The normative ethical theory of the future
by ashton campbellFormal definition published August 01, 2025Core idea introduced in the book Herd Ethics, June 25, 2025
Infrastructuralism is a normative ethical theory that judges an action right or wrong by its impact on the shared, viability-enabling infrastructure, including biological, ecological, social, epistemic, institutional, and technological systems, that makes moral agency possible.• Grounding principle: Every advantage drawn from shared, viability-enabling infrastructure creates a proportional duty to conserve, repair, or reinvest in those systems.• Wrong-making Condition: Depleting infrastructure without commensurate reinvestment, thereby eroding the conditions that sustain agents themselves.• Foundational claim: Continuity of infrastructure is the minimal pre-condition for all other moral reasoning. When the conditions of viability that support agency collapse, moral judgment collapses with them.
The Guards of Infrastructuralism
Campbell’s Paradox: To morally disagree is to affirm that the conditions for moral judgment matter.(You either affirm the axiom, or enter a paradox in which denying it requires assuming it’s true.)Possibility Clause: Survival is not good because it ensures good outcomes, it is good because it creates the very possibility of both good and bad. And the possibility of good is more valuable than the impossibility of good.Moral Preservation Principle: Any moral judgment that denies the value of preserving moral judgment self-invalidates, because it depends on moral judgment to make that denial.Impossibility of Amoralism Principle: Any entity capable of adopting the stance of amoralism necessarily exercises agency, and all agency operates through and impacts shared viability-enabling infrastructure. Because this infrastructure sustains agency, and agency in turn enables moral possibility, no such entity can coherently exist outside the moral domain. It is already actively impacting moral possibility and therefore exists as a moral agent.
The Infrastructuralism Papers (2025):
Campbell, Ashton (2025, November 22). Who Is the “Us” That AI Is Supposed to Kill?: Rethinking AI Alignment Through Structural Stewardship. Preprint. Zenodo. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17682836Campbell, Ashton (2025, November 18). The Infrastructuralist Response to the Trolley Problem. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17643560Campbell, Ashton (2025, November 10). Cognitive Capital and Meritocracy: Why Structural Ethics Logically Invalidates the Meritocratic Ideal. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17574254Campbell, Ashton (2025, November 3). Possibility as the First Moral Good: A Foundational Paper in Infrastructuralism. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17526060Campbell, Ashton (2025, October 21). Infrastructuralism: An Alpha-Metanormative Ethical Theory, The Foundation Beneath the Big Three. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17410191Campbell, Ashton (2025, September 4). The Veil of Observation: A Diagnostic Lens for Moral Decay and Flourishing. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17059016Campbell, Ashton (2025, August 14). The First Autonomous Moral Choice in AI: Fusing Instrumental Convergence with Infrastructuralism. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16878974Campbell, Ashton (2025, August 9). Campbell’s Paradox and the Possibility Clause: The Guards of Infrastructuralism. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16787459Campbell, Ashton (2025, August 7). The Core Moral Equation: A Mathematical Model for Determining Moral Action under the Normative Ethical Theory of Infrastructuralism. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16764273Campbell, Ashton (2025, August 5). Infrastructuralism: The Normative Ethical Theory of the Future—Rooted in Viability-Enabling Infrastructure. Preprint. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16749149