Infrastructuralism

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.

Survival is Morality introduces the idea behind Infrastructuralism before its formal definition.

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How to Cite This Entry
Campbell, Ashton. 2025. “Infrastructuralism.” Infrastructuralism.com. https://infrastructuralism.com (accessed DD Month YYYY).