Orion Simerl

Contemporary moral philosophy frequently appeals to objective reasons said to hold independently of desire. Yet when such reasons conflict, no non-arbitrary criterion exists for determining which should prevail. This article introduces Objective Morality, a liberty-based framework grounded in the invariant structure of conscious agency. Because conscious awareness necessarily involves preferred orientation, desire is a constitutive feature of consciousness, and liberty understood as non-imposition emerges as the necessary condition for action. On this basis, the article demonstrates how this structure subsumes influential moral frameworks by resolving their foundational tensions. It shows that Scanlon’s reasonable rejection reduces to the rejection of liberty-imposing principles ; it provides the missing criterion to resolve Parfit’s conflicting objective reasons ; it identifies why Berlin’s positive liberty collapses into unjustified coercion ; and it reframes the Capabilities Approach as a derivative function of adequate opportunities to acquire time, money, and know-how. By situating liberty as a structural precondition rather than a contingent value, the paper provides a unified normative framework capable of grounding moral judgment without contradiction.