The Imperative of Pluralism: Empirical Support from Cognitive and Epistemic Simulations of Social Being

This paper presents empirical evidence for the Imperative of Pluralism, the thesis that pluralism is not merely a moral or political preference but an ontological necessity for sustaining relational and democratic orders. Drawing on data from the SimEthica simulation framework, I analyze agent-based systems endowed with cognitive agency and epistemic autonomy. These agents form obligations, negotiate trust, and repair contradiction debt across regimes of differing plural structures. The results show that moral and institutional resilience depends on epistemic diversity coupled with partial alignment. Systems that enforce homogeneity (authoritarian or all-legal) or lack shared norms (anomic or purely pluralist) collapse, while systems maintaining moderate diversity remain stable and adaptive. The findings provide empirical grounding for the philosophical architecture developed in The Geometry of the Good (unpublished manuscript), confirming that pluralism is structurally indispensable for sustaining social being.