THE PHILOSOPHY OF VIRTUES: AN INTERNAL BALANCE SHEET - Laws, Theories, Theorems, Neologisms, Original Ideas and Innovations of a Research Programme, 2023–2026 — What It Holds, What It Owes, Its Minimal Core, and What Remains to Be Shown
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The Philosophy of Virtues is a research programme that derives an account of virtue, of institutions and of their corruption from a single primitive: freedom, understood as sourcehood — an act issues from the agent’s own reasons-responsive self, or it does not. Between 2023 and September 2026 it produced some 123 papers, seventeen books, a teaching pack, a constitutional text and eight versions of its own method. This article draws up its balance sheet — an internal one, made by the programme about itself. On the side of assets it counts and lists twenty-two theories, 112 formal laws (of which thirty-four are theorems), thirty normative laws, ninety-eight coined or re-coined terms, thirty-one original ideas classified by what survives priority, and thirty-two methodological and institutional innovations. On the side of liabilities it counts what the programme owes: thirty-one concessions of priority to earlier authors, sixteen published withdrawals and corrections, twenty-three registered tests of which none has been run, nine contested or open problems, and twelve points at which its own normative code contradicts or strains against its formal results. The warrant of the formal laws is distributed as follows: one at W4 (derivable from external mathematics), thirty-six at W3 (theorems on stated axioms), forty-seven at W1 (falsifiable, untested), twenty-seven at W0 (definitions and frameworks), and none at W5. Nothing has been verified by anyone outside the programme. The article then restates the programme as a minimal core of seven principles carried by ten laws, classifies the other 102 laws against it, separates the four senses in which the corpus uses the word “freedom”, sets each central result against its nearest rival with the observation that would decide between them, and publishes the rule by which the first test is chosen. The net position is stated plainly: the programme’s originality is compositional rather than foundational, lying in a middle layer that does not require its metaphysics; its method is its most transferable innovation; and one executed test would move it from candidate to a first local validation, not yet to a confirmed theory. The article closes with what the laws mean for human beings and for contemporary societies. The counts in this article are the author’s own classification of his own corpus and are internal evidence only. Keywords: Philosophy of Virtues; freedom; sourcehood; virtue ethics; research programme; internal audit; minimal core; rival explanations; inversion; capture; forgery; authorship; virtue scoring; Control Theorem; method; warrant; neologisms Highlights · A complete inventory of the programme in one place: 22 theories, 112 formal laws, 34 theorems, 30 normative laws, 98 terms, 31 original ideas, 32 innovations. · Every asset set against its liability: concessions of priority, withdrawals, unrun tests, contested claims and internal contradictions. · The formal laws graded on the programme’s own warrant ladder: one W4, none W5, nothing externally verified. · The thirty Laws of Human Freedom audited against the formal layer: three statements contradict corrections already published. · A minimal core of seven principles, with all 112 laws classified as core, derived, auxiliary, empirical, normative or speculative. · Each central result set against its nearest rival, with the observation that decides between them. · A net position: the originality is compositional; the method is the most transferable asset; the first test is chosen by a published rule, and one passed test is a local validation, not a confirmation. Relevance A programme of this size cannot be judged by any one of its papers, and it cannot be judged fairly by its own claims about itself. A balance sheet does what neither can: it sets every asset against what is owed on it, so that a reader can see at once what the programme holds, what it borrowed, what it withdrew and what it has not yet shown. For the author it is an instrument of decision — which results to test first, which public texts to correct, which claims to stop making. For a specialist it is a map of the weakest links. For a general reader it shows what a philosophy of freedom has to say to societies that increasingly score, rate and manage the conduct of their members, and how much of that can already be trusted.
Author: Mattos, José Caetano de
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7218407038
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