How Do the Six Philosophical Commitments Work Together

ChatGPT:

They form a single, internally coherent philosophical stack. Each commitment does a specific job. None is redundant. Remove one, and the structure collapses or degrades into relativism, determinism, or psychologism.

What follows is a clean systems-level account, not a survey.

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1. Substance Dualism

What it secures: a genuine internal domain

Claim:

There are two irreducible kinds of reality:

Mental (rational, normative, choosing)

Physical (causal, extended, mechanistic)

Function in the system:

Substance dualism explains why judgment, assent, and choice are not physical events reducible to neural causation.

Without it:

Thought becomes brain activity

Judgment becomes computation

Responsibility becomes a fiction

Structural role:

Substance dualism grounds the internal/external distinction.

It explains why some things are up to you in principle.

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2. Metaphysical Libertarianism

What it secures: real choice and real error

Claim:

Rational agents can genuinely choose among alternatives; choices are not fully determined by prior physical states.

Function in the system:

Libertarian freedom explains:

Why error is possible

Why responsibility is justified

Why correction makes sense

Without it:

False judgment is just malfunction

Moral responsibility evaporates

“Ought” reduces to conditioning

Structural role:

Metaphysical libertarianism activates substance dualism.

A non-physical mind that cannot choose is inert.

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3. Ethical Intuitionism

What it secures: direct moral cognition

Claim:

Some moral truths are known immediately by rational insight, not inferred from consequences, culture, or emotion.

Function in the system:

Ethical intuitionism explains:

Why moral recognition is immediate

Why moral deliberation is not empirical

Why error feels like recognition gone wrong, not ignorance

Without it:

Morality becomes sociology

Norms become preferences

Moral reasoning never gets off the ground

Structural role:

Ethical intuitionism supplies the input channel for moral knowledge.

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4. Foundationalism

What it secures: termination of justification

Claim:

Justification must bottom out in non-inferentially justified beliefs, or else reasoning is circular or infinite.

Function in the system:

Foundationalism explains:

Why moral knowledge is possible at all

Why intuition is not arbitrary

Why reasoning has stopping points

Without it:

Every moral claim requires another reason

Moral skepticism becomes unavoidable

Intuition collapses into assertion

Structural role:

Foundationalism stabilizes ethical intuitionism.

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5. Correspondence Theory of Truth

What it secures: truth as answerability to reality

Claim:

A judgment is true if it corresponds to how things actually are, not merely to coherence, usefulness, or consensus.

Function in the system:

Correspondence explains:

Why judgments can be false

Why error matters

Why correction is meaningful

Without it:

Truth becomes internal consistency

Moral disagreement becomes incommensurable

“Right” means “fits the system”

Structural role:

Correspondence theory is the truth-condition of all judgments in the system.

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6. Moral Realism

What it secures: objective moral facts

Claim:

There are stance-independent moral truths; moral claims describe reality, not attitudes.

Function in the system:

Moral realism explains:

Why moral disagreement is substantive

Why some actions really are wrong

Why reform, not accommodation, is required

Without it:

Ethics becomes expression

Blame becomes taste

Moral education becomes persuasion

Structural role:

Moral realism is the ontological commitment that makes the rest worth having.

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How They Interlock (System View)

[Substance Dualism]

        ↓

[Metaphysical Libertarianism]

        ↓

[Responsible Rational Agency]

        ↓

[Ethical Intuitionism]

        ↓

[Foundational Moral Knowledge]

        ↓

[Correspondence Truth]

        ↓

[Moral Realism]

Each layer presupposes the one above it.

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What the System Explains That Rivals Cannot

This stack explains, simultaneously:

Why judgment is internal and sovereign

Why error is blameworthy, not pathological

Why moral recognition is immediate

Why moral reasoning can terminate

Why disagreement is about truth, not preference

Why self-correction is rationally obligatory

No single commitment can do this alone.

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Bottom Line

This is not an eclectic bundle.

It is a single integrated metaphysical-epistemic-ethical architecture.

Substance dualism gives you a mind

Libertarianism gives it freedom

Intuitionism gives it access

Foundationalism gives it structure

Correspondence gives it truth conditions

Moral realism gives it something to answer to

Remove any one, and the system degrades into either:

Determinism

Relativism

Expressivism

Skepticism

Or moral psychology dressed up as ethics

This stack does not soften morality.

It explains why morality can be strict, demanding, and correctable.