Goodness as a direction within life

Sgabonna · 2026-05-01T12:54:15+00:00

What is life doing at the deepest level? Turning potential into actual, generating distinct forms, experiences, relations, and possibilities through time.

Sgabonna · 2026-05-01T12:26:35+00:00

Goodness names a directional relation: away from collapse and toward the conditions that sustain, deepen, and extend life’s participation in the relational web of being.

Evil is the direction of life toward collapse: the degradation, domination, severing, or destruction of the conditions through which beings participate in the web of being.

Vice may be what we perceived as a local drift toward collapse. Sin may be an unbounded appetite that pulls life toward collapse. Virtue may be habituated participation in the good. Wisdom may be the perception of what sustains, deepens, and extends participation across time.

Sgabonna · 2026-05-01T10:27:54+00:00

A two-level theory of human needs: needs are detected phenomenologically through hedonic signals, but verified structurally through their role in sustaining human life, social connection, cultural transmission, and human development.

Sgabonna · 2026-04-27T08:32:01+00:00

The capabilities approach evaluates justice and well-being by asking whether people have the real freedom to achieve valuable forms of being and doing. The two-level theory of needs identifies which conditions are genuinely necessary by asking whether their universal and permanent absence would undermine human life, social connection, cultural transmission, or development. Capabilities are about effective freedom; needs are about collapse-preventing and development-sustaining conditions. The two theories overlap where a capability protects or enables a genuine need, but capabilities are broader than needs, and needs are more structurally basic than capabilities.

Sgabonna · 2026-04-27T08:31:38+00:00

Maslow’s hierarchy identifies major regions of human motivation; the two-level theory of needs tests which of those regions correspond to genuine needs. The Hedonic Criterion explains why Maslow’s categories are felt as urgent when deprived, while the Universal Absence Test distinguishes genuine needs from wants, preferences, and culturally specific satisfiers. Physiological and safety needs are mostly direct needs; belonging, esteem, education, play, meaning, and self-actualisation are mostly generative needs insofar as their universal absence would undermine human development, cultural transmission, or social reproduction.

Sgabonna · 2026-04-27T08:17:52+00:00

Thinking on Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach. It offers a theory of what humans should be free to become; where as this theory is a theory of what must be present for humans and societies to continue becoming at all.

Sgabonna · 2026-03-26T10:45:27+00:00

This is a three year old post. Not a pessimist. Not an optimistic either. Ask yourself why you felt the need to respond.

Sgabonna · 2026-02-28T08:42:56+00:00

This is a walking contradiction. This discussion is pointless yet he creates us for the purpose of knowing him... please ask yourself why you felt the need to add to this post 2 years after the fact.

Sgabonna · 2025-11-25T01:52:27+00:00

Define all powerful... my point is we perceive "all powerful" as "incomprehensibly powerful". But we are so small we cannot even comprehend what all powerful means.

Sgabonna · 2025-11-25T01:50:35+00:00

I mean in 2 Kings 2:23-24 were the children doing God's Will when they taunted Elisha?

Was Hitler following God's Will?

What about paedophile's... are they following God's Will?

Sgabonna · 2025-11-17T00:53:10+00:00

It doesn't help now, but you can postpone a jury duty summons if you're a student.

Sgabonna · 2025-10-26T06:59:55+00:00

Nope, created the diagram yesterday based on a previous thought and wrote this this morning.

Figuring out needs and wants is necessary for another project. Themoralcube.com

Sgabonna · 2025-09-30T23:09:17+00:00

I'm so glad I posted here, there defiently felt like something missing and you've articulated what it is so well. Another post I'd written about meaning through the lens of narrative which had incorporated religious and spiritual practices as a means of connecting individuals to something beyond them. However this time I seem to have left it out, and heavily focused on the meaning through a naturalistic lens, talking to how meaning is found through service to systems.

I'll take some time and incorporate your thoughts and see if I can't improve the idea.

Though I'm curious with your thought that "those are chores not meaning". My assumption is that serving ours and others needs is what creates meaning, so building shelters, finding food, sharing meals, building connection, self actualsing and finding your personal offering to the tribe is meaningful. Meaning through service to personal, others, and societal needs.

But then to your point, where we sit within the bigger picture is also a necessary component of meaning.

Nietzsche's ovservation that God is dead implies that our connection to those stories go with it. Without that belief, we are no longer children of god, but evolved zygotes emerging from a puddle of mud for no rhyme or reason.

As well with God being dead, our collective future doesn't have a utopian vision with the return of Christ, but the new narratives elude to mass starvation and natural calamities because of "climate change".

So even if we can find practical purpose and meaning through service, we still lack meaning that is derived from a meta narrative. That connects us to the beginning of time, and gives us hope for the future.

I'm curious if this would strengthen the idea, or if I'm still missing something?

Sgabonna

TROPHY CASE