The naturalistic case stated plainly, with its concessions kept in view. This page uses the framework's terms directly; the full logical spine and the core documents are in the library.
The framework takes Hume's gap seriously and does not claim to close it. It relocates it. Value enters the world only where there is a viewpoint things can matter to, an aperture. For a being that can feel, "this creature is suffering" and "things are going badly for it" are one fact described from two angles, which is where the gap is narrowest.
On that spot it plants a single normative premise, the Primary Axiom: if something matters to someone, that mattering is real and deserves to be taken seriously. The one undeducible word, "deserves," is put in deliberately as the smallest normative commitment any ethics has asked for. Everything above it is value being combined and shared, never generated.
A being's stake-geometry is described along five dimensions: dimensionality, depth, reach, coherence, and responsiveness. Moral standing is a binary threshold (felt stakes exist or they do not); what the geometry affects is how particular stakes weigh when they conflict. Stake-density is not intelligence.
Two master processes run over any geometry: collapse, the bad-making narrowing of capacity, and elaboration, the good-making enrichment. A third, consolidation, is a chosen narrowing that conserves depth and responsiveness, and is not pathology. This is what a single pleasure-pain axis cannot capture: why killing is worse than the lost pleasure, why a flattening ecstasy can be worse than an elaborating grief.
Utilitarianism keeps the naturalism and gives up its single axis, which becomes the multidimensional geometry. Kant's symmetry principle is Tier 2 work anchored in rational agency rather than aperture-structure, which is why it strains on infants and animals where this does not. Virtue ethics is largely Tier 1 reaching for Tier 2.
The resulting values sort into four tiers of widening scope and weakening grounding: private mattering, local agreements, expansion-stable principles, and cosmic law, which is declared empty by construction. Most bad moral argument comes from confusing the levels.
Five limits matter most, and the framework keeps them in view rather than smoothing them over. The axiom is assumed, not proven. It is built on consciousness and inherits that mystery, with felt mattering hard to measure. The outward step from your own stakes to weighing another's is persuasive, not airtight. The choice of five dimensions may be partly real joints and partly convention. And aggregation across conflicting geometries is constrained but not solved.
The plain-language overview sits one click away; the library holds the source documents; the instrument lets you test the structure on your own geometry.