The Relational Nature of Evaluative Facts

 

Moral principles do not descend from abstraction. They take shape within the lived conditions of an organism regulating itself in a changing world. Long before principles are articulated, life distinguishes what sustains viability from what endangers it, and these distinctions—extended through reflection, relation, and experience—can be grounded in evaluative facts. This article explores that foundation: how evaluative patterns emerge from organism–environment coupling, how they acquire normative significance, and why moral guidance is most coherent when rooted in the empirical realities of living well with others.

Moral principles are best understood as arising within a world that becomes meaningful through the organism’s ongoing engagement. Living systems are never indifferent to their conditions: every act of regulation presupposes a distinction of degrees between what sustains viability and what endangers it. These discriminations, extended through reflection and relation, are best grounded in evaluative facts—empirical, relational patterns that reveal how actions and environments affect the integrity of life. Such facts are most coherently understood as Relational. They do not reside within isolated minds or inert matter but within the ongoing coupling of organism and world, self and other, perception and response.[1]

To encounter an evaluative fact is to engage the world through meaningful responsiveness rather than detached observation. The living agent perceives significance in patterns of consequence—how honesty stabilizes trust, how care restores balance, how neglect corrodes relation. These patterns are first sensed through the body, then interpreted through emotion, and finally refined through reflection. Human cognition can render them explicit: what was once enacted as adjustment becomes recognized as a principle of pattern.[2]

Contemporary cognitive science describes this process as predictive attunement. The mind routinely models its environment, comparing expected and actual outcomes to minimize error and maintain coherence. Through this feedback, agents learn which actions tend to support stability across physiological, psychological, and social-moral levels. Evaluative facts are the relatively stable regularities discerned through this learning—the empirical relations that help indicate what allows life and meaning to endure.[3]

Evaluative facts are neither cultural inventions nor metaphysical absolutes, they arise as emergent and revisable patterns of interaction. When experience repeats across contexts—when cooperation reliably yields security, or cruelty repeatedly yields fracture—these outcomes reveal the relational patterns through which moral significance emerges. Their validity is best demonstrated in practice: patterns that consistently sustain integrity acquire normative weight precisely because they prove themselves within the ecology of living systems.[4]

To understand why these patterns can carry normative force, we must clarify what kind of “fact” they represent. The regularities we encounter in lived experience usually display some degree of stability, observability, and consequence. This shifts the discussion from the vocabulary of intuition and belief to the empirical status of these relations themselves.

This naturalistic orientation contrasts sharply with traditional moral theory which often treats goodness or badness as if they were properties that actions or things somehow possess in themselves.[5] Yet this “property conception” mistakes value for an attribute of isolated entities rather than an emergent feature of relational processes and patterns.[6] On a naturalistic reading, value does not reside in objects or actions but arises through their functional significance within the living and social systems they affect.[7] To call something good or bad, then, is shorthand for describing the patterned ways it matters within the ecology of life and relation.[8]

This naturalistic account of value invites a corresponding clarification of what we mean by truth and fact. Truth, in its most ordinary sense, pertains to belief—it designates consistency within propositions or systems of thought.[9] Philosophers also speak of truth in the correspondence sense, where a proposition is counted as true when it aligns with the features of the world it describes.[10]

A fact, by contrast, concerns relations, events, or processes that can be verified independently of belief.[11] It can be observed, tested, and if necessary, falsified. In practice, such verification is always partial and provisional, especially in complex social contexts. Moral facts are therefore not abstract truths about value but empirically discernable relations within lived experience—the recurrent ways in which conduct alters the conditions of viability and relation.[12]

In this respect, evaluative facts can be described as facts of mattering: empirically traceable relations that reveal how certain actions, traits, or environments contribute to or diminish the coherence of living systems.[13] Their validity rests not on intuition or consensus but on the observable consequences that link behavior to functional outcomes.[14] A value claim is true to the extent that it tracks an evaluative fact—a stable relation of mattering revealed through the ways actions support or disrupt the conditions of life.

