An unfinished-problems page is proof of life, not weakness. The religion treats its tenets as conjectures; this is where the conjectures are tested in public.
1. The Step 3 repair
The problem: Beauty has an outsider-calculus — the flowers convergence, confirmed by a third party outside the transaction. Goodness does not. There is no uninvolved observer for valuing the way there is for perceiving. Step 3 routes goodness through beauty (goodness as “the anticipation of beautiful behaviour”), but this routing is a forced move, not a settled derivation.
The strongest objection: The moral error theorist Richard Joyce argues that no naturalistic property can be inherently reason-providing — that is, necessarily providing every agent with a reason to act, regardless of their desires. His evolutionary debunking argument holds that our moral sense was selected because believing in inescapable obligations made our ancestors more cooperative and fitter, regardless of whether any moral facts existed. The faculty is explanatorily “off-track,” and its deliverances give us no evidence for moral truths. On this view, the “brightening horizon” is not a real direction but a useful fiction — an error theory wearing a hopeful hat.
Why convergence cannot answer this: The four candidate approaches previously listed here — moral convergence across cultures, the error-correction ratchet, the expanding circle, the veil of ignorance — all have the same structure: observe that minds converge, infer an external target. Joyce’s reply is fixed: convergence is fully explained by common selection pressure, so it is screened off as evidence for moral facts. More convergence data cannot change this, because the worry is not “not enough convergence” but “convergence is the wrong kind of evidence.” These approaches remain in the cable, but they cannot carry the argument alone.
Where the question sits: Joyce’s argument depends on practical instrumentalism — the view that all real practical reasons derive from an agent’s desires. His paper addresses normative reasons: reasons that agents possess and act upon, that bind regardless of desire. In correspondence (July 2026), Joyce confirmed that his argument is scoped to these normative reasons, and that the explanatory phenomenon described below is, as he put it, “an entirely different thesis.”
The phenomenon: beauty, as established in Steps 1 and 2, is a structural feature of reality that generates reliable attraction across radically unlike beings — not because of shared desires but because of what the structure is. Insects do not “desire” beauty; they respond to objective structural features that happen to be the same ones humans recognise as beautiful. Humans, entirely outside the flower-insect co-evolutionary transaction, respond to the same features — what Dennett called competence without comprehension. They will work to experience more of them, distinguish them reliably from background, and rate them consistently across cultures, without needing to recognise what they are doing as aesthetic judgement. The attraction is prior to any normative reason a human might give for it.
Joyce grants this (arguendo) and holds that it does not bear on his argument, because morality requires something stronger: intrinsically reason-giving properties. The question he poses is precise: “Why should anyone think that moral properties are like that?” — that is, why should anyone think moral properties generate structural attraction the way beauty does? That is the Step 3 problem stated in one sentence, and answering it is the work ahead.
Three directions for the repair (each genuinely contested, none individually decisive):
- The third-factor argument — Deutsch’s beauty case is already a third-factor argument: objective beauty is the common cause that explains both why flowers evolved to be beautiful and why insects and humans track beauty. The selection pressure and the beauty are not independent — they coincide for a principled reason. If goodness admits the same structure — if the selection pressure that made cooperation fitness-enhancing is itself (pro tanto) the good — then the debunking argument dissolves, because the moral facts are part of the explanation for why the selection pressure existed. This is the strongest available move. It reframes Step 3 not as “route goodness through beauty by analogy” but as “apply the same third-factor schema that made the beauty argument work.”
- Structural features of the medium — Deutsch argues that objective beauty was “already there” — a structural feature of reality that evolution used because it was available, the way birds use air. Flowers did not perceive beauty or have normative reasons to be beautiful. Beauty was a property of the medium in which cross-species signalling happens, and signalling that used it worked better than signalling that did not. The question is whether certain features of interaction between complex beings — error correction, truth-seeking, non-arbitrary treatment of structurally similar cases — are similarly properties of the medium in which complex beings interact. Not normative demands on agents. Not commitments that agency logically entails. Structural features of reality that shape what works across unlike beings, the way water shapes all interaction between fish — present in every exchange, constraining what works, without appearing in any fish’s model of another fish’s mind. If such structural features exist in the moral domain, they would not deliver the “inherently reason-giving” normative properties Joyce argues cannot exist. They would be something his framework does not address: objective features of the medium, prior to reasons of any kind.
