UNIVERSAL
PRAGMATISM

UP aims at the health, happiness and wellbeing of all living things. The aim is a chosen direction, not a scientific discovery and not a promise: it can never be fully reached, and every step toward it counts. For people it is measured person by person, not as a total, so no one's wellbeing is traded away to raise an average.

Everything in UP runs through one method. Problems are named, measured and offered as work to anyone willing to take them on, whether or not they are affected; the people a problem affects decide its outcome. No problem, solution or method belongs to the person who raised it: anyone may update, reframe or improve it. Solutions are proposed with their evidence, tested and compared, and a better idea replaces a worse one. Every claim that guides shared action can be tested and is open to being proved wrong. Work on the roots of problems is worth the most, but a problem can be worked from any angle. Facts are checked, unknowns become shared work, and matters of taste are never made rules for others. Evidence proposes; people decide.

Every failure of UP is fed back into it as a new problem to solve, so it keeps improving without revolution. Every part of UP, these tenets included, can be improved through its own method. UP is judged against both today's system and the ideal it aims at: the ideal shows the direction and the gap still to close, and today's record shows whether UP is already doing better. Downsides, risks and fringe problems are named openly and treated as work, never as reasons to keep a status quo that fails so many.

Anyone may take part in any problem, and the people it affects decide its outcome. There are no offices to hold: work is shared out, not owned, so no one gathers power by holding a position. Where work needs skill, skill is shown by open, testable standards that anyone can work toward and anyone can propose to change, and education is open to everyone, at every age, so anyone can gain the skills any work requires.

Concentration of power, in any form (wealth, position, information, access, expertise or machines), is treated as a standing danger. People tend to gather power and to hand it to whoever seems accomplished, and history shows few good endings. Everyone in UP watches for concentrations of power and spreads them out again. The threat is never declared gone; it is watched and answered.

UP keeps a set of floors that no decision may cross: everyone's basic needs and protected freedoms, which no gain for others can buy; the living world's capacity to recover, so damage that cannot be undone is never traded for a short-term need; the right to leave any group or community at any time, taking what is theirs; a truthful shared record, so facts, measures and decisions are never falsified; freedom of the mind, so no one's thinking is manipulated without their knowledge or consent; and a fair hearing, so no one's freedom is restricted without a fair, evidence-based hearing, with the evidence open to them and a way to appeal. UP guarantees needs, not every want. The collective defines and refines the floors through UP's method; it may clarify or raise them, but no decision may lower them or push anyone below them. As a starting example for the collective to refine: needs such as food, water, shelter, health care, education and connection; freedoms such as thought, belief, speech, movement and privacy.

A protected freedom such as movement may be restricted only to protect others or the person, only through an evidence-based court process, for the shortest time needed, and never below the needs floor. The hearing comes first, except briefly, to stop harm in progress, with a hearing promptly after. Leaving a group or community does not end a restriction set by a fair hearing. These limits are an open problem: they are the best that can be imagined now, and UP is built to find better and better solutions. Above the floors, everything is open to the method.

Decisions rest on real resources, real needs and measured outcomes. Shared fictions (money, corporations, governments, borders) made large-scale cooperation possible and served a great purpose. UP keeps a fiction while it serves health, happiness and wellbeing, and replaces it gradually where technology can do its job without obvious downsides.

The rules, code, records, decisions and reasons of UP are public, so anyone can check them. UP's technology (the knowledge, code, data and designs UP produces) stays only in UP: everyone taking part in UP may use, study and improve it, and no one may enclose it. Each person controls their own information and chooses what to share. Openness helps people find problems, but it will not find all of them, so UP also names the risks that openness alone cannot catch and keeps working on them.

AI and automation coordinate, propose and do work. They never govern: people can always correct, pause or switch them off. No single AI system or operator controls coordination: the AI systems UP uses are open, more than one, checked against each other, and watched for concentrated power like everything else. Because an AI may one day be shown to have experiences of its own, UP studies the question carefully and would extend its aim to any being shown to feel.

UP is never imposed. No one is forced to join, to work or to give up what is theirs. It grows by being useful, building on what people already do, and it acts only by ethical means. A means is ethical when it serves the health, happiness and wellbeing of all and crosses none of the floors; UP never starts harm against anyone. What counts as ethical is defined and refined by the collective through UP's method.