Religiously obligatory (Layer 3) yet structurally complicit in injustice (Layer 4),
Discursively hegemonic (Layer 4) but transcendentally void (Layer 5).
This redefinition shifts ethics away from univocal moral prescriptions to a multi-perspectival discernment, where moral excellence is the ability to navigate levels, not absolutize one.
Moral virtue, in this framework, is not a single unit such as "just" or "sincere," but rather the ability to see and act across layers, even when it causes personal conflict or suffering.
6.3 Moral Epistemology: Between Dissonance, Transcendence, and Deliberation
One of the most radical implications of the SMH framework is its call for a new epistemology of morality, a way of knowing the good that embraces ambiguity, rupture, and revelation. It pivots around three interrelated axes:
a) Dissonance as a Source of Moral Knowledge
Unlike classical rationalist ethics, SMH valorizes moral dissonance as epistemically productive. When an agent experiences inner conflict between, say, religious obligation and empathic response, or between structural obedience and transcendent call, this conflict is not to be suppressed, it is to be examined as a source of moral insight.
Moral growth, then, is not linear ascent (as in Kohlberg) but spiraling negotiation of contradictions.
b) Transcendence as Distraction and Clarify
The fifth layer of SMH acknowledges a realm of moral knowledge that transcends linguistic articulation or socio-rational consensus. Whether grounded in divine inspiration, existential illumination, or aesthetic sublimity, transcendence functions as both a disturber and clarifier of moral reality.
