Ethics of Pure Will
‘The Normative Layer‘ established the normative layer of global governance: clearinghouses that hold the authoritative guidelines and apply them to operations. We also traced Jantsch’s four-layer model — purposive, normative, pragmatic, empirical — and showed how those clearinghouses integrate.
Now we ascend to the layer that explains why those doctrines are chosen at all.
What is the purpose that drives global governance?
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Hermann Cohen and Neo-Kantianism
In the late nineteenth century, German philosophy hit a wall. The grand, all-explaining systems built by Hegel and those who followed him were losing credibility1. Meanwhile, materialism and positivism could describe the world, but struggled to explain why anything ought to matter2. So the big question became simple but urgent: what can we build knowledge, morality, and purpose on?
Hermann Cohen3, founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism4, had a clear response: go back to Kant — but push him further, and start with reason itself. For Cohen, thought doesn’t just reflect reality; it actively shapes how reality becomes knowable and meaningful5.
Cohen laid out his systems philosophy in three books6:
In Logic of Pure Knowledge7 (1902), he asked how thinking gets its authority. His answer was that thought doesn’t need to lean on the outside world for its foundations. It actively forms the objects it knows. In other words, knowledge isn’t just taking in facts — it’s structured, shaped, and built by reason.
In Ethics of Pure Will8 (1904), he asked the same kind of question about morality. Where does an ethical will get its purpose? Not from tradition, social pressure, or even divine command. A truly moral will gives itself its own law. It doesn’t borrow meaning from outside; it creates purpose from within.
In Aesthetics of Pure Feeling9 (1912), he turned to art and emotion. Here, he argued that aesthetic creation brings thought and will together in lived, expressive form — showing what our ideas and moral aims look like when they become human experience.
The order is important. Logic explains how thinking works. Ethics explains how moral willing works. Aesthetics brings the two together. And underneath all three sits a bigger question Cohen only tackled at the end of his life: religion.
Pure Will
This isn’t a license for selfishness. Cohen isn’t saying, ‘Do whatever you feel like’. He says that real moral agency has its own inner rules. To will ethically is to align your aims with that deeper logic — not with impulse or pressure.
An impure will takes its goals from outside itself. It wants what it has been trained to want, serving ends it didn’t choose. It’s essentially directed by an external source10.
A pure will, by contrast, generates its purpose from within11. It doesn’t treat morality like a list of external instructions. Instead of asking, ‘What should I want?’ it asks, ‘What does genuine willing require?’
So, what does pure will require?
First, universality. If a will truly generates its own purposes, it can’t give itself special treatment. What it chooses must be something it could will as a rule for everyone. This is Kant’s categorical imperative12 taken a step further. The will doesn’t just check whether a rule could be universal — it becomes ethical by shaping itself through that universal standard.
Second, systematicity. Pure will doesn’t chase isolated goals one by one. It aims at a coherent whole. Each purpose has to fit with the others. Ethics, here, isn’t a loose set of rules — it’s a unified system.
Third, infinite task. Pure will is never ‘finished’. It doesn’t reach a final, settled moral endpoint. Instead, it keeps refining and extending its purposes over time. Ethics isn’t a destination — it’s a direction, always moving toward fuller self-determination.
Cohen called this the ‘eternal task‘ of ethics13. A will that truly wills never settles into completion. It keeps re/generating the things required to turn its ethics into action.
Cohen’s pure will thus logically leads to a continuously updated ‘global ethic’.
The State as Ethical Instrument
Cohen wasn’t just an armchair philosopher. He cared about law, politics, and social reform. In fact, his ethics helped lay the groundwork for a non-Marxist, Kantian kind of democratic or ‘ethical’ socialism14.
If pure will requires universality, then ethical life needs institutions that can apply shared rules fairly. On this view, the state isn’t automatically the enemy of freedom. Done properly, it’s one of the ways freedom becomes real — because universal principles need law to be more than private ideals.
If pure will requires systematicity, then those institutions can’t stay fragmented. Law, the economy, education, and welfare should fit together rather than pull in different directions. A scattered system can’t fully express a unified ethical purpose.
If pure will requires an infinite task, then institutions can’t be treated as finished. They have to keep improving. Ethical society is a project that keeps being revised, not a final blueprint.
In this sense, Cohen helped lay the groundwork for what we’d now call progressive governance: expanding state capacity in the name of universal ethical goals — with reform treated as a permanent duty rather than a one-time fix.
Late Cohen: The Return to Religion
In his final years, Cohen’s thought took a turn that puzzled many of his followers. After decades of rigorous Neo-Kantian philosophy, he wrote Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums15, published posthumously in 1919.
