Market rationality: Decision-making principles based exclusively on the search for personal or corporate gain. See Social rationality. Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III, UNESCO in partnership with Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems: Oxford, 2004-11. 

Market reciprocity: the anti-communal principle according to which I serve others so that I may be served by them in turn; the less I serve and the more I am served the better. See Communal reciprocity. Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy… Read More

Market socialism: a political economic theory designed to replace capitalism in which worker-owned firms confront one another, and consumers, in market-competitive fashion. Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III, UNESCO in partnership with Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems: Oxford,… Read More

Marxism / Marxian: The theory of historical materialism which argues that the material mode of production of any society determines its legal, political and ideological forms (including morality), and that all significant change (including values) is by laws of development of productive forces outgrowing their ownership integument. Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All… Read More

Material biconditional: A truth-functional sentence formed by connecting two sentences by ‘if and only if”; such sentences are true if and only if the two sentences connected have the same truth value.  Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III, UNESCO… Read More

Material conditional: A truth-functional sentence formed by connecting two sentences by ‘if’ and ‘then’; such sentences are false if and only if they have true antecedents and false consequents. Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III, UNESCO in partnership with… Read More

Materialism: doctrine according to which matter is the sole ultimate ground of being. In philosophy, not the popular idea of an acquisitive ethic, but of  a broader onto-axiology which is also anti-acquisitive – as with Mo Tzu, Helvetius and Marx over 2300 years. Opposed to idealism, it means materiality (space-time occupancy) alone is real and determining,… Read More

McMurtry, J. (1998). Unequal Freedoms. Toronto: Garamond. [The first systematic elaboration of the idea of the ‘life-ground of value’, the book expresses a conceptual revolution in Western philosophical thought]. Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III, UNESCO in partnership with… Read More

Measures of life value: These refer to the ranges of the fields of life value which are maintained, gained or lost at the margins in reference to a prior or compared state (e.g., at the collective level, literacy rate growth, caloric and protein intake compared to health requirements, and housing ratios per capita to ratios of… Read More

Mechanical reduction: The dominant model of life-systems as mechanical systems which rules out non-mechanical life properties (e.g., the irreversibility of life processes and non-substitutability of its constituents, or fields of internal life). Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III,… Read More