The literature on morality is among the most active in contemporary philosophy, with disputes running across metaethics, normative theory, moral psychology, and practical ethics. The framework engages the principal positions by name; each is taken up again at [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) once the structural account is in view.

*Moral realism and its varieties.* Robust moral realism (Boyd 1988; Brink 1989; Shafer-Landau 2003; Enoch 2011) holds that moral facts exist mind-independently, as objective features of reality. Naturalist realism identifies moral properties with natural ones; non-naturalist realism (Parfit 2011; Scanlon 2014) treats moral facts as a *sui generis* category. The framework reads moral realism as correctly identifying that morality is not purely conventional, while supplying the structural reading: moral facts are facts about distinct subjects in shared exchange, grounded in the structural conditions of intersubjective coupling rather than in a separate normative realm.

*Anti-realism, error theory, and expressivism.* Mackie (1977) developed error theory: ordinary moral discourse presupposes objective moral facts, but no such facts exist, so the discourse is systematically false. Blackburn (1984, 1993) and Gibbard (1990, 2003) developed expressivist alternatives on which moral discourse expresses non-cognitive attitudes rather than describing facts. The positions remain influential. The framework reads error theory as correctly identifying that supernatural-anchored moral metaphysics fails (the inversion forecloses it), while denying the further claim that no moral facts remain: the structural facts about subjects meeting subjects are not eliminated by the failure of the supernatural anchor. Expressivism picks up real features of moral psychology while underspecifying what the expressed attitudes are tracking.

*Constructivism.* Korsgaard (1996, 2009), Street (2006, 2012), and the constructivist tradition hold that moral norms are constructed through procedures of practical reason rather than discovered as mind-independent facts. The framework reads constructivism as correctly identifying that moral norms emerge through agent-level activity rather than from a Platonic realm, while supplying the structural reading: the activity through which norms are constructed is itself constrained by structural facts about what subjects need to do to remain subjects in shared exchange.

*Parfit on reasons and persons.* Parfit's *Reasons and Persons* (1984) and *On What Matters* (2011) develop three positions canonical to contemporary normative theory. *Triple Theory*: that the best formulations of Kantian contractualism, Scanlonian contractualism, and rule-consequentialism converge on a common set of fundamental moral principles, with moral progress as the progressive discovery of that convergence. *The non-identity problem*: that standard person-affecting reasoning — an action is wrong only when it makes some particular person worse off — cannot handle cases where the identity of affected persons depends on the action in question (as in certain long-run population and policy decisions), generating a need for impersonal reasons not anchored to any one person’s interests. *Person-affecting vs. impersonal*: the resulting distinction between reasons relative to particular persons and reasons that are agent-neutral and not anchored in any individual’s perspective. The framework reads Parfit as correctly identifying the convergence pressure at the level of best-case formulations, while supplying the structural reading: the reciprocal-coupling floor [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) derives is what the three traditions converge toward; the non-identity problem exposes where person-affecting reasoning fails to reach the floor at population scale; and the person-affecting/impersonal distinction is what the two-level structure of [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (minimum floor structural, fostering context-sensitive) accommodates.

*Virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism.* The three principal normative-theory traditions — virtue ethics (Aristotle, MacIntyre 1981, Hursthouse 1999, Annas 2011), deontology (Kant 1785; Korsgaard 1996; Scanlon 1998; Kamm 2007), and consequentialism (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick; contemporary defenders Singer 1979; Kagan 1989; Norcross 2020) — organize most contemporary normative debate. Each captures real features of moral practice; each generates counterintuitive results in specific cases. The framework reads them as three operations on the same modal field ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) that the moral case coordinates across subjects.

Virtue ethics tracks the *cultivated-field* operation: a body whose modal field is dense enough and accurately calibrated enough that the morally relevant features of a situation come into view before deliberation begins — what older traditions called wisdom and what virtue ethics formalizes as character. Deontology tracks the *structural-reciprocity* operation: the floor of non-corrosion that mutual registration imposes whenever subjects of the same kind register each other accurately — what the structural account derives as the negative-rule core and what deontology formalizes as rules and rights. Consequentialism tracks the *trajectory-comparison* operation: the forward-running of modal branches the field already contains, with the body's valenced weights assigned across each branch — what the modal account treats as one mode of practical deliberation and what consequentialism formalizes as outcome aggregation.

