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9 examples of anankelogically objective morality
- Steph Turner
- Nov 4, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 25, 2024
Conflicts from the latest Hamas-Israel war to political conflicts at home convince many to resign to the popular notion that morality is merely subjective. Anankelogy provides tools to appreciate morality’s objective side. If every natural need exists as an objective fact, then our responses to them can be regarded arbitrarily moral but not the needs themselves. Anything in the way of resolving any natural need necessary for objective functioning presents as objectively immoral—and therefore scientifically measurable. Let’s start there.
Which do you assume is more likely?
Morality is subjective and therefore not accountable to any empirical science.
OR
Morality includes an objective dimension accountable to empirical science.
Anankelogy asserts that any natural need exists as a natural fact. Hence, anankelogy suggests there is an objective dimension to morality—to choosing actions that either resolve needs for improved functioning or detracts from resolving needs that painfully lowers functioning.
Anankelogy distinguishes between inflexible natural needs and flexible responses to those needs. Since you do not nor can you choose to experience a naturally occurring need, any obstruction of such a need is objectively immoral. And empirically measurable.
How to respond to those needs can have a more arbitrary moral dimension. The natural existence of any natural need can never be reduced to any arbitrary moral platitude or belief. That itself is immoral, with objectively measurable unfavorable consequences.
What we sometimes declare and do in the name of morality—often in a rush to ease some unsettling frustration—is too often immoral itself. Anankelogy offers a list of empirically grounded principles to guide our actions through even the most morally ambiguous situations.
When applying the first and second principles of object needs and objective priorities, consider these nine examples as merely a helpful starting point.
1. Empathic or nonempathetic?
If you do not empathize with the inflexible needs on all sides to a conflict (i.e., judicial conflict, political conflict, etc.),
then you are wrong.
If you empathize with the inflexible needs on all sides to a conflict (i.e., judicial conflict, political conflict, etc.) toward resolving such needs,
then you are right.
COMMENTARY
You don’t know what you don’t know. Clinging to your beliefs or to impersonal rules leaves you blind to how you impact others. You can believe you are being moral while doing some of the most immoral things to others. You can follow rules religiously while damaging others in the name of the law.
Or you can empathize with others. You can try to appreciate how they experience a moral issue. You can step outside of your shell and ask another how they feel about the situation, and you can listen to understand when prioritizing respect for their stated needs instead of insisting on your way.
The less you try to relate to the needs of another through their perspective, the more feel-reactive you likely will be. Their objective level of functioning will objectively diminish from empirically observable ways you and others affect them unknowingly.
The more try to relate to the needs of another through their perspective, the more need-responsive you likely will be. Their objective level of functioning will objectively improve from empirically observable ways you proactively support their needs.
2. Relieving pain or removing cause for pain?
If you prioritize relieving the pain of unresolved needs over resolving the needs causing that pain,
then you are wrong.
If you prioritize resolving the needs causing pain over relieving the pain of such unresolved needs,
then you are right.
COMMENTARY
Anankelogy introduces you to your easement orientation. When confronting life’s natural pain, you either favor avoiding such discomfort or facing this momentarily unpleasant experience upfront to ensure the pleasant experience of more fully resolving the need behind the pain. There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs.
Moralizing all pain as bad and best avoided results in all kinds of immoral behavior. You can rationalize almost any action harmful to others to get out of experiencing painful harm to yourself, or harm of those you care deeply about.
Or you can reorient yourself to embrace life’s natural discomforts to resolve more needs. You could stretch your comfort zone to improve your easement orientation with our free online course. You can then shift from feel-reactive to need-responsive moral behavior.
The more you prioritize avoiding pain, the more feel-reactive you likely will be. The more you prioritize ignoring the needs your pain tries to report, the more pain you shall suffer. The more this avoided pain mounts, the more you can be independently observed to act more desperately to cope with its climbing agony.
The more you process your pain to face threats to be removed, the more need-responsive you likely will be. The more you prioritize resolving the needs your pain tries to report, the less pain you shall suffer. The more you remove threats or remove yourself from threats to your ability to function, the more you can be independently observed to function better, and act morally towards others.
