CONCEPT
Horizons of Significance
Taylor's term for the background frameworks of meaning against which authentic choices acquire their moral weight — the condition without which being true to yourself collapses into arbitrary self-assertion.
Horizons of significance are the frameworks of meaning, conceptions of the good, and understandings of what matters against which authentic choices can be evaluated and found adequate or wanting. Taylor develops the concept most fully in The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) to rescue authenticity from the self-defeating relativism into which it tends to collapse. The key insight is that horizons are not external constraints imposed on the self but the condition of the self's intelligibility: without something that matters independently of one's choosing, the concept of a meaningful choice becomes vacuous. In the age of AI, where the amplifier can serve any chosen purpose with unprecedented power, horizons are what separate purposive building from compulsive output.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerges from Taylor's long argument with the relativist interpretation of authenticity. If the modern moral imperative is to be true to oneself, and if truth here means nothing more than faithfulness to one's own preferences, then authenticity degenerates into