Ethics and Philosophy: Understanding Moral Agency and Pluralism

The essay “The Ethics of the Grey: Pluralism, Moral Orders, and Narrative Structure” presents a structural-ontological theory of moral agency for navigating a world filled with competing, irreconcilable value systems. Using Star Wars as an allegorical case, it examines the Jedi and Sith as embodiments of ethical monisms—rule-bound restraint versus emancipatory will—that each collapse under their own absolutism. Against these binaries, the figure of the Grey Jedi emerges as a philosophical archetype of pluralism ethics: one who navigates contradictions without seeking purity or certainty, acting responsibly amid irreducible value conflicts. The article illustrates how The Last Jedi briefly gestures toward such pluralism before retreating into mythic closure, reflecting a broader cultural difficulty in sustaining moral ambiguity and value-structured temporality. Ultimately, this article offers a framework for ethics as situated discernment, structural reflexivity, and responsibility without clarity—a call to embrace contradiction and act with integrity in plural worlds.

The paper “Time Is Not Fundamental: Entropic Temporality and the Value-Structured Illusion of Duration” argues that time is not a fundamental dimension of reality but an emergent construct produced by valuation. Drawing from physics, phenomenology, ritual theory, and ethics, it critiques models like Einstein’s block universe, the entropy-driven arrow of time, and temporal determinism, showing that each fails to capture lived experience and moral agency. Instead, the paper develops the concept of value-structured temporality, suggesting that time arises through symbolic, embodied, and cognitive processes that filter change into coherence based on biological, cultural, and ethical priorities. This reorientation dissolves linear temporal scaffolding in ethics, reframing moral life not merely as duty across time or consequence into the future, but as attunement to coherence and becoming in the present. In this context, pluralism ethics is highlighted, emphasizing the diverse ways in which individuals can navigate moral agency. Rituals, myths, and symbolic practices emerge as technologies that generate temporality, while modern chrononormativity flattens it into productivity and efficiency. The essay culminates in a metaphysics of valuation, proposing that meaning, not measurement, grounds both ontological emergence and ethical responsibility. In this vision, time is not the container of meaning but its byproduct, and living “without time” means inhabiting reality as a field of coherence, resonance, and sacred attunement.