Dilemma

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.

Context

Modern liberal-individualist Western thought takes the discrete person as the unit of moral-political reasoning. Many other traditions disagree, sharply: the community-of-persons (ubuntu, Confucianism), the cosmic-religious order (classical Platonism, medieval Christianity), the class in history (Marxism), the species or biosphere (deep ecology, posthumanism, Singer).

Why it matters

This choice is upstream of nearly every concrete normative question — individual rights vs communal obligation, the moral status of unborn children and non-human animals, the legitimacy of revolution, the priority of present persons over future generations or the species.

The coordinates that split the schools

social_unit

The stances

The discrete person is the moral primary.

80 schools

Communities are composed of individuals; the individual is what is morally fundamental.

Why these schools land hereThe individualist position has dominated post-Reformation Western thought — from Locke and the classical empiricists through liberal political philosophy to existentialism. It is the position from which most modern rights talk derives.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The community of persons is the moral primary.

58 schools

Persons are constituted by their relations to other persons; the community is what is fundamental.

Why these schools land hereThe communal-relational position — ubuntu ("I am because we are"), Confucianism, sobornost, Catholic personalism, indigenous traditions — takes the person as derivative of relations rather than as the relations' foundation.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The cosmic-religious order is the moral primary.

33 schools

Persons have their place in a hierarchy of being or a cosmic ordering.

Why these schools land hereThe hierarchical-cosmic position — classical Platonism, medieval Catholicism, Zoroastrianism, Stoicism — orients the person within a larger ordering of which they are a constituent rather than the primary.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The class or historical movement is the moral primary.

10 schools

Persons are constituted by their position in social-historical struggle.

Why these schools land hereThe class-historical position — Marxism, liberation theology, much of postmodern critique — holds that what counts about a person is their position in the historically-formed structure of domination and liberation.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The species or biosphere is the moral primary.

22 schools

The biological species, or the wider community of sentient life, is the moral unit.

Why these schools land hereThe species position — Singer's utilitarianism, deep ecology, evolutionary naturalism, much of posthumanism — extends moral consideration past the human community to all sentient beings, or to the biosphere as a whole.

Where this stance leads ⓘ

Schools the coordinates don't place

These schools don't satisfy any stance's coordinate pattern strongly enough to be assigned — either because they decline to commit on the question (Confucianism is famously silent on what comes after; Pyrrhonian and pragmatist traditions suspend judgment), or because their attribute signature crosses categories in a way the five buckets don't capture.

Cosmopolitanism Natural Theology Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Science

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