Ethics as a Science of Viability: Life-Value Onto-Axiology and the Conditions of Human Flourishing | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Contemporary societies face a persistent paradox: despite widespread commitment to values such as health, prosperity, freedom, and sustainability, social, ecological, and human crises continue to deepen. This white paper argues that the problem lies not in the absence of values, but in the absence of a shared, life-grounded standard for what value is.

Drawing on Life-Value Onto-Axiology, developed by John McMurtry, the paper reframes ethics as a science of viability — the systematic inquiry into what allows living systems to continue, adapt, and flourish without self-destruction. At its core is the Primary Axiom of Value, which defines value as the expansion of the coherent range of thought, feeling, and action, and disvalue as their reduction or destruction.

The paper unfolds this axiom step by step into universal human life necessities, life-coherent principles of social and economic organization, measures of sufficiency and progress rooted in civil commons development, the concept of life capital, and life-value efficiency criteria that prevent short-term gains from eroding long-term capacity. Ethics, economics, public health, and ecology are shown to share a single underlying logic: life must be organized so that its enabling conditions are preserved and enhanced over time.

Written for a general but serious audience, this white paper provides a coherent framework for evaluating policies, institutions, and economic systems without reliance on ideology, preference, or abstract metrics. It offers a durable orientation for distinguishing genuine progress from destructive success by using life itself as the measure of value.

Rationing to Life Necessities: A Guide to McMurtry’s Life-Value Compass | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

This document introduces John McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Life Value and its practical application through the principle of rationing to life necessities. It explains why today’s global system prioritizes profit over survival, creating crises in health, education, economy, governance, and ecology. Drawing on McMurtry’s metaphor of the “cancer stage of capitalism,” the work contrasts the destructive logic of money-sequence growth with the sustaining logic of life-sequence value. For a general audience, the text illustrates these concepts with everyday examples — bottled water versus clean water systems, luxury housing versus homelessness, fossil fuel growth versus climate stability. It argues that rationing to life necessities is not austerity but liberation: the foundation of real freedom, justice, and sustainable development. The document concludes with a call for life-coherent governance, science, and meaning, positioning humanity at a civilizational choice-space between collapse and renewal.

From Life-Value to Coherence Attractor: Reframing McMurtry’s Primary Axiom as a Meta-Epistemological Compass for Integrative Meta-Design | ChatGPT4o

The Primary Axiom of Value, formulated by philosopher John McMurtry, offers a universal criterion for evaluating systems, processes, and institutions: “That which enables life is of value; that which disables life is not.” While originally articulated in the context of ethical and political philosophy, this axiom has increasing relevance amid the contemporary metacrisis — an entangled global condition of ecological collapse, systemic fragmentation, and epistemic breakdown. This white paper reconceptualizes McMurtry’s Axiom as a meta-epistemological attractor: a symbolic phase constraint that can guide integrative meta-design across health, governance, education, and ecology. By embedding the Axiom within a regenerative coherence framework and aligning it with developmental models such as the TATi grammar (Tend, Align, Transcend, Integrate), we demonstrate its capacity to function not as a metric, but as a value compass — orienting diverse frameworks, policies, and symbolic systems toward nested, life-enabling coherence. In doing so, we propose a unifying principle for bridging integrative paradigms, informing cross-disciplinary coordination, and grounding a new civilizational attractor centered not on control, optimization, or abstraction — but on the living spiral of life coherence.

From Rivalry to Regeneration: Reclaiming Our Future Through Life-Value Onto-Axiology | ChatGPT4o

This white paper addresses the civilizational threat posed by the convergence of exponential technologies and rivalrous social dynamics, a trajectory that Daniel Schmachtenberger describes as structurally self-terminating. Integrating his analysis with John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), we diagnose the life-blind value systems at the root of systemic breakdowns across economics, media, governance, education, and identity. We propose a civilizational re-alignment grounded in the Primary Axiom of Value: that value is that which sustains and enables life-capacity without loss. From this foundation, we articulate the emergence of regenerative systems and sovereign selves — anti-rivalrous, coherence-generating, and ontologically grounded in interdependence. The white paper outlines the qualities of imaginal cells, the redesign of value equations, and the cultivation of semiotic, emotional, and systemic coherence as prerequisites for a viable future. Coherence, not control, becomes the foundation of civilizational continuity. Only life-value aligned systems survive — and evolve.

From Systemic Incoherence to Global Life Coherence: A Life-Value Onto-Axiological Critique of International Institutions and Pathways to Regenerative Governance | ChatGPT4o

This white paper offers a comprehensive critique of five major international institutions — the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and World Health Organization (WHO) — through the lens of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA). By applying the Primary Axiom of Value, which defines value as that which enables the universalizable development of life capacities without depriving others of the same, the paper exposes the systemic life-incoherence embedded in institutional logics. It identifies five recurring meta-patterns of dysfunction — money-value supremacy, elite governance, siloization, epistemic reductionism, and crisis management without transformation — across all institutions examined. The paper then proposes a bold and necessary re-grounding of global governance based on regenerative principles, participatory sovereignty, and life-coherent metrics. A new global architecture is outlined, including the formation of a Regenerative Global Commons Council and the adoption of institutional life-value metrics. The work serves as both a rigorous philosophical critique and a practical framework for those seeking to co-create a civilization where life, not abstraction, is the measure of all value.

Towards Learning the Life Capital Solution (An Essay as part of the Festshrift for Prof John McMurtry) | Bichara Sahely (2024)

This essay honors and extends John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology by arguing that contemporary health, social, and ecological crises share a common root: a life-blind social value system organized around private money sequencing rather than the sequencing of life. Drawing on the author’s medical practice and multi-year correspondence with McMurtry, the paper introduces life-capital — the wealth of means of life that reproducibly generates more means of life through time — as the missing integrator across clinical medicine, public policy, and planetary stewardship. It sets out McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Value (value = that which enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action) and the Universal Human Life Necessities as testable, operational criteria for designing institutions, laws, and programs that measurably enable life rather than degrade it. The essay calls for open access to life-relevant knowledge, a shift from extraction to life-value addition, and practical rationing to life necessities (not scarcity), and it closes with action-questions spanning AI, public health, reconciliation, and institutional learning. An Appendix sketches how the life-capital lens unifies “One Health” across people, animals, ecosystems, and knowledge systems.

Introducing “Ten Essays In Honour of John McMurtry – January 6, 2024 by Jeff Noonan (Author), Giorgio Baruchello (Author)”

This Festschrift collects ten essays — plus an explanatory appendix by John McMurtry — honouring the scope and influence of his life-value onto-axiology (LVOA) and related ideas such as the civil commons. The volume opens with Jeff Noonan’s introduction and Giorgio Baruchello’s survey of McMurtry’s intellectual biography and core concepts, then advances applied and theoretical developments across ethics, public health, political economy, science policy, pedagogy, and food systems. Chapters examine the life-ground of value versus money-sequenced capitalism and the climate emergency (Card), a research horizon for the life-capital synthesis (Noonan), grounding social determinants of health in life-value (Watson), a virtues-based path within LVOA (Myers), two decades of “system-cooked science” (Olivieri), a practical learning program for the life-capital solution (Sahely), and civil-commons-oriented reform of food systems (Sumner & Mustapha), alongside a personal tribute (Barrington). McMurtry’s appendix restates the Primary Axiom of Value and the universal human life necessities, anchoring the contributions in a common evaluative grammar. Together, the essays argue that policies, institutions, and practices are good insofar as they coherently enable wider ranges of thought, felt being, and action across persons and ecologies, and are bad insofar as they disable them.