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.

52 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.
Absurdism Advaita Vedanta Analytic Metaphysics / Logical Atomism Analytic Philosophy Anti-Trinitarianism Arminianism Atomism Biblicism Buddhism Cartesianism Christian Existentialism Critical Realism Deism Determinism Dualism Empiricism Energetic Wellness Worldview Epicureanism Evangelical Protestantism Existentialism Idealism Jainism / Anekantavada Kantian Transcendental Idealism Logical Positivism Lutheranism Madhyamaka Mechanism Modal Realism Neutral Monism Newtonianism Nihilism Nominalism Phenomenalism Phenomenology Philosophy of Mind Presentism Psychedelic / Entheogenic Worldview Pure Land Buddhism Pyrrhonism Quantum Realism Rationalism Realism Reformed / Calvinist Theology Relativism Samkhya Social Contract Theory Solipsism Southern Baptist / Baptist Tradition Theravada Buddhism Virtual Realism Yogacara Zen Buddhism
Works: Time and Modality (Early (Prior's first major synthesis of tense logic, derived from his 1955-56 Oxford Locke Lectures)) Reality+ (Late (Chalmers's major popular-and-technical synthesis on virtual reality and the simulation hypothesis)) Outlines of Pyrrhonism On the Natural Faculties The Consolation of Philosophy

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The community of persons is the moral primary.

31 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.
African Traditional Religion / Yoruba-Ifa Anglicanism Animism / Relational-Indigenous Worldview Augustinianism Baha'i Faith British Idealism Christian Mysticism Christian Personalism Constructivism Eastern Orthodox Christianity Islamic Philosophy / Falsafa Jewish Philosophy (Maimonidean) Kabbalah (Lurianic) LDS / Latter-day Saint Theology Liberal Theology Methodism Neo-Orthodoxy Pragmatic Realism Pragmatism Process Theology Pythagoreanism Radical Reformation / Anabaptism Relationalism Shintoism Sikhism Social Democracy Structuralism Taoism Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism Transcendental Thomism Ubuntu / African Communal Ontology
Works: The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Early (Lévi-Strauss's breakthrough work; the foundation of structural anthropology)) Guru Granth Sahib The Book of Mormon The Odu Ifá Corpus

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The cosmic-religious order is the moral primary.

19 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.
Catholic/Thomistic Catholicism Confucianism Dvaita Vedanta Gnosticism Hermeticism Hylomorphism Latin Averroism Manichaeism Neo-Platonism Occasionalism Platonism (Classical) Stoicism Sufism / Wahdat al-Wujud Theosophy Thomism Vedanta Western Esotericism Zoroastrianism
Works: The Avesta The Kephalaia Against Celsus On Abstinence from Animal Food Han Feizi Hymn to Zeus Fragments (Reconstructed) Arthashastra Ramayana

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The class or historical movement is the moral primary.

9 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.
Afrofuturism Classical Political Economy Continental Philosophy Dialectical Materialism Hegelianism Liberation Theology Marxism Post-Structuralism Postmodernism
Works: A Theology of Liberation (Early (Gutiérrez's breakthrough work; the founding text of the school))

Where this stance leads ⓘ

The species or biosphere is the moral primary.

14 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.
Dataism / Information Ontology Deep Ecology Effective Altruism Eternalism Mahayana Buddhism Multiverse Theory Naturalism Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) Panpsychism Process Philosophy Simulation Theory Spinozist Pantheism Transcendentalism Transhumanism / Posthumanism
Works: Symbols of Transformation (Early (the 1912 break-from-Freud book; revised in 1952 as the mature statement of analytical psychology's mythopoeic register)) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Late (Næss's mature statement; the systematic expansion of his 1973 "shallow vs deep ecology" essay)) The Conscious Mind (Early (Chalmers's breakthrough book, derived from his 1993 Indiana PhD)) Tool-Being (Early (Harman's breakthrough work, derived from his 1999 DePaul PhD)) On the Plurality of Worlds (Late (Lewis's mature systematic statement of the modal-realist programme))

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.

Aestheticism Analytical Psychology (Jungian) Anarchism Anglican Broad-Church Animal Ethics Aristotelianism Atheism / Secularism Behavioral Economics Behaviorism Black Radical Tradition Christian Platonism Christianity (Generic) Civic Republicanism Classical Greek Thought Classical Liberalism Classical Roman Thought Classicism Cognitive Science Cognitivism (Mind) Communitarianism Consequentialism Conservatism Cosmopolitanism Critical Theory Cybernetics Deconstruction Deontological Ethics Evolutionary Psychology Evolutionism (Philosophical) Feminism Formalism (Mathematical) Hermeneutics Hinduism (Generic) Historicism Humanism Intersectionality Islam (Generic) Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) Legalism (Fa-jia) Liberalism Libertarian Socialism Logicism Materialism (Philosophical) Modernism Mohism Mysticism Natural Law Natural Theology Pacifism Perennial Philosophy Philosophical Pessimism Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Science Pietism Pluralism Political Realism Postcolonial Theory Protestant Reformation (Magisterial) Psychoanalysis Queer Theory Rabbinic Judaism Romanticism Scholasticism Scientism Systems Theory Tragedy (Philosophical) Utilitarianism Utopianism Virtue Ethics
Back to all dilemmas Take the quiz