What is a Factualist?

 

A Factualist is an ethical agent who grounds decision-making in empirically supported principles, reflective awareness, and coherence across self and others, present and future, risk and possibility—rather than in prescriptive moral doctrines, especially doctrines that rely on judgmentalness (right/wrong, good/bad, should/should-not).

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Functional rules and guidelines

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A Factualist employs functional rules and guidelines that must meet four criteria:

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1. Support: They are supported by evidence, reasoning, and/or repeated experiential verification.

2. Followability: They are clearly defined and realistically followable.

3. Well-being yield: Following them can reasonably be expected to increase short- and long-term well-being and happiness first for oneself, and then—as a necessary part of that—to enable win-win interactions, arrangements, and cooperation with others.

4. Process priority: In both living and structuring life, the Factualist prioritizes the process and the enjoyment of the process over the achievement of any particular result or set of results.

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A sleuth for the truth

 

A Factualist actively interrogates automatic cognitions, recognizing that unexamined intuitions, thoughts, and beliefs often reflect familial, cultural, or religious conditioning—or cognitive distortions—and are therefore often counter to living in alignment with reality in support of one’s happiness. A Factualist is especially attentive to questioning any thought, belief, or assertion that contains judgmentalness, recognizing that judgment-loaded language makes accurate assessment harder and less likely.

By cultivating a querying stance, the Factualist shifts from reactive “fast thinking” to reflective, coherence-seeking evaluation. Crucially, the Factualist accepts the factual uncertainty and risk inherent in life.

 

 

Recognizing and embracing risk and possibility

Ethical action is not grounded in certainty of outcomes, but in the recognition that powerful, well-reasoned choices must often be made within the limits of incomplete knowledge. Thus, the Factualist aims to act coherently and courageously—enjoying the experiential process, intending desired outcomes, and acknowledging that those outcomes may or may not occur.

 

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I believe In Factualism: Do You? (also known as The New Ethics of Integrity)

 

Factualism is a principle-based ethical framework asserting that traditional moral categories (good/evil, right/wrong, should/should-not, virtue/vice) are fictional constructs lacking referents in observable reality—except insofar as one or more people are prepared to blame or praise you based on compliance with an edict—and that these categories interfere with accurate assessment when making life choices.

 

 

Dethroning looking good/not looking bad

Instead of prioritizing—often by default—not looking bad / looking good to others, Factualism grounds ethical evaluation in:

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• empirical evidence

• experiential coherence

• principle-based reasoning

• questioning automatic interpretations

• accepting and embracing the limits of our knowledge and power

• the pursuit of personal well-being and happiness across time and relationships

 

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In service to happiness

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Factualism maintains that ethical principles must be functionally justified—in service to the happiness and well-being of any person who might choose to adopt them. Their adoption must be supported by evidence that following them predictably enhances both immediate and long-term flourishing.

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These principles remain provisional and are revised as new evidence or understanding warrants.

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Accepting and embracing risk and possibllity

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Factualism further asserts that calculated uncertainty is the fundamental condition of human action. Ethical life, therefore, is not a matter of guaranteed results, but of making informed, powerful decisions in the presence of risk—while cultivating enjoyment, agency, and relational workability throughout the process. In this sense, Factualism is the practice of living coherently with reality as it is, in order to more reliably achieve and express happiness and a life well-lived—rather than conforming to inherited (or newly invented) moral fictions.