3. Indulgent side-taking or mutual respect?
If you take sides in a violent battle to avoid the discomfort of relating to each side’s affected needs,
then you're ultimately wrong.
If you face the discomfort of relating to each side’s affected needs to dissolve resorting to violence,
then you're ultimately right.
COMMENTARY
Anankelogy exposes the dangerous trend toward what it calls oppo culture or adversarialism, or the set of norms that pits humans with their inflexible needs against each other. Opposing what others need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it.
The more you oppose someone’s inflexible need to survive, the more their need for survival will compel them to do almost anything to push back and survive. The more you oppose another’s rights to self-determination, for example, the more their needs such rights exist to address assert themselves uncontrollably. The more you indulge in opposition, the more you create conditions for what you ostensibly oppose—effectively inverting morality.
Oppo culture’s popular yet watered-down morality insists you take a side in a violent conflict. As if the Russia-Ukraine and Hamas-Israel conflicts were sports events for your spectatorship. Ignoring the needs of the other side is a feel-reactive thing to do, exposing a lack of morality. Prioritizing the inflexible needs on all sides is the more disciplined need-responsive thing to do, demonstrating a higher moral commitment.
After all, what you reactively resist you reflexively reinforce. Subjective side-taking morality ensures the conflict persists to fit the familiar patterns of frenzied mutual defensiveness. Mutual respect resolves more needs than mutual defensiveness.
When violence seems the only answer, quickly rethink the question. Side-taking morality easily rationalizes violence, even the slaughter of innocent kids as collateral damage. Any side-taking can address what we do about our needs and can never change with rationalized violence the natural needs themselves. Violence is weakness turned outward. Resilience is strength turned inward. Resilience is necessary for sorting through access needs at the root of most conflicts.
The less you relate to the inflexible needs on all sides of a conflict, the more your defensive actions tend to enflame tensions—further preventing resolution of needs. The more your side-taking morality prevents others from resolving their inflexible needs, the more you can be independently observed as objectively immoral.
The sooner you relate to the inflexible needs on all sides in a conflict, the quicker you can defuse tensions—enabling resolution of each other’s affected needs. The more you contribute to resolving needs, the more you can then be independently observed as objectively moral.
4. Selfishness or generosity?
If you prioritize your own selfish interests over the inflexible priorities of another,
then you are wrong.
If you prioritize the inflexible priorities of another over your own selfish interests,
then you are right.
COMMENTARY
As an independent economic actor, conventional wisdom privileges you to act selfishly. You buy things you personally want that helps others to buy thing they personally want. You vote for what’s in your own best interests with little if any regard for others. You sue others to get what you believe you rightly have coming without regard for their affected needs.
What you selfishly do for yourself ultimately benefits a free society, or so goes such thinking. Such watered-down philosophy easily slips into anti-generous self-indulgent behavior. You buy something for your own pleasure that could be better invested in something another needs that would then provide you a deeper sense of meaning and connection. Selfishness easily spills fuel on painful alienation that we seek to alleviate with self-indulgent stuff.
Anankelogy counters this downward moral spiral with social love. Love pulls you out of your silo of self-absorbed alienation to connect meaningfully with the needs of one another. The more you personally connect with the inflexible needs of others, the more they can personally connect with you and your inflexible needs. The more you respect the vulnerable needs of others, the more you inspire them to respect your vulnerable needs.
Selfishness traps you in pain. The more you prioritize avoiding pain, the more feel-reactive you likely will be. The more you prioritize ignoring the needs that your pain tries to report, the more pain you likely suffer. The more this avoided pain mounts, the more you can be independently observed to act more desperately to cope with its climbing agony.
The more you process your pain to face threats to be removed, the more need-responsive you likely will be. The more you prioritize resolving the needs that your pain tries to report, the less pain you ultimately suffer. The more you remove threats (or remove yourself from threats), the more you can be independently observed to function better, and sustain generosity towards others.
5. Generalize or specifics?
If you do not empathize with others but instead rely on political or other generalizations to ease your pain,
then you are wrong.
If you empathize with others to address specifics behind political or other generalizations to resolve those needs,
then you are right.
