# What closing gaps is for

_Mykyta Zagamula; edited with AI assistance · updated 2026-09-13_

_Idea · 5 of 7 · https://synchronism.top/en/frame/values/_

More knowledge, more capability, more autonomy, more freedom to choose the shape of one’s own life — and a better understanding of the consequences of one’s own power. Gaps are worth closing for that, not for the sake of caution.

**A good life** — Pleasure, curiosity, friendship, love, health, creativity, beauty and a sense of meaning have intrinsic value, not instrumental value. This is a distinctly Epicurean component and we do not hide it.

**Freedom and autonomy** — A person should gain an ever greater ability to understand themselves, to shape their own life and to set their own goals — with respect to body, thought, way of living, relationships and beliefs.

**Knowing** — Knowledge has value of its own. Research into the universe, consciousness, history or society deserves resources even when its application is unknown.

**Intellectual courage** — Questions society has not yet learned to ask properly should be asked. If there is a reasonable possibility that something carries moral weight, it deserves study before it becomes an everyday matter.

**Epistemic humility** — «We do not know this yet» is not a defeat but a boundary marked, and the beginning of a research programme. We are especially interested in areas where public confidence far exceeds the quality of available knowledge.

**Empirical correctability** — Philosophical, political and social models should accumulate experience and change with it. Social systems can be compared, modelled and tested.

**Resilience** — The capacity to act clearly inside uncertainty. This is the Stoic inheritance, and it is needed precisely because acknowledging gaps makes the picture of the world less comfortable.

**An open future** — A future in which many possible ways of living remain. From this follows an asymmetry: irreversible decisions demand a higher standard of justification than reversible ones.

**An expanding moral circle** — Moral attention should widen as grounds appear for treating a being as a bearer of experience, interests or autonomy. The circle has widened before, and each time it first looked like a category error.

## The most expensive of them

Epistemic humility costs the most, because it obliges us to do something uncomfortable: publish confidence levels, name the condition under which we would change a position, and mark our own weak points on the very pages where we assert something.

It looks disadvantageous. For a movement that claims the quality of knowing as its subject, any other behaviour would be self-refuting.


## What is missing here

- **Objection** (Philosopher) — The list has no internal hierarchy: freedom and an expanding moral circle can conflict. Propose an ordering, or an argument that ordering them is a mistake.
- **Argument** (Philosopher) — We name a good life as the main orientation and do not define it. Defend or attack the choice to leave it undefined at this stage.
## Where this leads

- Concept: Epistemic humility — https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/humility/
- Concept: Moral circle expansion — https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/moral-circle/
- Concept: Open future — https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/open-future/
- Concept: Synchronist — https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/synchronist/
- Question: What makes a life good? — https://synchronism.top/en/questions/good-life/

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