This essay was written as part of the Festshrift for Prof John McMurtry which can be found here: Ten Essays In Honour of John McMurtry: Noonan, Jeff, Baruchello, Giorgio: 9781999114657: Amazon.com: Books

The Table of Contents and Biographies of Contributors can be found here: Introducing “Ten Essays In Honour of John McMurtry – January 6, 2024 by Jeff Noonan (Author), Giorgio Baruchello (Author)” – TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE (bsahely.com)

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Executive summary

Context & problem. From bedside medicine to global policy, outcomes are repeatedly mis-aligned with human and ecological wellbeing. The essay locates a common driver: a life-blind value program that normalizes profit-maximizing money sequences — even when these degrade individual, social, and planetary life capacities. This analysis emerged from the author’s internal-medicine practice, subsequent civic work, and sustained exchange with John McMurtry.

Core reframing: life-capital. To correct the blind spot, the paper advances life-capital as the primary capital of any society: stocks and flows of means of life (ecological, social, knowledge, technological) that reproduce and grow without loss in their capacity to enable life through time. Seeing through this lens reclassifies many “externalities” as direct life-capital losses and many “costs” (e.g., prevention, education, care) as life-capital investments. It also reorients debates about “growth” and “degrowth” toward life-capital growth (more enabling capacity per unit of material/energy throughputs).

Testable compass: the Primary Axiom of Value. McMurtry’s criterion — x is value iff, and to the extent that, it enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action — offers a practical, falsifiable standard for evaluation across domains. Policies, products, platforms, and practices can be assessed by whether they expand (or restrict) inclusive human and ecological capacities across lifecycles and generations.

Operational baseline: Universal Human Life Necessities. The essay enumerates the complete set of means of life required for human flourishing (e.g., breathable air/light/space; clean water and nourishing food; shelter; caring relations and healthcare; education/creative play; meaningful work; self-governance consistent with just provision). These necessities convert moral aspiration into measurable design requirements for institutions and infrastructure and clarify the paper’s call to ration to life necessities — that is, to prioritize provisioning and access such that necessities are secured universally, efficiently, and non-wastefully.

From extraction to life-value addition. With life-capital as unit and the Primary Axiom as metric, economic and legal systems can be recoded away from carcinogenic money self-multiplication toward life-value adding sequencing: prevention over remediation; regeneration over depletion; distributed participation over enclosure. The essay emphasizes that the target is not scapegoating individuals but restructuring the systemic mind-locks that channel behavior toward life-blind outcomes.

Knowledge as a means of life. The argument extends to epistemic infrastructure: open, restriction-free access to life-relevant knowledge is essential for societal learning, timely coordination, and scaling what works. Paywalls and proprietary enclosures are reframed as life-capital inhibitors.

Applied bridge: One Health. The Appendix illustrates how life-capital supplies the missing connective tissue for One Health — integrating human, animal, environmental, microbial, and social determinants within a single provisioning logic. It shows how agencies and policies can align by adopting life-capital accounting and the life-necessities baseline as shared, cross-sector standards.

Action questions (starter agenda).

1. AI for life-capital: Can we constrain general-purpose technologies to optimize for life-value, not merely engagement or profit?

2. From war logic to health logic: Can societies repattern incentives toward building health capacities rather than producing dis-ease and conflict?

3. Deliberation & reconciliation: Can life-value onto-axiology provide a common language for truth-and-reconciliation processes that heal structural harms and redesign value encodings (law, trade, media)?

4. Learning systems: Can institutions adopt “safe-fail” learning (first, do no life-harm), iterating by explicit life-capital metrics and necessity maps?

Bottom line. The essay is both tribute and toolkit: a structural diagnosis of the life-blind program, a unifying unit (life-capital), a testable compass (Primary Axiom), an operational baseline (Universal Life Necessities), and a translational bridge (One Health). Together they specify how to redesign economies, policies, and practices so that value reliably means enabling life — now and across generations.