The Initiate's Pledge

The Grey Robes have a prime directive.

The Hierophant’s Call
If you seek the Triune Braid—happiness, harmony, and prosperity—then you will abstain from initiating harm, join others who share this commitment, and lock arms with them in solidarity.

The Initiate’s Pledges
As I seek the Triune Braid—happiness, harmony, and prosperity—I will abstain from initiating harm, join others who share this commitment, and lock arms with them in solidarity.

There is no such thing as objective morality. There are only commitments to be honored and virtues to be practiced. Whether or to what extent philosophers or the faithful disagree about the ultimate nature of morality is of little use to us. What matters is whether enough of us can agree on the moral primitives.

The Grey Robes’ initiate’s pledge is a moral commitment derived from instrumental rationality, which takes the following form:

If you desire x, then you ought (or ought not) to do y.
(For example: If you wish to live a long life, then you ought to exercise.)

Such differs from the usual normative form, which is something like You ought to do x because x is objectively good, moral, or right. While we can have strong intuitions about right and wrong, the fact is that people sometimes hold different views, despite the strength of the intuition. And a moral belief is wholly unlike a metaphysical or scientific belief, such as I see a chair. Claiming one’s moral statement is objective adds little, especially when in disagreement with one’s enemies.

Further, the Grey Robes invoke instrumental rationality for the following reasons:

1. Instrumental rationality refers to one’s subjective and sometimes selfish beliefs. It’s difficult to argue against your own moral beliefs, even if they are not objective.

2. Instrumental rationality still enables us to establish solidarity with those who share our moral reasoning and avoid those who do not. (This really matters.)

3. Once we establish solidarity, we can formalize our relationship with an actual agreement, which means we agree to our own moral system, one that we can spread as far as possible, creating an Empire of the Mind.

What’s interesting about the instrumental rationality approach to our doctrine is that it is empirically testable and/or discoverable in many cases. For example, we can observe the degree to which societies and systems of government that minimize threats and acts of violence give rise to happiness, harmony, and prosperity.

Moral Spellcasting

This is perhaps an unusual way of thinking and finding one’s moral siblings, but one will notice that we do not completely discard the moral bases of the Western intellectual tradition. Indeed, the Initiate’s Pledge uses scraps of it. Call this subtle approach moral spellcasting, because it has all the ingredients for a binding declaration.

Let’s pull elements from the Western Tradition’s “ethics” spell book:

• Duty- and rule-based ethics—One judges actions based on adherence to moral duties, rules, or principles rather than outcomes.

• Contractarian ethics—Views morality as arising from social contracts or agreements among rational individuals.

• Consequentialist ethics: Judges actions by their outcomes or consequences. The right action is the one that produces the best overall results.

• Virtue ethics—Focuses on moral character rather than specific acts or rules. One develops virtuous practice, asking, "What would a virtuous person do?"

These are the Big Four. And each is part of the spell.

• Duty- and rule-based ethics—“abstain from initiating harm”

• Contractarian ethics—“join others who share this commitment, and lock arms with them in solidarity”

• Consequentialist ethics—“happiness, harmony, and prosperity”

• Virtue ethics—Live by the pledge in conscious, continuous practice.

However subtly, the pledge weaves together all the major ethical threads. By taking the pledge, we cast that moral spell upon ourselves and draw close to others who do the same.

Be aware that the Initiate’s Pledge not only aligns with the practice of nonviolence, but it has a corollary: Never outsource the initiation of harm to a proxy. No matter how far away one thinks she is from the victims of threat and harm, she bears some responsibility for an innocent person being threatened or harmed if she designates a proxy. This includes lending support—electoral or financial—for criminals or authorities that threaten harm against the innocent.

The pledge thus serves as the foundation for the Law of Consent.

There are always paradoxes and grey areas, of course, and we must consider the nature of the membrane around our order. This includes how we must treat those within and those outside our circle of reciprocity—as well as how we deal with special circumstances, such as war, which can be difficult and intractable. Perhaps such debates should be left to the hierophants and lawyers of the future, who will have to navigate such difficult circumstances with the Initiate’s Pledge as their North Star.

We’ll explore the Law of Consent in a future installment.