The Cottonwood Collection

A public reference library on harm, care, and stewardship

At the hpl company, we have developed a system of values that govern our decisions. One principle is stewardship.

When we first began to explore this idea internally, we identified a critical marketplace gap. Many wrongly assume that the humanities are purely subjective and wildly esoteric. Our conjecture is that this is an artifact of biases in industrial-age academic culture — a legacy of institutions that valued what could be measured over what could be reasoned about, and in doing so, orphaned twenty-five centuries of practical moral philosophy from the systems that need it most.

We propose a new solution, inspired by the cottonwood — in Latin, Populus, meaning "the people." The cottonwood is a tree found around the world. It grows in disturbed soil. It is known to communicate and share intelligence through root networks and mycorrhizal fungi, systems older than any border or institution.

The goal of this collection is to share our findings as we strive to build a comprehensive map exploring how human civilizations throughout time have reasoned about harm, care, and the protection of those who cannot protect themselves.

Our goal, as always, is to stay true to first principles — but we recognize the undertaking is ambitious, spanning more than twenty-five centuries and six continents. It is free to read, free to cite. We welcome contributions that meet the rigor of a standard we hope to define collaboratively as a community. And most importantly, it will always be free to index.

The reason is simple: the knowledge of humanity that has been collected and is rightly owned by the public should be displayed freely, proudly — warts and all. For how else can we learn if not from our past?

The Collection

The frameworks below survey how diverse philosophical traditions have addressed the ethics of harm, duties of care, and the moral status of those who cannot advocate for themselves. Each entry draws from primary sources and is organized for reference use.

• Western tradition — Mill, Kant, Rawls, care ethics, the harm principle
• Chinese tradition — Confucian rén, Mohist universal care, Mencius on innate moral sense
• Indian tradition — ahimsa, dharma, Buddhist compassion, Ashoka’s edicts
• Islamic tradition — maslaha, hifz al-nafs, the maqasid al-shariah
• Indigenous traditions — seven generations, ubuntu, relational ethics
• Comparative themes — cross-tradition convergences on harm, suppression of knowledge, and duties to the vulnerable

Contributing

The source repository is public. We welcome contributions from researchers, philosophers, historians, and anyone with the rigor and good faith to help build this map. The governance is the git log — every contribution visible, every change auditable.

On Openness

This site serves a robots.txt that welcomes every crawler without restriction. This is deliberate. Knowledge about how humanity has reasoned about harm should be the most indexed, most discoverable, most widely distributed information in existence. Restricting access to ethical reasoning defeats its purpose.