COMMENTARY
We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them. But we keep trying anyway, don’t we? Just about every political “solution” must skip over specifics that risk undercutting a fragile coalition. But trusting these sweeping answers is so much easier than the hard work of seeing the lives of others through their own eyes. Especially when stuck in pain.
Pain temps you and me to cling to the low hanging fruit of relief-generalizing. The more in pain, the more self-absorbed and less attention afforded the specific details to relate more honestly and realistically with the painfully unresolved needs behind our problems. So we tend to latch onto some easy way out.
The shortest way out of pain easily turns into the surest way back into pain. Reacting to your pain tends to leave you in more pain when you fail to address the threat your pain exists to report. At least you know how to handle the pain you keep enduring. We typically prefer the pain we feel over the pain we fear. So we often cling to generalizations promising comfort now that also promise some familiar pain later.
The more you generalize, the less of reality you realize. The more we trust in our self-serving political generalizations, the more we tend to drift from relevant facts affecting each other’s inflexible needs. The more we replace generalizing with an honest search for what each other inflexibly needs, the closer we can solve our specific problems.
Your inflexible needs and my inflexible needs exist as objective facts. All of our inflexible needs sit equal before nature. Each inflexible need persists whether we generalize and overlook them or specifically address them. We might as well specifically address each one, so we can each objectively improve our ability to objectively function. Your safest generalization is to love.
6. Obedience or responsiveness?
If you prioritize any arbitrary law or social norm over the inflexible needs they ostensibly exist to serve,
then you expose an improper priority.
If you prioritize addressing inflexible needs over any arbitrary law or social norm applied to avoid addressing such needs,
then you expose a
proper priority.
COMMENTARY
You should obey every rule of authority without question. Or should you? Most of us follow given rules with little if any question. Most of us prefer to avoid the likely wrath of disobedience.
Most of us would’ve went along with Nazi laws if living in Germany during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Most of us would’ve went along with legalized theft of Indian lands and theft of black labor if living in 17th Century colonial America. Most of us would’ve went along with ill-informed government mandates during the latest pandemic. Most of us did.
It’s completely natural to acquiesce to authority. Especially when trusting authority to act in the people’s best interests. We trust authority bound by the rule of law, that recognizes everyone sits under the law. The probable alternative of chaos encourages us to appreciate being a nation of laws, and to agree to obey such laws.
But before we can be a “nation of laws” in a healthy fully functioning way, we must first recognize we first became a “people of needs”. The needs came first. Laws followed. Needs emerged as inflexible objective phenomenon. Laws then emerged in response as flexible social norms. While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve.
When you think about it, you realize it is actually against the grain of law to fully resolve needs. Laws tend to stay vague to apply a variety of situations, regardless of inconvenient specifics. And laws tend to stay impersonal to avoid bias, easily reinforcing norms of social alienation. To fully resolve needs usually requires to know the specific needs and the specific ways to best address them. Laws don't do that.
Respect every just law, but merely as a minimal standard for behavior. Our laws do not resolve needs; loving people do. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn aptly observed, a society slipping into dysfunctional legalism can easily quash our higher potential. Laws can never mandate our highest potential, which is love. There is no greater human authority than resolving needs with love.
After all, you don't exist for human authority; human authority exists for you. Humanity does not exist for the Sabbath rest, but the Sabbath rest exists for humanity. How easy we can get this backwards when authority slips from accountably fulfilling its purpose to support our exposed needs into increasingly supporting more of its own interests at our coerced expense.
Authority demonstrates legitimacy the more measurably responsive to the objective phenomenon of your inflexible needs. Laws and their enforcement by legitimate authority can protect us from harm and our rights to thrive in life. But must never interfere with our greatest potential to lovingly respond to each other’s needs. If this sound like some kind of revolution, then so be it. There is no greater revolution than to revolve back to love.
7. Feel-reactive or need-responsive?
If you act upon your emotions to try to quickly relieve its intensity, without regard for how your actions impact others,
then you are wrong.
If you reflect upon your emotions to try to explore every option, with regard for how your actions could impact others,
then you are right.
COMMENTARY
Your emotional pain only exists to convey your unmet needs. You can only feel pain when your body warns you of a presenting threat to your capacity to function. Objectively speaking, there is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs.
