“Moral facts are mind-independent directional features of an eternal field — the field is the substrate, its direction is the fact.”
Goodness, on this account, is the direction Law points — not a divine command, not a social convention, not a free-floating abstract form. This gives moral realism a concrete ontological home and resolves two classic problems along the way.
Not command, not convention
Three familiar answers to 'what makes something good' are voluntarism (good is whatever God commands), constructivism (good is whatever a society agrees to), and Platonism (good is an abstract Form floating free of any substrate). Agenticism offers a fourth: good is the direction of an eternal, non-conscious field that is part of the basic furniture of reality — not decreed by any mind, not agreed upon by any group, and not free-floating, because it's anchored in Law's actual structure.
The is–ought gap, dissolved rather than refuted
Hume's point stands: you cannot derive an 'ought' from a purely descriptive 'is.' Agenticism doesn't try to refute that logical point — it denies the hidden premise that what-is must be value-free to begin with. If Law, a direction-specifying field, is genuinely part of what exists, then 'ought' was never separate from 'is' in the first place; it was built into reality from the start. (This isn't Moore's naturalistic fallacy either — Law isn't a natural property in Moore's sense, but a non-natural eternal field, closer in structure to Moore's own non-naturalism.)
The Euthyphro dilemma, resolved
Plato's old question — is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it's good — forces a choice between arbitrariness and an external standard God merely obeys. Agenticism rejects both horns. Goodness is neither constituted by God's command nor an independent standard God has to answer to. Goodness is the direction of an eternal field co-eternal with God and every other Will — a field no one created. God is perfectly good because God is perfectly aligned with that field: the most perfect exemplar of Law, not the source of it.
Discussion
Loading comments…