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It is the contention of this author that such visions of personal human independence/autonomy are factually inaccurate concerning our existence on earth and are normatively false depictions of what we should aspire to individually as our nature. This is because we are intertwined with Nature—including the human community along with terrain, climate, plants, and animals. Our fates are not separate. The scala naturae model is the wrong way to think about our existence. In its stead we should consider a model of various community memberships in which we participate.

Living in Community.

A brief review of these various perspectives that set out their normative structure are as follows. First, the shared community worldview imperative (human communities: close at hand), “Each agent must contribute to a common body of knowledge that supports the creation of a shared community worldview (that is itself complete, coherent, and good) through which social institutions and their resulting policies might flourish within the constraints of the essential core commonly held values (ethics, aesthetics, and religion).” There are five important parts of this imperative that deserve attention. The first criterion is agent contribution. This means that members of a community have responsibilities to be active members. Ethically, one cannot completely shift this responsibility to others. Even in communities in which there are elected officials, this does not absolve each person in the community from periodically checking to see whether they think the community is doing what it says it’s doing and whether what it says it’s doing is proper policy. When it isn’t the case that what it says it’s doing is proper policy, then that member of the community has an obligation to engage whatever institutional mechanisms of protest and change are open to them.