The same body runs all three operations simultaneously, because the field carries cultivated content (virtue), structural floor (deontology), and forward-running branches (consequentialism) at once. Where the three converge, ordinary cases settle without effort; where they diverge, the traditions disagree about which operation should govern. None is fundamental; each is the partial articulation of one operation on the modal field that constitutes the moral case.

*Moral particularism and prima facie pluralism.* Dancy (1993, 2004) argues for reasons-holism: a consideration that favors an act in one configuration of surrounding features can oppose it, or drop out of relevance entirely, in another — pleasure taken in another's suffering does not favor the act the way ordinary pleasure does, and no feature carries a fixed valence assignable independently of what else is present. Moral judgment, on this reading, is a form of situational perception rather than the application of a codifiable rule, and the demand for exceptionless general principles that deontology and consequentialism both presuppose is a demand particularism denies can be met by any moral theory whatsoever. Ross (1930) reaches a related but weaker conclusion from the opposite direction: a plurality of genuine, non-derivative *prima facie* duties (fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, self-improvement) can conflict in a given case, with no algorithm ranking them in advance; what one's actual duty is, all things considered, is fixed only by judgment exercised on the case at hand, never read off a governing formula. The framework grants the holism at the level Dancy and Ross are describing: which of the three operations a case calls for, and how the structural-reciprocity floor actually cashes out given the configuration of facts present, is exactly the work of the cultivated-field operation virtue ethics already names, not a mechanical output the structural floor delivers in isolation from judgment. What the framework does not grant is the further claim that the floor itself carries no fixed content beneath the case-by-case variation: non-corrosion of another subject's field of possibility is invariant across every configuration particularism's holism ranges over, exactly as the structural-reciprocity operation requires, even though which specific act counts as corrosive in a given case is precisely the situational question Dancy is right to say no advance valence table can settle. Particularism is right about how the floor is applied and wrong, pressed to full generality, about whether there is a floor to apply.

*Frankfurt’s reasons of love and volitional necessity.* Frankfurt’s work (1971, 1982, 1988, 2004) develops a position that cuts across the three-traditions division rather than occupying a place within it. *Reasons of love* — the partial reasons one has for a beloved’s good simply in virtue of loving them — are, on Frankfurt’s account, irreducible to the impartial considerations shared by virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. What one is permitted and required to do for a beloved is not fully derivable from what any impartial procedure delivers, and the irreducibility is a feature: the structure of love is *volitional necessity* — caring about something so completely that one cannot bring oneself to act against it is a height of freedom rather than a constraint on it. The *wanton* case names the absence: a will that endorses none of its desires from a higher order, with no stake in what happens to anything. The framework reads this tradition as tracking a real axis the three traditions leave underspecified — the first-person normative weight of what an agent has identified with most fully, operating alongside the reciprocal-coupling norms [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) derives — and the [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) engagement of Frankfurt's hierarchical account develops the structural reading in full.

*Evolutionary debunking and moral nativism.* Joyce (2006) and Street (2006) developed evolutionary debunking arguments: moral beliefs are products of selection pressures unconnected to moral truth, so even if there are moral truths, our beliefs are not reliably connected to them. Haidt (2012) developed moral-foundations theory on the moral-psychology side. The framework reads debunking arguments as raising a real challenge to specifically realist accounts, while supplying the structural response: morality is not a separate normative realm vulnerable to evolutionary debunking but the structural shape of subjects meeting subjects, with the evolutionary pressures producing moral psychology operating on the same structural conditions morality consists in.

*Hume's is/ought gap.* Hume (1739) argued that one cannot derive ought from is: normative conclusions do not follow from purely descriptive premises. The position has been refined and contested across centuries. The framework reads Hume as correctly identifying that ought cannot be derived from a value-neutral is, while supplying the structural reading: the body's modal field ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) is always already valenced ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)), and the felt-best branch within the valenced field is what the body registers as the ought. The ought is the affective pointer that emerges automatically whenever a feeling body reads its own possibility space; Hume was right about the value-neutral is, but the is of being a feeling body operating on a modal field is never value-neutral to begin with. The gap closes at the structural level without requiring a derivation from neutral premises.

