AIM Framework glossary
Essentialist Morality
Canonical definition
Essentialist Morality is the part of Morality that is not Ethics: claims that explain another Individual's conduct by a property of character held to be permanent, pervasive and personal, which no Referent governs, or that attribute to a group a kind the Diversity Referent denies, the same property held of every member. A claim of Essentialist Morality names no conduct that could satisfy it, and each of its dimensions answers to contrary conduct only weakly, so the only remedy it leaves acts on the Individual rather than on the conduct. Negative Relatedness held as Essentialist Morality is released only slowly, and the more certainly it is held, the more slowly. A permanent property is by definition one that no conduct could revise, so that the Belief is released at all shows the permanence it attributes to be false.
Explanation
This is judging what someone is rather than what they did: evil, a traitor, unclean, one of a kind of people. It explains what someone did by something about them that is permanent, runs through everything they do, and belongs to them rather than to their circumstances. Nothing the person does can meet a judgement like that, so it ends in action against the person. The judgement can still fade, because the mind holding it goes on weighing what the person does, but it fades very slowly, and the surer someone is, the slower it fades. That it can fade at all shows that what it called permanent was not.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct. Defined from Morality, Ethics, Self-Model Inversion and the Diversity Referent. No new axioms required.
Derivation
Chapter 16, Section 16.11.9; the release rate at Appendix A, Section A.5.10.
Also in the entry
Distinction from Ethics. Ethics names conduct and its Harm and is revised at the rate the conduct sets. Essentialist Morality names no conduct. Distinction from Referent Abandonment. Referent Abandonment is any Belief held against an available verdict. The targeting of a group by kind is the case of it that falls within Essentialist Morality.