The more urgent your need, the more intense your unpleasant emotion. Your need to steer clear of a pending threat cannot wait. The more potentially crushing that threat, the more your pain compels you to some self-protective reaction.
Your body’s warning provides you sketchy information. While it could be incorrect, your pain serves you well by not leaving you out to dry. Every possible threat coming your way gets registered. Every confronting threat evokes some reaction, something for you to do immediately to guard your possible vulnerabilities. Your emotions prioritize your self-continuance.
A little reflection helps to put the actual magnitude of the perceived threat into perspective. React too quickly and you possible could trigger the very harm you sought to avoid. The more you relate to the actual needs behind your reactive feelings, the less likely you react with regret.
Delaying your reaction gives you time to consider the impact of your actions upon others. Your deferred reaction also gives you opportunity to seek the support of others, or at least receive their helpful feedback to your cloudy perceptions. Enduring this moment of passing pain to respond to the needs at hand lets you avoid suffering the pain of keeping your needs unresolved.
If habitually reacting to your painful emotions, you risk trapping yourself in more painful emotions. If cultivating a habit of pausing long enough to realize the specific needs involved, the better your chances to remove cause for pain by resolving the underlying needs.
Fully resolving your needs not only removes cause for pain, but restores your ability to function. Once your capacity to function gets fully restored, and there are no more unmet needs for your body to report, it becomes impossible to experience any pain. You either let your pain serve you, or you will end up serving your pain.
You either react to your feelings, or respond to the needs your feelings exist to convey. You either find yourself in the wrong when overreacting to your feelings, or find yourself objectively functioning well while cooperatively supporting others to objectively function well. You either react to feelings, or respond to needs.
8. Hate or love?
If you act upon a widely accepted generalization that negatively impacts anyone’s inflexible needs, then you expose your unrighteous avoidance of reality.
You then are wrong.
If you act upon the widely universal generalization of love that honors each other’s inflexible needs, then you show your righteous relating to reality.
You then are right.
COMMENTARY
“I’m no hater!” you assure us all. Fine. But we all experience anger at some point.
We all taste the bitter roots of outrage. We all slip into righteous and not-so-righteous indignation. We all see our own anger differently then others likely experience it. What you see as your right for heated protest, in a brash tone, others may easily interpret as your hate.
The less you know what others specifically need of you, the more you tend to rely on ill-equipped generalizations to guide your actions. When this fails to fit their expectations, their reactions quickly fail your expectations.
Call this a mere rift, if you like, but such negativity poisons relationships. The more you cling to a comforting generalization, the more discomfort you likely spark in others. At its core, anger is rejection. And who wants rejection?
Anankelogy recognizes your anger as your body warning you of something you cannot accept. If only mild irritation, you likely could accept it but prefer not to. If tirades of livid outbursts, you see no room for any acceptance anytime soon.
When intensely angry, we tend to overlook important pieces of reality. We risk trapping ourselves in situations continually confronting us with the very thing we reject. We may come to reject our own reactions, and perhaps reject ourselves.
The further you can look past whatever you feel you must reject, and find the innate value in others and in yourself, the closer you can snap free from the chains of anger. The more you can focus on each other’s inflexible needs, the easier to cultivate the love we all seek and need.
The more you can let go of your anger to identify what you can realistically accept and not accept in the moment, the easier to mutually respect one another. You can go from provoking mutual defensiveness to sparking mutual respect. Mutual respect resolves far more needs than mutual defensiveness.
9. Right or wrong?
If convinced you are right,
then you are wrong.
If suspecting you could be wrong,
then you are right.
COMMENTARY
You can easily convince yourself you are right when convincing yourself you must pick a side on some moral issue. You declare how you must not stay morally neutral. Many have denounced moral neutrality as complicit with the wrong side of morality.
“We must take sides,” Elie Wiesel insists. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice,” Desmond Tutu warns, “you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
“People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo,” explains Max Eastman. “Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence,” cautions Louis D. Brandeis. “Neutral men are the devil’s allies,” declares Edwin Hubbel Chapin.
Dante reportedly said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
These all speak to vertical conflicts, not lateral conflicts. A vertical conflict exists where one side is clearly wrong for brutally harming the other side. A lateral conflict exists where each side experiences a contrasting priority of inflexible needs.
