Autogenetic Praxis

This essay develops a framework I call autogenetic praxis: a way of reading how moral norms and religious meaning are produced and reproduced through social practice, rather than treating them as either fixed essences or infinitely malleable constructs. Norms and meanings are traced through four overlapping movements, crystallization, deconstruction, production, and provisional institutionalization, each read as a lens rather than a fixed stage. The framework states its normative premise openly: it favors expanding the space for action available to those most constrained, and reducing forms of domination that are difficult to contest. Two test cases — a religious prohibition on compound interest, and a conflict between two vulnerable groups over social assistance — are used to show how the framework's own questions can yield conflicting answers, and how a decision can still be made and recorded without claiming finality. The aim is not to close the question of how norms ought to be judged, but to make the process of judging them open to examination and revision.