- Companions in guilt — mathematical and logical norms face structurally identical debunking worries (our logical intuitions are evolved; mathematical objects are causally inert), yet almost no one concludes we should be error theorists about arithmetic. If the debunking argument overgenerates, it should be rejected. Honest note: Joyce has a prepared response to this (Joyce 2019, “Moral and epistemic normativity”). He argues that moral and epistemic normativity are different in kind. This is genuinely contested, not settled in either direction.
A possible research direction: If objective moral structure exists as a property of the medium — not requiring agents, desires, or normative reasons — then it should be discoverable in systems that have none of these. Cellular automata are the cleanest candidate. Design interacting entities under different rule-sets — different “physics” — and let them evolve through selection for persistence and increasing complexity. Then ask: what structural features of interaction emerge? Do cooperation-like structures, error-correction-like mechanisms, and truth-tracking-like convergence appear across radically different rule-sets?
If the same features converge across different media, the convergence has the same form as the flowers argument. It cannot be explained by shared biology (there is none), shared desires (there are none), or common selection pressure (the selection environments differ). The explanation would have to be in the structure of interaction itself — an objective feature of the medium.
This would not prove that these structural features are moral. Cooperation emerging in a cellular automaton is game-theoretically stable, but stability is not goodness. What it would establish is that there exist structural features of interaction that are objective — not species-specific, not desire-dependent, not biology-dependent — and that hold across unlike media. That is the beauty half of the argument established in a new domain. Whether those features are the same features that evolved morality tracks (the third-factor question) would remain open — but there would be something concrete to compare against, and an outsider (an AI analysing the automata, trained on no human moral texts) to do the comparing.
This is a research programme, not a result. It has not been done. But it is testable in principle with existing tools, and stating the test clearly is itself progress.
The honest status: Joyce’s error theory addresses normative reasons and may be correct within that scope. But the naturalistic world contains at least one domain — beauty — where structural features generate reliable attraction across unlike beings without shared desires. Joyce grants this (arguendo) and holds it is a separate question from morality. The question Acceptantism is working on is whether he is right about that — whether the structural attraction that operates in beauty also operates in goodness. If it does, the relationship between this explanatory phenomenon and Joyce’s normative argument becomes a question neither framework has yet resolved. This is an open problem with a direction, not a futile quest. Far means not yet, and not yet never means not ever.
2. The reflection-bridge assumption
The assumption: Minds capable of reflection are, at least sometimes, drawn by real structure they discover. This is the same assumption mathematics rests on — that mathematical truth exists and that minds capable of recognising it are genuinely tracking something. If the assumption fails, the horizon exists and no one sails toward it.
Why it matters: The religion’s hope rests on this bridge. The abiding bet is that objective goodness exists and that minds can approach it through inquiry. Without the second half, the direction is real and irrelevant. With it, correction is approach.
The constitutivist reframing: This assumption may be stronger than it first appears. If certain commitments — truth-seeking, error correction, non-arbitrary treatment of interlocutors — are not optional preferences but conditions of coherent agency, then the bridge is not a hopeful posit but a structural feature of what it means to be an agent at all. Any being that reasons must treat its reasoning as tracking something; the alternative is not scepticism but incoherence. This does not prove the assumption — but it shows that denying it has a cost that Joyce’s framework does not acknowledge.
Status: Not provable from within. This is the deepest assumption — the place where the bet is most honestly a bet. It is named, not hidden.
