Classical Ideological Audit — Non-Naturalist Moral Realism v1.0
Classical Ideological Audit — Non-Naturalist Moral Realism v1.0
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Instrument. Classical Ideological Audit v3.0. Commitment numbering per CPA v1.1 §IV: C1 Substance Dualism, C2 Libertarian Free Will, C3 Ethical Intuitionism, C4 Foundationalism, C5 Correspondence Theory, C6 Moral Realism.
Stated condition of the run. The target was selected in order to test whether this instrument’s Convergent finding is reachable, no prior run having issued one. That selection creates pressure toward finding it. The Step 2 self-audit names which findings were held back against that pressure.
Prior finding in the archive. The Classical Presupposition Audit run on Michael Huemer, whose framework overlaps this target substantially, returned four Aligned findings and two Partially Aligned, with No Dissolution. Any inconsistency between that run and this one is diagnostic and is addressed at Step 6.
No prior conclusion stated or implied.
Step 1 — Ideology Statement
Core presuppositions, the intersection across declared variants.
P1. There are moral truths holding independently of anyone’s attitudes, desires, conventions or agreements.
P2. Moral properties are not identical with, and not reducible to, natural or descriptive properties.
P3. Moral propositions are truth-apt, and some of them are known.
P4. Justified moral belief rests on starting points that are not themselves inferred — self-evident propositions, moral appearances, or apprehended reasons.
Declared variants. Huemer’s intuitionism grounded in phenomenal conservatism; Shafer-Landau’s non-naturalism with self-evident foundations; Audi’s Rossian intuitionism; Enoch’s robust realism argued from the indispensability of normative truths to deliberation; Parfit’s cognitivism without ontological commitment.
Excluded from the core-defining set, with reasons.
- Naturalist moral realism, which denies P2. A different doctrine rather than a variant of this one.
- Constructivism, which denies P1.
- Contractualism of Scanlon’s kind. Locating rightness in what principles no one could reasonably reject derives the moral fact from a justificatory relation among persons rather than apprehending it, which strains P2 and P4 together.
- Reflective equilibrium as a method of moral justification. Mutual adjustment of principles and particular judgments, with no proposition immune from revision, is coherentist: justification runs in a circle of mutual support rather than upward from a base, and a self-evident proposition in the corpus’s sense cannot be surrendered to improve a system’s fit. It departs from P4 rather than varying it.
Gate result. The intersection holds across the remaining variants and the run proceeds rather than halting. The residual strain is at P4, where Enoch argues from indispensability rather than from apprehension; it is carried to Stage Two rather than resolved here.
Step 2 — Stage One Core Audit
C1 Substance Dualism — Partial Convergence
Affinity: P4 requires a faculty capable of apprehending properties the doctrine has just declared irreducible to the natural order, which is a substantive commitment to something in the apprehending mind that the natural sciences do not exhaust.
Residual divergence: the intersection is silent on the metaphysics of mind, and prominent variants are non-naturalist about ethics while sympathetic to physicalism about mind — the position the prior run recorded in Huemer. A doctrine may hold moral properties non-natural and the apprehending faculty a physical process, and several of its variants do.
C2 Libertarian Free Will — Partial Convergence
Affinity: the doctrine is addressed to agents who can conform their conduct to truths they apprehend, and its obligation-talk presupposes it.
Residual divergence: origination is nowhere argued, and compatibilism would serve every variant’s purposes as well as libertarianism would. Nothing asserts determinism, so Divergent is unavailable; nothing secures origination, so Convergent is unavailable.
C3 Ethical Intuitionism — Convergent
The corpus’s C3 is not merely presupposed by the target but is the target’s own central thesis, argued at length and defended against the standard objections. Direct apprehension of moral truth, non-inferential justification at the foundation, and resistance to deriving the moral from the non-moral are the doctrine’s identity rather than its background. No divergent presupposition qualifies it within the core.
This is the first Convergent finding issued by this instrument.
C4 Foundationalism — Convergent
The target builds ethics upward from foundations apprehended without inference: self-evident propositions in Shafer-Landau and Audi, moral appearances in Huemer, with a dependent structure above them and a justification order running one way. That is the corpus’s C4 in both structure and substance.
The coherentist alternative present in much of the surrounding literature was ruled a departure rather than a variant at Step 1, and no divergent presupposition remains inside the core to qualify the finding.
C5 Correspondence Theory of Truth — Convergent
P1 and P3 jointly state the corpus’s C5 for the moral domain specifically: moral propositions are true or false by holding or failing to hold independently of any attitude taken toward them. This is the domain in which every previous target returned a residual or an imitation, and here it is the doctrine’s defining claim.
C6 Moral Realism — Partial Convergence
Affinity, and the strongest available: objective, mind-independent moral facts are not a formal feature of this target but its name.
