Morality: A Universal Foundation

Having read Ayn Rand's, Atlas Shrugged recently, I now feel compelled to express some of my own concepts of morality, which I have been musing over for many years now.

My search for a fundamental basis upon which all moral judgment and behavior ultimately rests began several years ago, in the late 1990's. All along, my approach has been to first attempt to understand whether the notion of universal morality, and even truth, is possible at all.

The concept of Universal Truth certainly is not new, but what the term means to me seems to be slightly different from the definition that has formed beneath it over the past few centuries - since the days when the church first decided that, like virtually any other expression of intellect, Universal Truth is essentially evil.

In a nutshell, the premise upon which most of my assertions rest is that the elemental building blocks of morality and truth can be identified, and that they constitute an alphabet of sorts, with which the concepts of morality and truth can be spelled out. I call this elemental alphabet, the Truth Model.

I am sometimes less fond of the label Truth Model, than I am at other times. I've experimented with other labels here and there, considering terms such as Logic Graph, or even Alphabet of Truth; but as you may be gathering for yourself at this moment, Truth Model seems to be the lesser of all these evils.

So, here is the ultimate basis of my philosophical approach, which I will expound upon in upcoming posts.

The Truth Model is a structured body of knowledge, which is based upon the premise that the very Universe itself is an expression of a fundamental, identifiable and immutable set of characteristics that together, form the basis of everything we can know and understand about its nature.

Unlike mainstream science, which looks to ever smaller constituents of the Universe to understand its construction and makeup, the Truth Model asserts that (metaphorically) beneath even the smallest physical elements are governing laws of which those physical elements are only an expression. And, like physical elements whose behavior we understand and predict based on our knowledge of those laws; the general body of truth itself is also a symptom, or projection of the same underlying laws seen not in terms of the physical, but the logical.

To view the next post in this series on morality, click here.