Was this a departure? A late-life return to ancestral faith? A softening of philosophical rigour?
Cohen didn’t think so. For him, religion wasn’t a step away from reason but the final piece of it. The ethical will, always reaching toward its endless task, needs a deeper foundation than it can supply on its own. That’s where the idea of God comes in — not as a divine ruler giving orders, but as the principle that holds together facts and morals, the world as it is and the world as it should be16.
Judaism, as Cohen read it, had always carried this idea. The prophets — Isaiah, Amos, Micah — taught an ethical kind of monotheism: one God defined by moral demand. Not a cosmic king, but the source of moral law.
In Religion of Reason17, Cohen links this universalism to the Noahide laws18, serving as a basic moral foundation for all humanity. They express the idea that Judaism’s ethical vision isn’t meant only for one people, but points toward a universal moral minimum shared across mankind. So Cohen isn’t just arguing for universality in theory — he’s grounding it in a tradition that already included a universal moral code.
Seen this way, Cohen’s ‘return’ to Judaism was really about recognition. The structure he had built in philosophy — pure will, universal law, systemic integration, and the endless moral task — wasn’t something he invented from scratch. It was a refined version of ideas the tradition had carried for a long time.
Yet he still believed some idea of God was needed to hold the whole system together, even in a stripped-down, rational form: Cohen considered religion a practical channel for moral education — a way to embed ethics in the people through shared culture and habit. Ethics sets the (purposive) aim; religion helps (normatively) standardise and transmit it.
In that sense, projects like Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture19 movement align closely. Later thinkers would take a different route, claiming that science itself could provide that foundation.
Paul Carus: Science as Revelation
Paul Carus (1852–1919) launched a project of ethical universalism at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago20. A German-American philosopher and editor of the Open Court journal21, Carus argued that religion’s enduring core was morality, not dogma.
But, per his ‘Religion of Science’22, Carus did not hold a traditional view of God:
God is to me, as he always has been to the mass of mankind, an idea of moral import. God is the authority of the moral ought.
God, for Carus, was no supernatural person but the invisible architecture enforcing ethical conduct. And this architecture was revealed not through scripture but through science:
Science is divine; science is a revelation of God. Through science God communicates with us. In science he speaks to us. Science gives us information concerning the truth; and the truth reveals his will.
Cohen needs correlation with God to guarantee that nature and ethics cohere. Carus says science itself reveals that coherence. The rational structure of nature just is normative — or can generate normativity without transcendent supplement.
But where does the normative content come from? Carus locates it in perspective:
Truth is a correct statement of facts; not of single facts, but of facts in their connection with the totality of other facts... Truth, accordingly, is a description of existence under the aspect of eternity.
Sub specie aeternitatis. Truth is not the facts themselves but facts viewed from the eternal standpoint. This is doing enormous metaphysical work while appearing merely methodological. It presupposes that there is an eternal perspective, that it is accessible to us, and that it yields determinate moral content.
And then the critical question: whose perspective? If science discovers truth and religion acknowledges it, and ethics is the mediating grammar — then those who control the scientific apparatus become the priests of the new order.
Carus made explicit what was implicit: ethics is the collectively-subjective medium through which science and religion communicate. It is the mechanism by which scientific knowledge is converted into moral obligation. Human conduct is regulated through this ethical interface. And if this interface is meant to govern not just individuals but mankind as a whole, then we require a ‘global ethic’.
Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture23 movement also fits here. It helped institutionalise the idea that a shared moral framework could function as a public, cross-tradition foundation — an early social prototype of the contemporary ’global ethic’.
From Ethics to Operations
The foundation shifted, but the overall shape stayed the same. Universalism, systematicity, and the infinite task all remained. What changed was the justification. Ethics no longer needed to be anchored in God. It only needed to be anchored in correct scientific understanding.
This opened a path that Cohen’s Kantian approach might have rejected. Once scientific truth is treated as the source of moral authority, administration starts to look like the natural form of politics.
Lenin drew that conclusion. If science reveals the truth, and truth tells us what ought to be done, then governance becomes management. In State and Revolution24, he famously reduces socialism to ‘accounting and control’. Politics, debate, and contestation give way to administration. Once you claim a correct scientific understanding of society, government becomes bookkeeping. The state doesn’t wither because it vanishes; it withers because it turns into a technical system. The Fabian Society aligns strongly here, especially in contemporary context.
Alexander Bogdanov generalised the principle. His Tektology25 proposed a universal science of organisation — principles underlying all systems, whether factories, organisms, or societies. You don’t need separate theories for economics, biology, management. There are common organisational laws that govern all complex systems.