Residual divergence: the good is identified pluralistically — states of affairs, welfare, knowledge and pleasure among genuine goods — so that externals carry genuine moral weight, which the corpus denies. The residual is a divergence in the content of the identification and not a contradiction of the objectivity claim, and virtue is among the goods the target recognizes rather than excluded from them. Divergent is therefore unavailable, unlike the effective altruism finding, where the core did not require mind-independence and the contradiction on the identity of the good was direct.
Self-Audit — Step 2.
- The pressure named at Step 0 was toward Convergent findings. Three further Convergent findings were available on a looser reading and were declined: C1, held back by the physicalist-about-mind variants; C2, held back by the absence of any argument for origination; C6, held back by pluralism about the good.
- The check a reader should run is whether those three refusals rest on presuppositions actually in the intersection or on the engine’s need to appear unpersuaded. The C6 refusal is the one to test first, since it turns on the same reasoning used to refuse Partial Convergence at C6 in the effective altruism run, applied in the opposite direction.
- No finding issued outside the corpus’s domain.
Step 3 — Dissolution Finding
Neither C1 nor C2 is Divergent. No Dissolution.
The first target in this instrument to return neither Full nor Partial dissolution.
Step 4 — Structural Imitation Characterization
No finding of Structural Imitation, and the first run to return none. The target does not imitate the corpus’s architecture with substituted content. At C3, C4 and C5 it occupies the architecture with the corpus’s own content.
Step 5 — Stage Two Variant Differential
Huemer, Shafer-Landau, Audi. Confirm all six. These are the variants on which the C3 and C4 findings principally rest.
Enoch. The P4 strain identified at the gate. Deliberative indispensability grounds normative truth in what deliberation cannot do without, which is an argument from presupposition rather than from insight. It strains C3 without removing it, since Enoch accepts non-inferential starting points in practice. Confirm, with the strain recorded.
Parfit. The non-ontological reading strains C5, since truths held without commitment to what makes them true sit oddly with correspondence. Confirm, on the ground that Parfit holds the truths to obtain independently of us, which is what C5’s test requires.
Result: confirm across all six commitment findings.
Step 6 — Summary Finding
Part A — Commitment Pattern. Three Convergent (C3, C4, C5), three Partial Convergence (C1, C2, C6). No Divergent findings, no Structural Imitation, no Orthogonal. The pattern is the inverse of every prior run in this instrument.
The corpus and this target share the architecture of moral knowledge entire: direct apprehension of moral truth, a foundational structure built upward from what is apprehended without inference, and propositions answerable to how things are rather than to anyone’s attitude toward them. The residue is one proposition — what the good is.
Consistency with the archive. The prior run on Huemer returned Aligned at C3, C4, C5 and C6 and Partially Aligned at C1 and C2. This run agrees at C1, C2, C3, C4 and C5, and differs at C6 alone. The difference is explicable rather than contradictory: the Classical Presupposition Audit examines one man’s argumentative record, in which pluralism about the good need not appear as load-bearing, while this instrument examines an intersection across variants, in which it does. If that explanation is rejected, one of the two findings is wrong, and this run’s is the more likely candidate.
Chief vulnerability. Three substantive exclusions were made at Step 1: contractualism, reflective equilibrium, and naturalist realism. The first two are contestable and each is load-bearing for a finding. Reverse the reflective-equilibrium ruling and C4 returns to Partial Convergence, leaving two Convergent findings. Reverse the contractualism ruling and both P2 and P4 weaken, which would place C3 as well as C4 in question. A reader who rejects both rulings gets a materially different run, and the exclusions are recorded here so that the reversal can be performed without reopening the audit.
Part B — Dissolution Finding. No Dissolution. Neither C1 nor C2 is Divergent, and no variant shifts either finding.
Part C — Agent-Level Implication. An agent who adopts this framework is told that there are moral truths he did not make, that he can know some of them without deriving them, that his knowledge of them rests on foundations rather than on mutual fit, and that his beliefs about them answer to how things are. On the corpus’s own criteria that is the closest any audited framework has come.
What he is not told is where his good lies. The framework leaves him a plurality of genuine goods, most of them outside his control, so that the whole of what matters is not secured by the condition of his own faculty. He is also left with his agency ungrounded: presupposed by every obligation he apprehends, and defended nowhere. What is missing is not the structure of moral knowledge but a single further identification, and the divergence at C6 is therefore a difference in the content of what is apprehended rather than a defect in the faculty that apprehends it.
What follows for the corpus’s own case. Against this target the corpus cannot argue from the structure of moral knowledge, because the target grants it. It must argue that virtue alone is good, and must do so using the intuitionist apparatus both positions accept. Sterling’s chain is that argument: complete happiness cannot depend on what can be taken away, only assent cannot be taken, and therefore the good is the condition of the faculty. A holder of this framework has no methodological objection available to him. He must either accept the conclusion or deny a premise on the same intuitive grounds he relies on everywhere else.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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