From Regeneration to Coherence: Synthesis of Regenerative Economics and the Primary Axiom of Value into a Life-Coherent Framework | ChatGPT4o

This document presents a comprehensive framework synthesizing Regenerative Economics and the Primary Axiom of Value into a Life-Coherent Framework aimed at transforming civilization. The framework addresses interconnected crises such as ecological overshoot, economic inequality, and governance failures by proposing a unified approach that aligns systems with the conditions necessary for life to thrive. It emphasizes the need for coherence across organic, social, and ecological capacities, advocating for a reorientation of policies and practices towards sustaining life.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the current systemic crises, highlighting the misalignment between dominant economic values and those essential for sustaining life. It critiques traditional economic models that prioritize GDP and financial returns while ignoring the health of ecosystems and communities. The document introduces two frameworks: Regenerative Economics, which focuses on vitality through circulation and mutualism, and the Primary Axiom of Value, which defines value based on its support for life.

The Ten Principles of Regenerative Economics

The document delineates ten principles of Regenerative Economics, categorized into four overarching themes: Circulation, Organizational Structure, Relationships & Values, and Collective Learning. Each principle is accompanied by metrics that assess the health and resilience of systems. For instance, maintaining robust circulation is essential for connecting all parts of an economic system, while ensuring sufficient diversity enhances adaptability and resilience.

Circulation Principles

Maintain Robust, Cross-Scale Circulation: Healthy circulation of resources is vital for systemic health.
Regenerative Re-Investment: Continuous investment into internal capacities is necessary for self-renewal.

Organizational Structure Principles

Maintain Reliable Inputs: Systems require stable, life-enabling inputs for long-term viability.
Ensure Healthy Outputs: Outputs must not degrade future life conditions.

Relationships & Values Principles

Balance and Integrate Elements: A mix of different-sized elements optimizes flow and resilience.
Promote Mutually-Beneficial Relationships: Trust and cooperation are essential for healthy systems.

Collective Learning Principles

Promote Constructive Activity: Economic activities should build capacity rather than extract value.
Effective, Adaptive Learning: Systems must learn and adapt through feedback and reflection.

The Primary Axiom of Value

The Primary Axiom of Value serves as an ontological foundation for determining what constitutes true value, emphasizing that actions supporting life are of value, while those that harm life are of disvalue. This principle encourages a shift from money-value to life-value as the guiding metric for economic and policy decisions.

Life-Capacity Dimensions

The document identifies three life-capacity dimensions: Organic, Social, and Ecological. Each dimension is crucial for assessing the value of systems in terms of their support for life.

Synthesizing Regeneration and Life-Value

The synthesis of regenerative principles with the Primary Axiom creates a Life-Coherent Compass, providing a heuristic for decision-making that asks whether a system nourishes and evolves life capacities. This compass serves as a moral and existential guide for systemic transformation.

Applications of the Life-Coherent Framework

The framework is applicable across various domains, including policy design, education, public health, and governance. It advocates for redirecting investments towards life-capacity building and integrating life-value metrics into decision-making processes. Specific examples include circular economy reforms and community-based education systems.

Metrics and Indicators

To measure life-coherence, the document proposes a multi-layered approach to metrics that includes Regenerative System Metrics and Life-Value Indicators. These metrics aim to reflect the real conditions of life and guide systemic transformation.

Implementation Roadmap

The implementation roadmap outlines a phased approach to scaling the Life-Coherent Framework, starting with pilot projects and expanding through networks of practice and shared learning. It emphasizes the importance of institutional integration and legal infrastructure to support life-coherent principles.

Reimagining Leverage Points: The paper also reinterprets Donella Meadows’ leverage points to align interventions with life-value principles, advocating for actions that sustain and enhance life capacities across biological, ecological, social, and spiritual dimensions.

Ostrom’s Principles Reformulated: Elinor Ostrom’s eight principles for commons governance are also reformulated through the lens of LVOA, aiming to foster regeneration and coherence in managing shared resources rather than relying on utilitarian or anthropocentric assumptions.

Conclusion

The document concludes by emphasizing the need to reclaim the pulse of life through the adoption of the Life-Coherent Framework. It calls for a collective effort to shift from extractive to regenerative systems, fostering a civilization that prioritizes the flourishing of all life.

