Post-Teleological Ethics and the Suspension of Moral Endpoints

Biocognitive Durational Ethics proposes a developmental model of ethical consciousness grounded in the organism’s lived experience of time rather than in teleological or soteriological frameworks. Traditional ethical systems often organize moral inquiry around ultimate ends—flourishing, salvation, redemption, or progress—thereby structuring cognition through anticipatory reward and fear. The durational model suspends these organizing premises, allowing inquiry to proceed without predetermined moral endpoints. This suspension liberates the organism’s cognitive architecture to explore complexity across expanding temporal horizons, enabling what may be described as pristine inquiry: a mode of investigation that is not constrained by inherited cultural or theological boundaries