Axiological disclosure and local terminal risks: What threatened futures reveal about moral grammars

Axiological disclosure and local terminal risks: What threatened futures reveal about moral grammars

Author:
Jean-Paul Vanderlinden (UVSQ)
Abstract (working draft):
Existential risk research has largely focused on threats to humanity as a whole, examining the probability, prevention, and governance of global catastrophic events. While this perspective has generated important insights, it leaves comparatively unexplored the normative processes through which communities confronted with the possible disappearance of their own ways of life understand, evaluate, and negotiate such futures. This paper introduces the concept of local terminal risks as an analytical counterpart to existential risks. Rather than asking how humanity might survive global catastrophe, local terminal risks concern situations in which a community perceives the possible exhaustion of the material, social, cultural, or symbolic conditions that sustain its continuity.

The paper argues that terminal situations possess a distinctive epistemological property: they create moments of axiological disclosure. Under conditions where continuity can no longer be taken for granted, actors are compelled to make explicit what ordinarily remains tacit, the principles through which they determine what is relevant, the values by which competing concerns are prioritised, and the ethical orientations through which these priorities are enacted in practice. To analyse these processes, the paper develops the concept of moral grammars as the structured yet evolving architectures that organise evaluative reasoning.

Moving beyond approaches centred on justification or valuation alone, the proposed framework distinguishes three complementary operations through which actors reason about threatened futures: the constitution of morally relevant concerns (principles), their ordering (values), and their practical enactment (ethics). This heuristic provides a systematic basis for reconstructing the normative architectures that underpin collective deliberation during periods of accelerated environmental, political, economic, or technological transformation.

The paper is primarily theoretical but draws illustrative examples from ongoing research in the Mekong Delta (Vietnam) and East Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat). It concludes by arguing that local terminal risks constitute not only an object of inquiry but also a methodological opportunity. By rendering ordinarily implicit moral grammars empirically observable, they provide a means of investigating how communities imagine continuity, negotiate transformation, and evaluate alternative futures under conditions of profound uncertainty.