Influence Encyclopedia
The philosophical traditions, thinkers, and schools of thought that shape ethical frameworks. When the sidebar detects an influence in your thinking, you can follow it here to understand the connection.
This is a living, growing document. As people explore their ethical frameworks, the AI identifies new philosophical influences and generates entries for them automatically. The encyclopedia expands with every conversation.
Virtue Ethics
Aristotle
When your framework emphasizes character, flourishing, or 'what would a good person do?' over rigid rules, Aristotle is in the room. His influence shows up in frameworks that prize practical wisdom over abstract principles, that treat moral development as an ongoing practice, and that resist reducing ethics to a single formula.
Virtue Ethics
When the question is not simply what to do but who to be — when the choice matters for the kind of character being formed, or when no rule or calculation seems adequate — virtue ethics asks what a genuinely good, practically wise person would recognize as the fitting response.
Behavioral Economics / Cognitive Psychology
Ethical Intuitionism / Pluralistic Deontology
Political Philosophy
Communitarianism
When a decision involves obligations to community, the erosion of shared institutions or civic bonds, or a conflict between individual preference and relational responsibility, communitarianism asks whether the framing is missing the communal goods and constitutive relationships that give the individual's choices their meaning.
Classical Liberalism
When your framework treats individual freedom as a precondition rather than just one value among many, suspects paternalism even when well-intentioned, or insists that coercion requires an unusually high burden of justification, classical liberalism is the tradition you're drawing from.
Social Contract Theory
When a framework asks about legitimate authority, mutual obligation, or what we owe each other as members of a shared political community, social contract theory is the background. It provides the vocabulary of rights, consent, and legitimacy that underlies most modern political and legal reasoning.