The Primarch

8th November 2025

How are we meant to know what is good if we don't know what "good" is?

✅ 1. The Axiom of Life

Life is the precondition of all value.
A value is only possible to a being that can benefit or suffer, continue or cease, flourish or decline.
A rock can’t gain or lose anything. A living organism can.

Because a living being faces a fundamental alternative — exist or not exist — its actions acquire meaning.
Only life makes the concepts good, bad, gain, loss, benefit, harm possible.

This axiom isn’t chosen.
It isn’t invented.
It isn’t culturally relative.
It’s a brute metaphysical fact:
Value presupposes a valuer, and a valuer presupposes life.

Everything else in axiology — pleasure, pain, flourishing, rights, purpose, property, intelligence, sovereignty — grows from this one root.

Without life, nothing matters.
With life, “mattering” exists.

✅ Definition: What is Life?

Life is a self-generated, self-maintaining biological process that preserves its own existence through metabolism, energy use, regulation, and goal-directed action.

Put simply:

Life is an organism that…

✅ Generates internal activity (not inert like a rock)
✅ Maintains its internal order against entropy
✅ Acts to preserve itself
✅ Requires energy intake
✅ Repairs internal damage
✅ Responds to environmental conditions
✅ Reproduces (or participates in a lineage that does)

Life is a continuous, active process, not a static state.
It’s a dynamic struggle against nonexistence.

This is why values arise:
Living things can be harmed or benefited.
They can move toward continued existence or toward death.
That alternative is what gives rise to the possibility of “good” and “bad” at all.

Note about AI or alien cases:
This definition properly excludes AI, unless an AI one day becomes a self-maintaining, self-generating, energy-regulating organism with genuine biological-like self-sustaining functions.
If that ever happened, they would count as “alive” by the same standard as everything else.
No special pleading. No speciesism. Just one objective criterion.

✅ Definition of Animal

Animal:
A multicellular, motile, heterotrophic living organism with sensory awareness, capable of goal-directed action driven by instinct, perception, and basic learning.

Clarification:
Calling something an “animal” describes its biological hardware, not its psychology or moral status. Animals act, but they do not conceptualize, reason volitionally, or form moral principles.

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✅ Definition of Mammal

Mammal:
A biological subclass of animals identified by warm-blooded metabolism, hair, live birth, and mammary nourishment of offspring.

Clarification:
“Mammal” is a physical-organizational category. It tells you what kind of biological systems an organism is built from. It says nothing about intelligence, conceptual capacity, or moral agency.

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✅ Definition of Human

Human:
A biological mammal with egoic consciousness, capable of volitional intelligence, rational conceptualization and purposeful action.

✅ Short explanatory breakdown

Humanity is a dual natured species, an integration of mind and body, psychology and biology.

Biological aspect:
Humans share a mammalian body-plan. This identifies our physical hardware, not our psychological identity.

Psychological aspect (the essential distinction):
Humans alone possess:

• conceptual cognition (forming abstract ideas)

• volitional focus (choosing to think or evade)

• rational judgment (evaluating principles)

• moral agency (understanding rights and reciprocity)

What this means:
This psychological layer places humans in a completely different kind of category of being than animals. Animals act out of perception and instinct. Humans act out of concepts, values, and chosen purposes.

✅ Ego (Definition):

The ego is a self-aware psychological identity: the integrated continuity of a being’s memories, values, judgments, preferences, and experiences, enabling it to recognize itself as the same “I” across time and to direct its future through deliberate choice.

✅ Short Explanation

The ego is what lets a conscious organism say “I was,” “I am,” and “I will be.”
It integrates past experience, present awareness, and future intention into a single, unified self.

This integration makes conceptual consciousness possible:
• memory structured into identity
• judgment structured into values
• choice structured into goals
• action structured over time

Destroy the ego and you erase the person, even if the biological organism remains alive. The continuity of self is gone. The “I” that acted, remembered, and planned has ceased.

Ego is the bridge between biology and reason. Without it, no entity can grasp rights, morality, or long-range value. With it, a being becomes a moral agent.

✅ 2. The Hedonic Orientation - 

Pleasure and Pain: The Psychological Compass

Pleasure and pain are life’s built-in guidance system.

• Pleasure is the organism’s internal signal for “this supports my continued existence.”
• Pain is the organism’s signal for “this threatens or damages my continued existence.”

These are not arbitrary.
They are not conventions.
They are biological facts wired into any organism that must act to live.

Pleasure is the physical or emotional form of successful survival.
Pain is the physical or emotional form of risk or harm.

Pleasure and pain are the built-in signals of value:

✅ Pleasure: “This supports my life, values, or flourishing.”
❌ Pain: “This threatens or harms my life or values.”

They do not define good and evil.
They make values intelligible, experienced, and actionable.

This is why the pursuit of happiness is not a luxury or social preference.
It is the psychological expression of the fact that life ought to flourish.
And the avoidance of unnecessary suffering is not sentimentality.
It is the psychological expression of the fact that life ought not move toward death.

Pleasure and pain are not the standard of value.
Life is.
But they are the organism’s immediate experiential indicators of alignment (or misalignment) with the conditions that sustain life.

Pain and pleasure are the psychological signals of value and disvalue.
They aren’t the standard of value. They are the experience of alignment or misalignment with the standard.

Life is the standard.
Happiness is the purpose.
Pleasure/pain are the experiential barometer.

In other words:
• Pain says “something is threatening my life or values.”
• Pleasure says “this is good for me or fulfilling my values.”
• Happiness is the long-term integrated form of pleasure from living in harmony with reason.

This keeps axiology objective and avoids the pitfall where someone could argue “torturing people is pleasurable to me so it’s good.”

This sets the stage for everything that comes next: flourishing, purpose, moral evaluation, rights, property, all of it.

✅ 3. The Standard of Value: Life-as-Flourishing

Life is the standard of value. Flourishing is its expression.

To say something has value means it contributes to the organism’s continued existence, growth, strength, and thriving.

Life isn’t just the baseline “being biologically alive.”
The standard is flourishing:

• stable health
• sustainable energy intake
• functional agency
• the ability to pursue goals
• emotional well-being
• long-term viability

Flourishing is the full successful expression of life’s requirements.
It's life functioning optimally, not just avoiding death.

This standard organizes the entire landscape of value:

• Good is what promotes flourishing.
• Bad is what undermines it.
• Pleasure is the experiential signal of alignment with flourishing.
• Pain is the experiential signal of threat to flourishing.
• Intelligence is the tool that identifies and achieves the conditions for flourishing.
• Rights arise to protect the freedom needed to pursue flourishing in a social context.