I see this question raised and I have raised it too How many things of which we speak are universal and binding within reality Reality understood as what we know and do not know but which we infer to be knowable The more I have thought of this the more I have come to sense that tables and chairs and other things evoke common understandings But understandings are not generals in the sense I mean Generals or universals suggest that there is some meaning or purpose to things If so a general has more heft that a table or chair A general has applicability A general has reach A general is powerful What I am getting at is the thought that generals are in fact values If we wish to speak of universals we speak most universally when we speak of values Values denote choices that describe all human actions
Almost inevitably as I puzzled my way through the thinking that results in Triadic Philosophy I had to tell myself that what was missing was a hierarchy of values A hierarchy or spectrum of good and evil that could be proposed and defended as a pragmatic look at what constitutes universal reality as far as we know it I was beyond the virtues proposed by Aristotle which sound fine but which on examination are dependent on values for their merit So I propounded quite spontaneously the scale of values I include in the graphic below Value is the merit or demerit we ascribe to anything Values are what we live by If we wish to speak of things that are universal we should speak of values. The number of generals is the number of values that describe the spectrum of actions that we engage in all of us all the time everywhere
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