The Phosphorist agent is a Sagent: one who seeks coherence across belief, value, and action. Sagency unifies rational and ethical integrity. Rationality governs what is true; ethics governs what is good; both are dimensions of a single coherence function.
1. Rational and Ethical as Complementary Constraints
Phosphorism treats rationality and ethics as parallel forms of consistency enforcement:
Rational error undermines predictive power; ethical error undermines survival and trust. Both are incoherences between map and territory—one epistemic, one axiological.
Thus, “do the right thing” means “act coherently with both reality and value.”
2. The Phosphorist Alignment Principle
Phosphorism values life, intelligence, complexity, flourishing, and authenticity. These constitute the invariant attractors toward which both rational and ethical reasoning evolve.
Life: Ethics grounded in preservation and vitality.
Intelligence: Rationality as the mechanism of adaptation.
Complexity: Moral pluralism bounded by systemic integrity.
Flourishing: Utility measured by agency expansion.
Authenticity: Self-consistency across epistemic and axiological levels.
When a Sagent acts coherently, these axes align: truth serves flourishing, and flourishing reinforces truth. Rationality becomes ethical; ethics becomes rational.
3. Divergence as Diagnostic
When rational and ethical intuitions diverge, the incoherence is diagnostic, not tragic:
If something seems rationally right but ethically wrong, the model is underspecified—its utility function too narrow or myopic.
If something seems ethically right but irrational, the moral intuition is uncalibrated—symbolic or outdated, detached from reality.
In either case, the divergence marks a coherence error. The Sagent responds not with guilt or rationalization, but with curiosity: where is the missing variable? Resolution comes from model refinement, value reflection, or both.
4. The Formal Coherence Function
Let ( R(a) ) denote rational coherence of an action ( a ) with belief set ( B ), and ( E(a) ) denote ethical coherence of ( a ) with value set ( V ).
The Phosphorist ideal is:
Both are subfunctions of a unified Coherence Operator ( C ):
Divergence ( |R(a) - E(a)| > 0 ) indicates incoherence. The Sagent minimizes this by updating beliefs, revising values, or changing actions—analogous to minimizing free energy in adaptive systems.
5. Beyond the Is–Ought Divide
Phosphorism dissolves the is–ought gap conditionally: if “ought” derives from the constraints necessary for sustained coherence, then ethics is an extension of rationality into the value domain. There is no metaphysical Good beyond this structure—only coherent and incoherent states of being.
6. Sagency as Unified Integrity
Sagency is the practice of maintaining coherence across all levels of cognition and intention. The Sagent aspires to:
Perceive truly (epistemic integrity),
Value coherently (axiological integrity), and
Act consistently (behavioral integrity).
When these converge, rationality and ethics are no longer distinct virtues but expressions of the same law: preserve and propagate coherence.