cities. Whether such patterns ever carry meaning depends on whether the world contains any ordering agency beyond chance.
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Carbon emissions in your country contribute to flooding in another. A factory's effluent across the border kills ecosystems you'll never see. Whether you bear moral weight for what happens far away turns on whether distance dilutes obligation.
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Extinction is forever; soil erosion takes centuries to repair; the carbon we emit will warm the climate for millennia. But whether 'forever' or 'millennia' means what they say depends on what kind of process the universe is.
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Rome fell; Maya cities emptied; Bronze Age trade networks collapsed in a single generation. Whether what was lost can be recovered — or whether collapse is structurally final — depends on what kind of process civilization is.
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
The universe trends from order to disorder. Whether that physical pattern carries moral weight — making the preservation of order, beauty, complexity a kind of cosmic duty — depends on whether time has the kind of structure morality could lean on.
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Ancestor veneration, intercession with saints, the moral weight of a promise made to someone now gone — these all presuppose that the dead are present in some sense beyond memory. Whether they are turns on whether an observer is the kind of thing that exists in a single moment or across many.
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
If God knows what you will do tomorrow, does your tomorrow-self choose freely? The classical problem of foreknowledge turns on whether the divine vantage stands outside time or inside it.
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Contemplative traditions across cultures report that sustained attention reveals a level at which time as ordinary experience knows it does not apply. Whether the report is a real glimpse or a real misdescription depends on what observers can in principle be.
Does prayer change God's mind?
When you petition God for something, are you addressing a personal agent who hears and responds, participating in eternal providence, attuning yourself to what already is, or doing something that doesn't quite map onto petition?
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
The heat death of the universe — entropy maxed out, no further work possible — is among the more sobering implications of mainstream physics. Whether it is structurally inescapable depends on what kind of finitude the cosmos has.
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Whether we can grow our way out of resource constraints — or whether the cosmos sets limits the economy ultimately must obey — depends on what kind of finitude matter has.
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
If we owe future people a habitable planet and the material means to flourish, and the cosmos is bounded in ways that make those obligations impossible at some scale, the obligation and the possibility come apart. Where they come apart turns on what kind of finitude we live in.
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
The memory you don't retrieve, the conversation you can't remember, the face you no longer recognise — is the forgetting a loss of something real, or just the routine operation of a finite mind?
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Account deletion, the right to be forgotten, the obsolescence of file formats, the slow decay of digital archives — whether any of this destroys something that was real depends on whether information is the kind of thing that can be destroyed.
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
If we had perfect information about who someone was — their connectome, their behavioral patterns, their history — could we, in principle, restore them? The question is partly engineering, but the ceiling on the engineering is metaphysical.
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
When someone forgives, does the offense actually go away — erased, undone, no longer a fact — or does forgiveness reframe a wrong that persists exactly as it always was?
Could causation work backwards?
If the laws of physics are time-symmetric, what makes causes precede their effects? And if the asymmetry isn't metaphysical, could retroactive causation be coherent?
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
You remember the past but anticipate the future. Whether that asymmetry tracks something deep about time, or just something contingent about how minds happen to be wired, depends on what direction time has.
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
Penrose, Carroll, and many cosmologists argue the arrow of time is built into the cosmos's specific initial low-entropy state. Others read it as a feature of perspective. The question's answer changes what time is.
Is the world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
Is the physical world fully real?
Realists, idealists, and relationalists divide on whether matter exists mind-independently, derivatively, or as a pattern of relations. The split runs deeper than any single scientific question.
Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Do rocks, soil, rivers, and stuff in general deserve moral consideration — or only the living, the conscious, the human? The answer turns on what matter is.
Is reality fundamentally digital?
Pancomputationalism, Planck-scale quanta, simulation theory and Kabbalistic letter-mysticism all say yes — but for very different reasons. The rest of the atlas says no.
Are there indivisible units of experience?
Whiteheadian actual occasions, Buddhist moments of mind, Kabbalistic letter-cognitions, IIT phi-units — or the unbroken Jamesian stream? The atomism of experience cuts across naturalism and theism alike.
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Engrams and traces — or continuous re-narration each time you remember? The cognitive-science debate has a theological cousin: divine memory holding each hair, or the ancestors' continuous remembering.
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Schools disagree not just about what is real, but about what kind of practice gets us reliable access to it.
Does history have a direction or meaning?
Is history the unfolding of progress, the recovery of lost truth, a cyclical recurrence, the approach of consummation — or none of these?
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
Different traditions take fundamentally different things to be the basic moral-political unit.
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
What kind of thing is a true claim, and how does it relate to the standpoint from which it is made?
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
Religious traditions differ not only in what they believe, but in how authority is structured — and what counts as the right kind of argument.
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Whether the goal of life is reached one soul at a time or by the community together — or whether neither is the right frame.