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A small gripe on Zorn's lemma

Recall the usual proof that commutative rings have maximal ideals: every chain of ideals has an upper bound (their union), and apply Zorn's. However, I always found this unsatisfying because there doesn't seem to be a relationship between the maximal ideal's existence and the union construction; it feels somewhat indirect. I find it cleaner to identify a maximal chain of ideals and directly construct the maximal ideal as the union. The claim that every poset has a maximal chain1 is called the Hausdorff Maximality Principle and fortunately it is almost trivially equal to Zorn's.

  1. HMP $\imp$ Zorn's
    Suppose every chain has an upper bound. By hypothesis there is a maximal chain, and its upper bound is a maximal element.

  2. Zorn's $\imp$ HMP
    Consider the poset $P$ of chains under the subset relation. Every chain in $P$ has an upper bound, which is its union; thus by Zorn's there is a maximal element in $P$ which is a maximal chain.

1. Note that actually a cofinal chain suffices and the maximal chain can be realised as its downward closure. back