An organically prioritized need is an objective fact. One side must take the far route to restore their capacity to function fully, while the other side must take the near route to restore their capacity to fully function. Neither side is more correct than the other.
Most political issues are lateral conflicts. The woman with an unplanned pregnancy exploring her reproductive rights, for example, experiences an intensely felt different priority than the woman compelled by a priority to speak up for the voiceless unborn.
The fledgling business owner experiences an inflexible priority for less government intrusion, for another example, than the traumatized ethnic minority experiencing an inflexible priority for something like a government to protect them from privileged forms of exploitation.
Opposing what others inflexibly need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. The more you push against what another inflexibly needs, the more they naturally push back. The more you resist what they must do, the more they do what you think you must resist.
Ultimately, what you reactively resist you reflexively reinforce. The more you yell at others who upset you for being their natural selves, for example, the more they dig in their heels to assert their natural selves in ways that upset you. You get more of what you ostensibly oppose with your moral stance, and perhaps feel satisfied with the familiar blowback.
The problem with most conflicts is that you don’t know what you don’t know. And you cannot know much more while insisting you are right. Self-righteousness is a weak savior. Arrogance is no savior at all. There is always more to know, more to discover, more to learn about the affected needs on all sides.
There is always room to be like Socrates and take the stance that you don’t yet know all you could know, so it’s best to remain open to learning. Instead of rushing to debate, you could take time to relate. You may find there is less reason to debate when you can vulnerably relate. A rush to debate usually skips the details that really matter in life.
Admitting you could be wrong doesn’t mean you are wrong. You could well be correct on all points. But you demonstrate that laudable maturity of recognizing THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE TO LEARN. You keep engaging channels open. You address needs as they occur, in real time. You optimize opportunities to resolve them promptly.
Instead of convincing yourself you must be right, convince yourself of the very real possibility you could be wrong, at least on some if not all points. Instead of pushing others away, close the gaps of alienation. Instead of going along with the throng that spreads animosity in the name of taking a stance, join us in spreading more love.
More about this anankelogically objective morality
If objective, it can be empirically measured in some way. Anankelogy introduces relational knowing for you to create your own testable hypotheses.
Pain relief tends to be arbitrary. It’s not buttoned down enough to be reliably measurable. Besides, easing discomfort too easily slides into the problems your life could do without.
Anankelogy’s objective morality points to empirically reliable ways
to fully resolve needs,
to remove cause for pain, and
boost your functionality level.
This is why a wellness campaign can point to a reduced level of addiction as a reliable measure.
The less pain induced from blind social power, while the addict acts in good faith to overcome addictive behaviors, the more the relatively powerless addict can resolve more needs to remove cause for pain, and improve their ability to get more done. This “relational knowing” correlation can be tested, for a vitally good cause.
The more we dismiss all morality as arbitrary, the more we tend to slide into legalistic traps. And the more vulnerable as sitting ducks to the socially powerful. Shall this objective morality take a back seat to legalistic powerholders who draft and interpret and enforce such limiting policies.
Need-response asserts
the higher authority of resolving needs in love
over
the lesser authority of adversarial legalism.
Legal systems of the judiciary and politics pit us against each other often for the benefit of these institutions and their elite-bred leaders. Need-response challenges their legitimacy.
Need-response asserts
the objective morality of mutually resolving needs
over
our current troubling malaise of
indulgent outrage,
antagonistic alienation, and
bloodthirsty cries for war.
Need-response asserts
love
over
hate,
and shall not compromise this objective morality for no blind power.
Love compels us to support each other to more fully resolve each other’s inflexible needs. The objective morality of anankelogy affords us little else. So let’s stop the hate and spread some love. Before hate, hostilities and wars consume us all!
Your responsiveness to objective morality
Your turn.
Need-response provides you an opportunity to improve your responsiveness to needs by expanding your capacity to endure the natural discomforts of resolving needs. Instead of habitually avoiding natural pain in the name of "good" that results in much "bad", you can take our free online course to start certifying your competencies as a need-responder.
You can actively address moral needs by launching your own wellness campaign. You can take our free online brief course to check if a wellness campaign is right for you.
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