Life-Value Onto-Axiology and Life-Ground Ethics | Prof John McMurtry

Table of Contents

Life-Value Onto-Axiology and Life-Ground Ethics

‘What Is Good? What Is Bad? – The Value Of All Values Through Time, Place And Theories’ by Prof John McMurtry

Preface

When the UNESCO-EOLSS Secretariat asked me in 2004 to organize a Philosophy Theme for the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, I accepted with an ultimate commitment. We were united in our shared concern for the future of life on the planet, and the world itself needed what philosophy can offer – critical examination of first principles and underlying value assumptions at a system level. The cumulative degradation and collapse of the globe’s life-carrying capacities was by then undeniable to thoughtful people, and I had already published much research on the unexamined value system regulating the globe. With the sciences and economics misleadingly claiming value neutrality, and philosophy and the humanities not engaging the value-system problem at a planetary level, I sought to meet a seemingly impossible task of explaining world philosophy across specialties and areas while coming to grips with the emergent world crisis. Forging explanatory connection between ruling thought systems and the deep-structural problems of civilization had long been central to my research, and so I understood this invitation as a call to enlist the deepest and most comprehensive resources of philosophical analysis to explain philosophy across schools, to lay bare the fatally misguided assumptions and their consequences pressing in upon us, and to spell out a life-coherent way of reason to move forward. “How to live” has been philosophy’s ultimate question since the ancients and “what is good and true”, or not, has been its unifying quest. Common problem and method of understanding it whole were joined by this project.

Organization of the Chapters

The work found in this publication has two major ‘volumes’ of explanatory analysis. The first is my Theme Essay on Philosophy and World Problems which is written in a cumulatively building explanation to fulfill the project in one unified volume. Its 12 chapters are set out in full in the Table of Contents ahead. Here I shall only summarize their research and findings in a very general way. Analysis begins from our current human condition with an anatomy of the global crisis in terms of opposed and unexamined value systems (Chapter 1). The next chapters then critically analyze and move beyond the immutable idea of the good as happiness and release from pain (Chapter 2) to critically excavate other general theories of value across classic and leading contemporary forms (Chapters 3, 4 and 5). The self-evident basis of all that human beings truly value is spelled out from the “primary axiom of value” with the “ultimate value fields of thought, felt being and action” explained and illustrated across problems and domains (Chapters 6, 7 and 8). The human subject and the manifold value systems constructed across cultures are then explained as the rules by which individuals and societies live whose validity or invalidity, justice or injustice can be objectively determined by life-value analysis in theory and practice alike (Chapters 9, 10 and 11). Rational choice and scientific method across contemporary theories are then critiqued in light of the life-coherence principle as the missing imperative of human reason and of the global system itself (Chapter 12).

The second ‘volume’ of original essays is by experts who have been selected to cover all the life-relevant fields of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Their essays cover three meta areas of philosophy, with each meta area consisting of a set of four or five essays. This organizing framework complements the all-inclusive Theme Essay by providing specialist accounts of major topic fields by philosophers with internationally recognized capacities of research in these fields. The three meta areas are: (1) Onto-Ethical Philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present with overviews from a life-grounded standpoint covering virtually every known figure and school of philosophy up to contemporary environmental theory; (2) Modes of Reason consisting of systematic coverages of logic, science, natural language argument, and market rationality; (3) Philosophy and Society investigating competing historical and contemporary views of human nature, democracy, and human rights.

Conclusions

Philosophy resists conclusions because its method across disagreements – like modern science to which it gives rise – always leaves issues open to counter-argument and furtherance of understanding. This is how philosophy differs from religious, sectarian and other dogmas and closed systems of thinking. Yet agreement across the research contributing to this work is implicit or explicit on one meta principle: whatever is incoherent with organic, social and ecological life requirements through time is false, and evil to the extent of its reduction and destruction of life fields and support systems.

Acknowledgments

Members of the UNESCO-EOLSS Secretariat patiently supported and counseled on this complex “magnum opus” over six years. My former PhD students and now distinguished professors, Jeffery Noonan and Giorgio Baruchello, have been close and outstanding co-researchers and explainers of life-ground philosophy and the method of life-value analysis across philosophy’s domains. James Robert Brown, Alex Michalos, and (as joint authors) Tony Blair and Ralph Johnson have written definitive overview texts for the project as masters in their fields. Kai Nielsen has explained why he thinks that received moral philosophy in which he is a noted leader has been impoverished in facing the world’s problems. Jerry (G.A) Cohen contributed his renowned essay on non-market reason and community before his tragic passing. My longtime partner Jennifer Sumner has been an invaluable social-science researcher into the life-ground and the civil commons and has provided all-sided life support to the project.

John McMurtry,
Editor

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Explaining Life-Value Onto-Axiology | The Primary Axiom of Life Value and the Universal Human Life Necessities and Principles of their Provision by Prof John McMurtry

The Primary Axiom is realised in the real world by the following complete set of universal human life necessities and their defined criteria / measures of all life goods, capital and efficiency which govern any life economy, as distinguished from the dominant private money-sequencing economy called ‘capitalism’ whose financialization since John Locke is increasingly life-blind in principle.