The following is proposed as the outline of a coherent system of values compatible with the continuing rapid growth of human knowledge.
1. The primary values are knowledge, ethics, and activation.
- a. Knowledge: The endless fruitful frontier, accessible to all.
b. Ethics: Doing right by other people.
c. Activation: Achieving an active state, such as by inspiration or social engagement.
2. The primary values are interrelated.
- a. Ethics both circumscribes and protects the process of gaining knowledge.
b. The growth of knowledge illuminates ethics, creates novelty, and drives all else forwards in a positive direction.
c. Psychological activation is essential for individual well-being and effectiveness. But activation must be circumscribed by both ethics and knowledge.
3. All other legitimate values follow from these, though not always with ease or certainty.
- a. Social attachments, aesthetics and inspiration follow from the need for activation.
b. The importance of individual integrity follows from the primary value of ethics.
c. Liberty promotes activation and knowledge, and is protected by ethics.
d. The growth and maintenance of knowledge must be protected from perennial hazards such as individual and group self-deception, and deliberate suppression.
e. These principles, and any other consequences of the primary values, can be revised by the most reliable knowledge-generation processes available.
4. The primary values are applicable to individuals and to social groups of all sizes.
- a. Values such as fairness, justice, and community-building follow from ethics and activation applied to groups.
b. Any social movement on behalf of Sapientism must be bound by the primary values.
c. To be ethical any such movement should be tolerant, and must be reciprocally tolerant, of adherence to other, possibly incompatible doctrines.
5. Other doctrines can be compatible with Sapientism.
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