---
title: Synthesis and Open Questions
section-id: conclusion
sort: 100
author: Prof. James Okafor
created: 2026-03-10 09:00
modified: 2026-04-15 11:00
language: en
description: How the three parts connect, and what remains genuinely open.
---

# Synthesis and Open Questions

We have moved through three territories—epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics—treating them largely in sequence. But they are not sealed compartments. This final chapter draws out some of the connections and flags the questions that remain, in my view, genuinely open.

## Connections

### Knowledge and Metaphysics
What we can know depends on what there is to know. If the moral realist is right and there are objective moral facts, then moral knowledge is possible; the question becomes how we access those facts. If the idealist is right that reality is mind-dependent, then our knowledge of the world is not knowledge of something independent of us—it is, in some sense, knowledge of ourselves.

The free will debate illustrates the entanglement. Our practices of holding people responsible depend on a view about the nature of persons—on personal identity (is the person who acts the same person who is punished?) and on metaphysical freedom (did they really choose?). Epistemology enters when we ask what evidence could possibly settle these questions.

### Metaphysics and Ethics
Whether there are objective moral facts is itself a metaphysical question. Moral realism claims that moral properties are real; error theory denies this. The metaethical question determines the landscape within which normative ethics operates.

The philosophy of mind has direct ethical implications. If functionalism is correct and mental states are defined by functional roles, then the question of which systems have morally relevant interests becomes a question about functional organisation, not biological substrate. This bears on the moral status of animals, artificial intelligence, and future minds.

### Epistemology and Ethics
Ethics requires making judgements under uncertainty. How confident must we be in a moral claim before acting on it? Moral uncertainty is analogous to empirical uncertainty, and some philosophers have applied decision-theoretic frameworks—maximise expected moral value across theories—to questions about what to do when we are not sure which ethical theory is correct.

## Open Questions

Some questions in this book are genuinely unsettled. Not because we have not thought hard enough, but because they are genuinely hard. I list a few.

**Consciousness**: The hard problem remains unsolved. We do not know why there is something it is like to be a conscious creature. Functionalism handles the functional aspects of mind but the explanatory gap remains. Whether it is ever closed—whether it can be closed—is not known.

**Free will**: The compatibility of freedom and determinism has been debated for centuries. Compatibilism has sophisticated defenders; so does incompatibilism. The question of what we should believe when we cannot achieve certainty here bears on how we treat each other and how we understand ourselves.

**Moral realism**: Whether there are objective moral facts is not settled. The debate between moral realists and expressivists, constructivists, and error theorists continues. The metaethical position one holds matters: it shapes what counts as a genuine moral discovery, what moral disagreement amounts to, and what role moral intuitions should play.

**Personal identity**: Parfit’s radical conclusion—that personal identity does not matter—has not been refuted, but most people resist it. The question of what makes someone the same person over time connects to questions about desert, punishment, and the rationality of prudential concern for one’s future self.

**Justice between generations**: Rawls’ framework was developed for contemporaries. The obligations of present generations to future ones—to those who do not yet exist and whose existence depends on our choices—raise deep questions about the basis of obligation that standard social contract frameworks struggle to accommodate.

## A Final Word

Philosophy does not deliver verdicts. It delivers better questions, sharper distinctions, and arguments that survive scrutiny—and it delivers the honest recognition that some questions are, at present, without satisfying answers.

This is not a failure. It is the condition of doing philosophy seriously. To recognise what we do not know—clearly, without pretending otherwise—is itself a form of understanding.

I hope this book has made some questions clearer, even where it has not resolved them. The questions that remain open are not defects in the book. They are invitations.

*James Okafor*
*Lagos, April 2026*
