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In this pivotal episode, the AI hosts reach Chapter Four of Tending the Garden by J. Daniel Alejos — the point where moral philosophy meets its limit. After examining the failures of personal instinct in Broken Compasses, Alejos now asks whether an objective moral framework can be built from within human reason, consensus, or evolution itself. The answer, he argues, is no — because every human-made system ultimately borrows values it cannot generate.

Through lucid conversation, the hosts unpack Alejos’ critique of the three major modern approaches: evolutionary morality, which mistakes survival for goodness; rational morality, which assumes the value of life before reason can defend it; and contractual morality, which confuses agreement with truth. Each, Alejos says, “smuggles in the very values it claims to derive.” You can’t find dignity under a microscope, or the sanctity of life in mathematical logic — they must come from beyond us.

The discussion explores the book’s striking metaphor of entropy: “Closed systems decay.” A purely human moral order, sealed off from transcendence, collapses under its own weight. True morality, Alejos suggests, must be received, not manufactured — sustained by a Source capable of giving meaning itself.

By the end, the hosts leave listeners with a provocative question: If morality cannot be built, only given, what does that say about the Giver? This episode bridges the philosophical groundwork of Tending the Garden into its second movement — the study of how formation happens, and what it means to live within a moral structure that was never ours to invent.