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Executive Summary
This paper addresses a puzzle at the heart of modern society: why systems capable of generating immense wealth simultaneously produce widespread insecurity, ecological breakdown, and preventable harm to human health. Conventional explanations — market failure, regulatory capture, or political dysfunction — tend to focus on symptoms rather than causes. The argument developed here identifies a deeper source: a hidden inversion in the moral logic governing property and value.
Early liberal theories of property did not defend unlimited accumulation. On the contrary, they justified private ownership only under strict life-protective conditions. Property was legitimate only when grounded in labor, constrained by sufficiency for others, and limited by non-waste. These conditions ensured that private appropriation remained compatible with shared survival in a finite world.
The decisive shift occurred with the introduction of money. Treated as non-perishable, morally neutral, and universally exchangeable, money was exempted from the very constraints that governed material goods. This exemption — the money exception — did not openly reject life-based limits. It bypassed them. Once accumulation took monetary rather than material form, the original moral constraints ceased to operate in practice.
The consequences of this shift are profound. Money becomes the ultimate standard of value, while life — human labor, ecosystems, social systems — is reduced to an input. Markets are elevated from tools to moral arbiters. States increasingly define their role as protectors of monetary claims rather than guarantors of life conditions. Public health, environmental protection, and social care are reframed as costs rather than foundations.
Using Life-Value Onto-Axiology, the paper clarifies why these outcomes are not anomalies but predictable results of a money-governed value system. It distinguishes between a life-sequence, in which money serves life, and a money-sequence, in which life serves money. Modern crises emerge when institutions built on the latter are expected to deliver the outcomes of the former.
The paper concludes that meaningful reform does not require abolishing markets, property, or money. It requires restoring life as the governing standard by which they are judged. When property and exchange are once again conditional on sustaining life capacities, ethical limits reappear as intrinsic design constraints rather than external impositions. The choice before contemporary societies is thus not between economy and ethics, but between a value order that treats life as expendable and one that recognizes life as the ground of all prosperity.
Comparison of Life-Sequence and Money-Sequence Value Systems
Scroll horizontally to see other columns| Dimension | Life-Sequence (Life-Governed Value) | Money-Sequence (Money-Governed Value) | Ultimate Standard of Value (Inferred) | Role of Money | Status of Property | Policy Success Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ultimate Standard of Value | Life capacity and continuity | Monetary accumulation | Life as the enabling condition and ground of all prosperity | Instrument for provisioning life | Conditional and life-bound | Health, resilience, and access |
| Role of Money | Instrument for provisioning life | End in itself | Instrumental utility for life versus self-justifying accumulation | Tool for coordination and provisioning | Conditional on serving life | Health, resilience, and access |
| Status of Property | Conditional and life-bound | Absolute and self-justifying | Life-protective conditions (labor, sufficiency, non-waste) | Instrumental versus sovereign | Life-conditional permission | Provision of life necessities |
| Labor | Meaningful life activity | Cost input to be minimized | Human capacity development versus price efficiency | Means of exchange for labor | Grounded in personal labor | Meaningful participation |
| Nature | Life-support system | Resource stock or asset | Common life-ground versus exploitable resource | Neutral medium bypassing natural limits | Limited by biophysical thresholds | Ecological continuity |
| Waste / Sufficiency | Moral failure and ethical threshold | Acceptable if profitable (ignored or displaced) | Shared survival in a finite world | Medium that bypasses non-waste limits | Conditional on "enough and as good" | Universal access to life requirements |
| Failure Signal | Life degradation | Financial loss only | Vital capacity versus monetary growth | Measure of success in the money-sequence | Loss of legitimacy if life is harmed | Prevention of harm and illness |