Ethics, Agency & Worldviews

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Abstractions about moral agency, selfhood, value, action, and comprehensive worldviews across philosophical and religious traditions. They include virtue and intention, determinism and compatibilism, non-self and ultimate reality, life stances, ethical side effects, and effortless action.

21 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Anattā — The Buddhist non-self teaching that conditioned phenomena should not be identified as an unchanging, independent self or essence.
• Arete — An ancient Greek concept of excellence as the fulfilled capability, virtue, effectiveness, or characteristic function of a person, practice, or thing.
• Brahman — In Hindu philosophical traditions, the ultimate reality or universal principle from which existence proceeds and in which it is grounded.
• Compatibilism — The philosophical thesis that causal determinism can be true while agents can still possess free will or moral responsibility.
• Dhāraṇā — The yogic discipline of holding attention steadily on a chosen object.
• Justice tourism — An ethical tourism approach that seeks locally retained economic benefit, reciprocal host–guest exchange, environmental responsibility and political or historical learning.
• Kāla — A Sanskrit concept joining time, fate and death, sometimes personified as a destructive divine power in Hindu traditions.
• Laws of robotics — A proposed rule framework constraining how autonomous robots prioritize safety, obedience and self-preservation.
• Life stance — An integrated practical orientation toward what a person regards as ultimately important, combining worldview, values and lived commitments.
• Madhyamaka — A Mahayana Buddhist philosophical tradition that analyzes all phenomena as empty of independent intrinsic nature because they arise dependently, while treating emptiness itself as non-substantial.
• Malakut — An Islamic cosmological and epistemic concept of an unseen dominion or spiritual realm associated with divine sovereignty and intermediary realities.
• Principle of double effect — An ethical doctrine distinguishing an intended good effect from a foreseen but unintended harmful side effect under conditions of act permissibility, proportionality, and noninstrumentality.
• Prohairesis — The deliberative moral choice or faculty of assent that ancient Greek ethics, especially Epictetus's Stoicism, treats as properly one's own and central to agency and character.
• Propositional attitude — A belief-like, desire-like, or intention-like mental stance that an agent bears toward propositionally structured content.
• Psychological determinism — The view that psychological states and actions are fully determined by antecedent motives, reasons, character or other conditions outside an agent’s ultimate control.
• Shabda — A Sanskrit term for speech sound, word or authoritative verbal testimony whose meaning varies across grammar and Indian philosophical schools.
• Transactionalism — A pragmatist philosophical approach that treats persons, environments and meanings as mutually constituted within ongoing transactions rather than as independent entities that later interact.
• Value (ethics) — Mark an object, state, trait, relation, or activity as good, bad, worthy, choice-giving, or reason-providing under an ethical evaluative standard, while distinguishing bearers, grounds, and intrinsic from instrumental status.
• Worldview — An encompassing orientation through which a person or community interprets reality, including assumptions about what exists, how knowledge works, what matters and how life should be conducted.
• Wu wei — A Chinese philosophical ideal of unforced, noncoercive action that accords with the spontaneous course of a situation.
• Ātman (Hinduism) — The Hindu philosophical concept of the innermost self or essence, interpreted differently across Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Yoga and other schools.