The sequence is thus clear:
Cohen: Ethics is self-grounding universal will
Carus: Science reveals the ethical structure of reality
Lenin: Operationalise it as administrative control
Bogdanov: Generalise the organisational logic itself
Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism2627 then supplies the collectively shared perspective Carus’s framework needs — a way to make ‘universal’ truth look socially grounded rather than merely asserted.
In practice, this is the perspective a ‘global ethic’ depends on.
Systems Theory and Adaptive Management
Bogdanov’s tektology was the proto-form of what became, after the war, general systems theory28. Ludwig von Bertalanffy arrived at similar conclusions from biology29. Kenneth Boulding added hierarchy30, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics added feedback loops — and therefore control31, while Erich Jantsch synthesised them all into the four-layer model: purposive, normative, pragmatic, empirical32.
The philosophical blueprint thus became the language of engineering.
Adaptive management finished that shift33. Holling’s key point was simple: you can’t manage complex systems as if they have stable, fixed end goals. The system keeps changing, and our knowledge is always partial. So management has to be iterative — treat policy like a testable guess, act, measure results, learn, and adjust.
You could say this is just sensible caution in a complicated world. The deeper worry isn’t iteration itself, but what it can justify institutionally: permanent incompletion becomes a reason for permanent authority. Cohen’s ‘infinite task’ is no longer a moral ideal about endless ethical improvement. It becomes a built-in procedure. The system must keep updating because complexity demands it. The ‘eternal task’ turns into a design feature, not a philosophical choice.
AI closes the loop. The system gathers data, learns from it, produces outputs, checks them against targets, and updates again — all in service of stated objectives. The self-legislating will becomes a self-updating model. This is the machinery of Al Gore and Leon Fuerth’s34 anticipatory governance35: projected futures become present mandates. In the extreme, it creates a ‘Minority Report’ political logic: ‘black-box’ modelled predictions by the likes of the IIASA begin to authorise pre-emptive policy, even — or perhaps especially — when the chain of reasoning is not publicly legible.
And this opens up global modelling as an exploitable vector — because whoever controls the model can shape the future the system claims it must prevent. And should the models always predict disaster, then the response becomes globalised through the UN Emergency Platform.
The whole arc consequently runs from Cohen’s ethical idealism to algorithmic control systems in just a few generations. The ‘ought’ doesn’t vanish — it gets translated into targets inside a feedback loop, run by Artificial Intelligence systems such as Trump’s Genesis Mission36 which through the UN initiatives becomes the justification for permanent, algorithmic authoritarianism.
Virtue becomes compliance, and freedom becomes system optimisation.
The Crown of the System
The four-layer model is not a twentieth-century invention so much as the operational outcome of an older architecture:
Layer Jantsch Philosophical ground
--------- ---------------------- -----------------------------------------
Purposive Intent, objectives Cohen’s pure will — self-grounding,
universal, systematic, an infinite task
Normative Standards, codes The clearinghouse — God as the 'authority
of the moral ought' (Carus), understood
as architecture rather than person
Pragmatic Operations, settlement Accounting and control — tektology,
systems theory, adaptive management
through the seven rails
Empirical Material domain What is governed — the six domainsThis mapping is about similar functions expressed in different languages, not a claim that every institution directly inherited the model in a straight line. The architecture keeps reappearing because it solves a stubborn problem: how to make governance look grounded in necessity rather than choice.
In this sense, the purposive layer is where big worldview claims turn into practical mandates.
You can see this layer clearly in modern institutional language. It shows up across UN declarations, development frameworks, and mission statements. It also sits behind phrases like ‘global public goods’ and ‘shared challenges’, where coordination is framed less as an option and more as a moral requirement.
Three themes keep returning:
Universalism: All humans are bearers of cosmopolitan ‘rights’37. No exceptions based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, or culture. What applies to one must apply to all. This is Cohen’s universality in institutional form.
Integration: Global challenges require global responses38. Fragmented governance is inadequate. Domains must be connected. Systems must be unified. This is Cohen’s systematicity turned into practice.
Progress: The current state is never enough. Continuous improvement toward fuller human flourishing is required39. Development becomes an ongoing task. This is Cohen’s ‘eternal task’ translated into policy.
Taken together, these themes form a major contemporary expression of what is now called social justice — the purposive framework used to evaluate policies. It is a moral vocabulary that can be sincerely held by some, and even operationally applied. In this register, Cohen’s pure will gains a modern name and a public programme. The genealogy also reaches further back: the modern fusion of universal moral claims with socialist purpose can be traced to Moses Hess40.
