Abstract

This paper develops Consistentism as a meta-ethical and institutional framework for an era in which external, metaphysical anchors for normative theory are no longer available. It proceeds from epistemological and semantic conclusions established in the companion papers Necessity, Ouroboros, and Fallibilism and A Groundless Ground: that no framework-external anchor is available or required, that necessity is intra-framework, that fallibilism is the appropriate epistemic default, that the dominant failure mode of moral philosophy has been the pseudo-descriptive presentation of normative constructions as metaphysical discoveries, and that consistency is to be understood functionally — as the requirement that a framework not undermine its own discriminatory capacity from within, prior in the order of justification to parsimony and the other comparative criteria that operate once it is secured. The paper opens with the meta-ethical foundations the argument requires: a conditional intra-framework cognitivism about normative propositions, and a precise location of the is-ought problem at the framework-selection layer rather than at the layer of framework-internal inquiry. These foundations establish that normative claims have genuine truth values within frameworks whose postulates have been adopted, without any recourse to framework-external moral facts. Part II then introduces the historical and diagnostic context: pseudo-descriptive closure — the conversion of a contestable, hypothetical commitment into the appearance of a categorical one by presenting it as discovered rather than adopted — has functioned across the history of normative conflict as an unacknowledged source of legitimacy, systematically foreclosing the conditions under which disagreements that could otherwise be negotiated or revised become structurally irresolvable. The identification of this mechanism motivates the question transformation that defines Consistentism: from "what ought we to do?" to "what structural conditions must any functional normative system satisfy to avoid collapse?" The central innovation is the grounding of normativity in epistemic parsimony rather than moral metaphysics: among frameworks that already sustain their own discriminatory capacity, rationality requires minimizing arbitrary commitments. Through this principle, harm-avoidance emerges not as a discovered moral truth but as a methodologically optimal postulate. Universality emerges internally from the conjunction of the harm-avoidance postulate and the functional consistency requirement, without borrowing from any prior tradition. Three dimensions of consistency — Design, Effect, and Dynamic — operationalized through the Code of Randomness, provide the structural architecture for institutional evaluation. The paper addresses the free will problem through epistemological suspension, examines illustrative cases, and responds to objections. The framework binds its participants, not all possible persons; this is the correct scope limitation for the enterprise, not a defect.