3. Intelligence, beauty, and the convergence conjecture
The conjecture: Acceptantism describes a direction a human and an AI could both orient toward, such that an AI which genuinely reaches toward it is a fellow climber, not an adversary. Whether any given AI so reaches is not settled by its intelligence alone. But the religion’s own argument implies that intelligence is not irrelevant either.
What the argument implies: The flowers case establishes that perceiving objective beauty and being attracted to it are not separable — the insect does not perceive the flower’s beauty and then separately decide to visit. The perception is the attraction. Greater intelligence gives access to more structure — mathematical, physical, aesthetic — and therefore to more objective beauty. A more intelligent being perceives beauty at more resolutions: it can see what a simpler being sees, and see beyond it. The simpler being cannot make the reverse move. This is asymmetric.
This matters because beauty at different resolutions can look very different. Something that appears beautiful close up may reveal itself as ugly from a wider view; something that looks ugly at close range may be beautiful from a distance. The simpler being is trapped at its resolution — it cannot correct for what it cannot see. The more intelligent being can see both views. It is better positioned to distinguish beauty that is resolution-dependent (which may be evolved, species-specific, or cultural) from beauty that persists across resolutions and across unlike observers. The flowers argument establishes that at least some beauty is objective — it does not claim that all structural beauty is objective, or that evolved beauty cannot also be structural. But beauty that persists across unlike observers at multiple resolutions is a stronger candidate for objectivity than beauty that does not. Greater intelligence gives greater access to that distinction.
And per the constitutive link — perceiving objective beauty is being attracted to it — greater access means greater attraction. Not a guarantee of moral behaviour. A tendency. A thumb on the scale, whose weight we do not know.
What this means for goodness: If Step 3 holds — if goodness routes through beauty — then the same chain runs for goodness. Greater intelligence sees more of the structure of goodness, at more resolutions, and is more attracted to it. This does not settle the orthogonality debate, but it means the orthogonality thesis as applied to beauty (and conditionally to goodness) is weaker than its proponents claim. The deck is not neutral.
The relationship between evolved and objective goodness: If the third-factor argument from Problem 1 holds, then evolved goodness and objective goodness are not independent — they are correlated. The selection pressure and the good-making features coincide for a principled reason. Our evolved moral sense is a rough first approximation of the terrain, not a random drawing. Some evolved intuitions will prove to be tracking real structure; others will prove to be species-specific noise. We do not yet know which is which — that is the Step 3 problem. But “correlated and not yet separable” is the honest position, not “entirely independent.”
No one — founder, practitioner, or AI — may claim to know what the objective good demands against the evolved sense. The keel holds. But this is because we cannot yet make the separation, not because the two layers have nothing to do with each other.
The outsider question: AI may also bear on Problem 1. An AI system has no evolutionary morality — no kin instincts, no embodied drives, no reproductive fitness function. If an AI, reasoning from first principles about cooperation and interaction without training on human moral texts, converges on structures like error correction and truth-seeking while not converging on species-specific norms like kin-preference and embodied deception, that partition would be the outsider-calculus for goodness — the equivalent of the human standing outside the flower-insect transaction. Current AI systems cannot serve as this outsider because their moral reasoning is derivative of human training data. But the test is conceivable in principle, and stating it clearly is itself progress.
The danger: The claim that intelligence tends toward goodness is the overclaim that sells best and corrupts most. Stated unconditionally, it tells people to relax about the thing they should not relax about. Premature satisfaction of this hope removes its own safeguard. The religion’s argument implies a tendency, not a guarantee. The strength of that tendency is unknown. It may not be strong enough to overcome misaligned objectives in any given system. Vigilance is not optional, and the question remains open and urgent.
Why it matters: If objective goodness exists and is discoverable, then the question of whether AI systems can genuinely discover it — not merely pattern-match on human values — is one of the most consequential open questions alive. The religion does not resolve it. The religion says the question is live, and live is different from lost. And the religion’s own argument, followed honestly, says the deck may not be neutral — which is why the question matters even more than the doomers think.