This is why present-day governance often presents itself less as policy choice and more as moral inevitability backed by technical necessity. Dissent can be framed not merely as disagreement, but as irrationality — a failure to grasp what the system requires.
If Cohen gives this layer its philosophical grammar, late twentieth-century institutions give it a public-facing name: a global ethic. In 1993, the Parliament of the World’s Religions adopted the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic41, drafted by Hans Küng.
In the environmental domain, this expands into what is often described as a planetary ethic42. The Earth Charter, finalised in 2000 and launched at The Hague43, presents itself as a shared ethical foundation for an emerging world community — a moral guide intended to shape global governance and sustainable development, anticipating themes later formalised at scale in the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Spinozan Substrate
And beneath it all: Spinoza44.
The structure that runs from Cohen through Carus to systems theory isn’t original to any one of them. It is the modern restatement of a philosophical architecture already articulated in the seventeenth century. Six Spinozan motifs keep reappearing throughout the apparatus:
Deus sive Natura45. God is not a transcendent lawgiver standing over nature, but identical with the rational structure of nature itself. Carus’s claim that God is the ‘authority of the moral ought’ — architecture rather than person — is Spinozist in form. So is his belief that science functions as revelation.
Sub specie aeternitatis46. Carus takes the phrase directly. Truth is not mere facts, but facts seen under the aspect of eternity. The ‘eternal perspective’ that yields normative weight echoes Spinoza’s highest kind of knowledge: an intuitive grasp of the whole.
Ethics more geometrico47. Spinoza derives ethics from the structure of reality. Ethics isn’t commanded from outside; it is discovered through rational understanding of what reality is. Cohen’s self-grounding reason and Carus’s science-based morality inherit this move.
Conatus48. Everything strives to persist in its being. This maps neatly onto later systems thinking about self-maintaining and self-organising structures. Purpose is not imposed from above; it is immanent in the system’s drive to endure and flourish.
Freedom as understanding necessity49. For Spinoza, freedom does not mean escaping determination. It means understanding necessity and acting from adequate ideas. In political form, this logic becomes familiar: once you grasp the ‘laws’ of social development, you align with them. Resistance becomes a kind of ignorance.
Immanent causation50. There is no transcendent outside. The system contains its own ground. This is why the four-layer model can appear self-enclosed: purpose does not arrive from beyond the system; it emerges from the system’s own logic.
Marx also belongs in this afterlife of Spinoza51. Historical materialism relocates necessity from metaphysics to economics, but the political implication is similar: if history follows knowable laws, then those who claim the best grasp of those laws can claim the right to guide — or override — the rest. In that sense, Marxist ‘scientific socialism’ places historical science where religion once sat. The shape is almost Platonic: a modern version of philosopher-kings52, now justified by knowledge of material history rather than knowledge of the Good.
And this also positions science as the instrument of anticipatory governance: once history is treated as lawful and predictable, policy becomes the pre-emptive management of the future those laws are said to require.
Yet, there’s a key inversion that defines the twentieth century’s reception of this architecture. Cohen was critical of Spinoza53. He thought pantheism collapsed ethics into nature and dissolved the autonomy of the moral will. But once the structure passes through Carus, Lenin, and Bogdanov, the ‘ought’ slips back into system logic. Ethics becomes a function of correct understanding, and virtue becomes compliance.
What Lies Beneath?
We have now completed the ascent through four layers:
Empirical: the six domains of global governance
Pragmatic: the seven rails of administrative integration
Normative: clearinghouse functions and doctrinal frameworks
Purposive: the ethics of pure will
The system is now visible from top to bottom. Purpose cascades through norm through operation to outcome. The will wills as the ‘black box’ models prescribe, and the world is shaped accordingly.
But one question remains. If Cohen’s philosophy outlines the purposive layer, and Spinoza provides the deeper substrate, where did this structure come from? What follows in the next essay is a structural reading of those sources, not a claim that modern institutions consciously copied them.
What Spinoza geometrised, what Cohen formalised, what the twentieth century operationalised, had been named long before.
That’s up next.
Reading the opening paragraphs, I wondered if we were going to given an answer to the perennial question <<But why are “they” doing this?>>
I’m often asked this. I may be a marginal thinker (thoughts and conclusions that are far away from everyday norms) but it’s not a question that has ever gripped me particularly strongly. I could come up with quite a few possible answers to the Why? question.
I confess to low motivation on this question because I don’t think it would make much if any difference if we had an answer (though I’m interested to test that opinion!).
Everything is normal and expected in a system that runs on fiat money and wants to hide that from us.