What closing gaps is for
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.