Moral facts should not be understood as intrinsic properties of acts or things taken in isolation. They arise from evaluation—the significance that emerges within interaction between agents, or between an agent and its environment, in a given context.[15] What grants these evaluations factual status is their stability and observability: recurrent patterns of consequence that reveal how certain modes of conduct tend to support or undermine the conditions of living well. Their normative force follows from this functional continuity between what occurs and what preserves.[16]

To perceive an evaluative fact, then, is to discern alignment or distortion within the relational field that connects self and world.[17] This perception is at once empirical and ethical: empirical because it concerns observable consequences, ethical because it implicates the agent’s participation in those consequences.[18] Through reflection, these insights consolidate into principles—generalizable orientations that guide conduct even when the original context has passed. Moral knowledge and reasoning, in this view, is learned from life’s feedback. It is the cumulative understanding, recognition, acknowledgement, and embodied realization of how certain relations uphold the coherence of existence.[19]

Within human life, evaluative facts often take the form of social mattering—the ways interactions sustain or erode trust, reciprocity, and shared stability.[20] Social mattering situates moral evaluation within lived networks of cooperation, where each act contributes to or detracts from the viability of the whole.[21] Through such patterns, the empirical relations of life acquire normative weight: they disclose how integrity, respect, and mutual reliability become conditions for continued existence together.

Such alignment or distortion can manifest at multiple scales of organization. An action that supports an individual’s immediate well-being may undermine the cohesion of a family, community, or ecosystem.[22] Conversely, norms that constrain individual preference may preserve the stability of the larger social or ecological field. Evaluative facts therefore arise within layered systems of dependence—physiological, psychological, interpersonal, and collective—where coherence at one level must be balanced against integrity at another.[23] Moral discernment consists in recognizing and navigating these intersecting orders of mattering.

Evaluative facts thus provide the experiential substrate of moral principles.[24] They are a connective tissue between the descriptive and the prescriptive, between is and ought as lived phenomena.[25] To understand them is to see that morality emerges from the relational order of living systems.[26] Through such discovery, human beings can transform the adaptive intelligence of life into moral understanding—the awareness that how we act toward others and our world is inseparable from the conditions that allow us to exist at all.

Series Note:
This article is part of a multi-part series titled The Foundations of Moral Principles. The series traces how moral understanding emerges from the living dynamics of adaptation, relation, and reflection. Each installment examines a distinct dimension of moral life—from the biological roots of moral evaluation to the relational and functional roles of principles, and finally their limits and renewal. Together, the series offers a naturalized account of moral order grounded in the coherence and continuity of living experience.

 

 

About The Author

Nathan is the Managing Director and Chief Instructor at Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, and Chief Representative of Luo Guang Yu Seven Star Praying Mantis in Canada and China. With over 25 years of experience living in China, he is deeply committed to passing on traditional martial arts in its most sincere form. As part of his passion Nathan regularly writes on related topics of self-defense, combat, health, philosophy, ethics, personal cultivation, and leadership.

 

 

End Notes:
[1] Evan Thompson, “Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007): 379–397.
[2] Antonio Damasio, “The Feeling of What Happens,” Nature Neuroscience 2 (1999): 859–862.
[3] Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2010): 127–138.
[4] Robert Axelrod, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 211 (1981): 1390–1396.
[5] Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903, pp. 10–15, 36–38.
[6] Richards, Richard A. “Evolutionary Naturalism and Valuation.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics, edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, 129–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 131–137.
[7] Dewey, John. Theory of Valuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939, pp. 5–10, 19–22; and Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 16–21, 38–40.
[8] Friston, Karl. “Life as We Know It.” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 10, no. 86 (2013): 20130475, pp. 5–7; and Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 128–133, 199–203.
[9] Hilary Putnam, “The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Philosophy,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 11 (2003): 3–14.
[10] Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958–59): 83–104.
[11] Hilary Putnam, “The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Philosophy,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 11 (2003): 3–14.
[12] David Wiggins, “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism, and Motivating Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80 (2006): 73–99.
[13] Richards, Richard A. “Evolutionary Naturalism and Valuation.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics, edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, 129–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 136–138.
[14] Dewey, John. Theory of Valuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939, pp. 19–22.
[15] Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007): 485–507.
[16] Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007): 485–507.
[17] Shaun Gallagher, “Dynamic Models of Body Schema and Body Image,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 195–212.
[18] Giovanna Colombetti, “The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets Enactive Mind,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2014): 501–523.
[19] Shaun Gallagher, “Dynamic Models of Body Schema and Body Image,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 195–212.
[20] Richards, Richard A. “Evolutionary Naturalism and Valuation.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics, edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, 129–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 138–140.
[21] Tomasello, Michael. A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 3–7, 71–74.
[22] Richards, Richard A. “Evolutionary Naturalism and Valuation.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics, edited by Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, 129–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 136–137.
[23] Friston, Karl. “Life as We Know It.” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 10, no. 86 (2013): 20130475, pp. 5–7.
[24] Biological Foundations of Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1966): 168–69.
[25] Mark Johnson, Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 28–32.
[26] Hans Jonas, “Biological Foundations of Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): 165–188.