*Moral relativism.* Cultural and individual moral relativism hold that moral truth is relative to the cultures or individuals that produce it. Harman (1975, 1996) developed influential relativist positions; Wong (2006) developed pluralistic accounts that combine relativist and universalist elements. The framework reads relativism as correctly identifying real cross-cultural moral variation, while supplying the structural reading: variation in moral *content* is consistent with universality of moral *structure* — the structural fact of subjects meeting subjects operates everywhere, with specific norms being culture-conditioned articulations of how the meeting is to be conducted.

*Care ethics and feminist moral philosophy.* Gilligan (1982), Noddings (1984), Held (2006), and the broader care-ethics tradition developed accounts on which moral relations of care and dependency are central to moral practice rather than peripheral. The framework reads care ethics as correctly identifying real moral relations the dominant traditions have understated, with the cross-current reading of affect ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) cluster-root) supplying the structural support: fostering another subject includes care for it, which requires reading its conditions accurately.

*Ubuntu and relational personhood.* Southern African moral philosophy in the Ubuntu tradition (Tutu 1999; Menkiti 1984; Gyekye 1997; Metz 2007, 2011) holds that personhood is not a given but an achievement realized through relationship with others — captured in the Nguni aphorism *umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu*, a person is a person through other persons. Menkiti's strong formulation holds that moral status itself accrues incrementally through a lifetime of participation in community norms and obligations, so that personhood is ontologically, not merely developmentally, a social product. Metz's more moderate formulation locates rightness in the promotion of harmony, understood as a combination of identity (a shared way of life, a sense of common purpose) and solidarity (mutual goodwill, disposition to aid), and reads wrongness as whatever produces discord between persons or degrades an individual's communal way of relating. The convergence with the structural account is real and substantial: both read morality as constituted through the relation between persons rather than residing in an isolated individual's private states, and both name a self that is only fully itself in relation to others as the moral achievement worth pursuing. The frameworks part where Menkiti's version presses furthest: on the structural account, the capacity that grounds moral status — persistence, distinction, and exposure to exchange (T, S, Φ) — is already fully present in a subject prior to any relational achievement, so an infant, a stranger encountered for the first time, or a person a community has failed to integrate is already owed the structural floor regardless of what relational history has or has not yet accrued; what Ubuntu's lifetime-achievement reading correctly identifies is not the threshold for moral status but the trajectory of the cultivated-field operation virtue ethics already names, extended to its properly social register — a person's cultivated capacity to read and be read by a community deepens across a life, but that deepening is growth in what an already-existing moral subject can do, not the constitution of the subject's standing to begin with. Metz's harmony-as-identity-plus-solidarity reading fares better against this seam: identity and solidarity name relational goods the structural account already locates as fostering ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) scaled to the community register, not conditions on standing itself.

*The is-of-life and biological-functional normativity.* A tradition from Aristotle through contemporary work (Foot 2001; Hursthouse 1999; Thompson 2008) holds that biological functions supply a kind of normativity — a heart that fails to pump is malfunctioning, a creature whose flourishing is impaired is *worse off* in a sense not purely descriptive. The framework reads this tradition as identifying the functional-biological normativity [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) cluster-root names, while supplying the structural upgrade: moral normativity proper requires the two-place mutual registration that turns one-place functional norms into structures binding distinct subjects.

*Animal moral status and bioethics.* A live literature investigates the moral status of non-human animals (Singer 1975; Regan 1983; Korsgaard 2018), the bioethics of medical decisions (Beauchamp and Childress 2019), and the moral standing of various marginal cases. The framework's depth-gradient reading supplies a usable framework: moral standing tracks the depth at which a subject registers its conditions, with the cross-current readability of suffering and flourishing as the structural feature that grounds moral consideration.

The literature on morality divides over realism vs anti-realism, error theory, expressivism, constructivism, the three principal normative traditions, evolutionary debunking, the is/ought gap, moral relativism, care ethics, the is-of-life tradition, and the moral status of non-human animals. The framework commits to specific answers on each; they are taken up again at [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) after the structural account is in view.


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← [8.12 Morality](<8.12 Morality.md>) | [8.12.2 What is Required](<8.12.2 What is Required.md>) →
