Traditional moral frameworks are rigid and fragile. If we want both to align advanced AI and to stop fighting our own minds, we may need to shift from “fixed virtues” to “regulated potentials”. This text is a proposal and an invitation to critique.

We’re standing at a crossroads. On one side, we’re looking at a mental-health landscape where people are constantly at war with their own nature—trying to suppress “bad” emotions and chase “good” ones. On the other side, we’re racing toward AGI while being unsure how to align its behavior with human values.

I think these two problems share a structural cause: our notion of ethics is too rigid.

For centuries we’ve relied on lists of virtues and vices. We label anger as “bad”, kindness as “good”, greed as “evil”. But in a high-dimensional, context-dependent world – and in the vast decision space of an AI – these binary labels don’t scale.

I’ve been working on a framework that tries to dissolve this issue. I call it Potentialism.

I just released a first-draft manifesto (v0.1) on Zenodo and I’m explicitly looking for critical feedback.

The core shift: from essences to potentials

The central claim of Potentialism is simple but radical: There are no intrinsically good or bad traits.

Anger, fear, sexuality, ambition, empathy, and intelligence are not moral essences. Rather, they are expressions of neutral potentials — forms of energy or capacity.

Anger is the potential for protection and boundary-setting.
Fear is the potential for preservation and risk assessment.
Ambition is the potential for growth and exploration.

Whether these show up as “virtue” or “vice” depends on how they are regulated with respect to (at least) four variables:

Context – Is this the right type/amount of energy for this situation?
Intention / goal – What is this energy being aimed at?
Awareness / regulation – Is the system tracking consequences and adjusting?
Cultural / social interpretation – How is this potential expression evaluated by society?

So instead of asking “Is anger bad?”, Potentialism asks “What happens when this anger is expressed, with this intention, in this context, with this level of awareness?”

Why this might matter for AI safety

This is where I think Potentialism might be useful beyond psychotherapy or self-help.

When we try to hard-code “do no harm” into an AI, we immediately hit edge-cases and ambiguities about what “harm” is. A static list of r...

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