Why Fifty Examples: Treating the Six Commitments as Common Sense

 

Why Fifty Examples: Treating the Six Commitments as Common Sense

Most defenses of Sterling's six commitments — Substance Dualism, Libertarian Free Will, Ethical Intuitionism, Foundationalism, Correspondence Theory of Truth, Moral Realism — proceed the way philosophical defenses usually do: state the position, anticipate the objections, argue from premise to conclusion. That approach is necessary for scholarly defense, but it carries a cost. It makes the six commitments look like six contestable theses a reader has to be argued into, rather than what they actually are: the architecture already operating beneath thought a person was having anyway, long before any philosopher arrived to name it.

The six lists that were posted take the opposite route. Instead of starting from a commitment and arguing toward instances of it, each list starts from two hundred and fifty ordinary moments of thought — apologizing because you know you were wrong, not because you got caught; trusting that a friend's calm exterior doesn't match the panic underneath; deciding that one non-negotiable principle will govern every smaller choice that follows from it — and only afterward asks what has to already be true for that moment of thought to make the sense it makes. The answer, every time, is at least two of the six commitments.

This isn't a rhetorical trick. None of these three hundred entries were built by starting with a commitment and reverse-engineering a plausible-sounding example to fit it. Each one is something close to universal — recognizable to a non-philosopher in a courtroom, a kitchen, a hospital room, a contract negotiation, a moment of grief — and the commitments were identified afterward, as the conditions without which the thought wouldn't be intelligible as the thought it is.

That reversal matters for an audience that has never read Sterling, has never heard the phrase “libertarian free will” spoken aloud, and has no reason to trust an unfamiliar philosophical vocabulary on its own authority. Such a reader doesn't need to be convinced that substance dualism is true before recognizing that they already think and act as though it is, every time they hold someone responsible for an act distinct from the excuse their circumstances offered. The work of persuasion has already been done, by the reader's own ordinary life. These lists simply make visible what was already there.

Two further patterns emerged across the six lists, worth flagging for a reader encountering them for the first time. First, the six commitments are not equally easy to spot. Correspondence Theory and Moral Realism showed up constantly as the content nearly every other thought ultimately answers to — is this actually true, or is this actually right — while Substance Dualism, Free Will, and Foundationalism do quieter, structural work, holding something apart from or beneath something else. Ethical Intuitionism was hardest of all to surface, because it names a momentary act of perception rather than a standing structure. Second, despite that unevenness, every one of the three hundred entries required at least two commitments working together; none of the six ever operates alone. That, as much as the sheer number of examples, is the real case for treating them as common sense rather than as a contestable philosophical system. They don't appear as isolated curiosities scattered through ordinary life. They appear as a single interlocking architecture, all six pieces present in some degree across virtually everything a person already thinks.

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Theoretical framework: Grant C. Sterling. Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly, 2026. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic).