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Love

Working draft This public copy has not yet had its final author pass; wording may still move.

Developed in conversation, June 6, 2026

What this document is

Love is the phenomenon that exercises nearly the whole framework at once, which is why the natural question about it — is love a value, a good, or an emotion? — turns out to be mis-posed in an instructive way. Love is not one of those things rather than the others. It appears at four distinct structural levels of the framework, and is not, strictly, the one thing ordinary speech most often calls it.

Several earlier documents already touch love in passing, each from inside its own concern and without looking sideways at the others. Aperture ethics lists it as a dilation — the case where "a second aperture becomes visible through the first; reality deepens." Stake-geometry says love "deepens existing stakes and adds new ones," because "the beloved's stake-geometry becomes partially internalized." The Catalogue of Goods sorts Love/Affection as a Tier 0 good. Relations Between Apertures makes permeability — the internalization that stake-geometry was gesturing at — a load-bearing primitive and names love as its home case. The Emotion Data Model mentions love only to set it aside, as an object-directed contrast to the propositional emotions it actually treats; and Mood and Sentiment picks it back up at the mesoscale, as a sentiment rather than an episode.

What none of those treatments did was put the placements side by side and ask whether they cohere. They do — and better than coherence, they turn out to be one phenomenon described at four scales, tied together by a single mechanism. This document locates love at each level, names the mechanism that unifies them, and records what the placement resolves and what it leaves open.

Love is not a value — except at one edge

The first thing to clear away is the usage that feels most obvious. People say my values are family, honesty, and love. The framework's opening move in Goods was to warn that "value" is quietly doing three different jobs — the Tier 0 fact that something matters to an aperture, the Tier 1 norms a network binds its members to, and the Tier 2 principles anchored in what any aperture must be. When someone lists love among their "values," they are doing none of these. They are naming a good: a content their stake-geometry has organized itself around.

So love is not a value in the framework's metaethical sense. It is not what makes an aperture matter — that is aperturality itself, the substrate. It is downstream of mattering, not constitutive of it. A newborn aperture that has not yet come to love anything still has full intrinsic value; the love comes later, as content laid onto a substrate that was already valuable. To call love a value obscures exactly this: it puts the contents where the framework needs to keep the condition.

There is one edge where the picture shifts. Agape — love extended not to a particular other but to any aperture in virtue of its being one — is recognizably the Tier 2 move. "Recognize any stake-bearer as a locus where things matter" is the same structure as "don't gratuitously collapse felt stake-geometries": a principle pre-committed to applying to participants not yet met, because the meeting itself requires the structural feature the principle is anchored in. At that edge love stops being merely a held good and shades into genuine value-content. The particular loves are Tier 0; the love-as-such they can grow into is Tier 2. This is the one place the ordinary phrase "love is a value" is tracking something real.

Love is a good

This is the unambiguous placement, and the catalogue records it cleanly: Love/Affection — Tier 0, primary dimension Depth, secondary Reach and Dimensionality.

What earns love its standing in the architecture is not the entry but the use Goods makes of it. Love is the worked example chosen to show that the five elaboration-mechanisms are not mutually exclusive — that a single good can do work across the whole geometry. It is the case that needs all five at once. It adds dimensions, because the beloved's stakes become regions of mattering that were nothing to you before. It deepens, which is why Depth is primary — love is high-depth almost by definition. It extends reach, into another aperture's geometry. It builds or strains coherence, depending on whether the beloved's goods integrate with the ones you already hold. And it modifies responsiveness — the lover updates on the beloved's states in ways no stranger could prompt. Most goods touch two dimensions; love touches all five, which is what makes it the structurally richest good in the catalogue.

The Tier 0 anchoring also makes love the framework's clearest demonstration that stake-density is not cognitive sophistication. Stake-geometry uses precisely this case as its protective example: "a person with Down syndrome who loves deeply has enormous stake-density even if cognitive dimensionality is reduced." Love is where depth of mattering and intellectual complexity most visibly come apart — which is exactly why a value theory that grounds moral weight in stake-density rather than capability needs love to do the work it does here.

The classical Greek taxonomy slots into this without strain, in the framework's usual relocate-rather-than-replace way. Eros, storge, and philia are particular loves — Tier 0 goods directed at this person, this child, this friend. Agape is the Tier 2 shadow, love-as-such. The catalogue's neighboring Tier 0 goods — Family, Friendship — are the same permeability-high genus under more specific descriptions. The framework does not invent the distinction between kinds of love; it gives the kinds a structural location.

Love is a relation

Love is irreducibly about a second aperture, which is why its most natural home is the relational layer, and why Relations Between Apertures names it as the case its central primitive was built to capture. Permeability — "how much each aperture's stake-geometry is internalized into the other's" — is, in that document's words, "the axis on which love, friendship, care, and parental investment do their distinctive work."

Run the three primitives against love and each does visible work. Recognition is high-fidelity and, crucially, low in substitutability: love registers this aperture, not the type it belongs to. Permeability is the internalization itself — the beloved's wellbeing has become a dimension of your own mattering, "not by argument but by the constitution of your geometry." That is what care is, structurally. Effect on geometries is where love's morality cashes out: healthy love produces bilateral elaboration; love's pathologies are precisely the cases that land elsewhere on this axis — the controlling or abusive "love" that combines high recognition and high permeability with asymmetric constriction. The three primitives are independent, and naming them separately is what lets the framework distinguish devotion from possession without leaving the vocabulary of love.

The four modifiers sharpen the analysis. Voluntariness distinguishes chosen love from the love an infant has no say in. Power explains why a parent's small carelessness can collapse a child's geometry in ways the child cannot reciprocate — the moral weight scales with the asymmetry. Mediation is what makes parasocial and long-distance love structurally different from face-to-face love, mostly by degrading or reshaping recognition-fidelity. Relational duration is why betraying a thirty-year love collapses more geometry than betraying a fresh one: more shared geometry has accumulated into the relation.

And the derived properties locate love precisely. Love is the low-substitutability case par excellence — the friendship is to this friend, not to "a friend." It need not be reciprocal to be valuable (unrequited love, the hospice attachment), though reciprocity changes what it produces. And its repair capacity — whether it can recover from a constriction event — is a property of the relation itself, not of either lover alone.

Love is a sentiment, not an emotion

The seven core emotions are fear, anger, joy, hope, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Love is not among them, and its absence is the most interesting result in the whole assessment, because intuitively love feels like the emotion par excellence. The Emotion Data Model names love only as a foil — an object-directed state used to illustrate that not every emotion populates all five axes. It declines to give love a dataset.

The exclusion is correct on the framework's own machinery, and Mood and Sentiment now says why. The episode model logs bounded occurrences; states that outlast the longest duration band leave the episode scale entirely and graduate into the mesoscale — a mood if they shed their object, a sentiment if they keep it. A sentiment is "an enduring, object-directed affective disposition… that is not felt every moment but stands ready to re-fire whenever its object reappears." Love is the paradigm. More precisely, in the per-emotion mapping, love is joy's sentiment: the object-fixed gladness joy becomes when its object is kept and sustained. You can have an episode of feeling a surge of love — that is joy, firing at the beloved — but love itself is the standing disposition the surge expresses, not the surge.

This placement has to be held together with the good placement, or it will mislead. Love-the-sentiment has a single home register — joy. But love-the-good has internalized the beloved's stake-geometry, and that internalization is what lets love generate a whole repertoire rather than a single feeling. Because the beloved's stakes are now partly your own, their fortunes trigger your emotions as if they were about you: their danger reads as your fear, their loss as your grief, a wrong done to them as your anger, their flourishing as your joy. Love is therefore one sentiment that, through internalization, becomes a generator of many emotion families. What people loosely call "feeling love" is any episode drawn from that repertoire; love itself is the standing structure underneath, disposing the whole set.

The four are one phenomenon — and the hinge is internalization

The four placements are not competing answers. They are the same phenomenon seen at four levels of zoom:

What makes them one rather than four is a single mechanism: the internalization of another aperture's stake-geometry into one's own. Each document describes that mechanism from its own side. The good account states it — love "partially internalizes" the beloved's geometry. The relational account names it and makes it a primitive — permeability. The sentiment account explains its dynamics — what the internalization feels like as a standing disposition, and why it radiates into the full episodic repertoire once the other's stakes have become partly yours. One mechanism, four descriptions.

This is why love reads to ordinary intuition as a value, a good, a relationship, and an emotion all at once. The intuition is not confused; it is registering that love genuinely operates at all of those levels through one structural move. The framework's contribution is to separate the levels and locate the move, so that the question "which one is it?" can be answered: all of them, and here is the hinge.

The kinds of love

The four registers above supply three axes — tier, permeability, and substitutability — and the traditional kinds of love turn out to be positions on them rather than separate phenomena. Setting the classical vocabulary against the framework's does two things at once: it shows that the kinds the tradition named were tracking real structural differences, and it separates genuine kinds (distinct axis-positions) from what are only the same kind held at a different modifier-value.

The headline of the plotting is the substitutability axis. The three Tier 0 loves cluster in one corner — high permeability, low substitutability, fastened to this aperture — and agape sits at the opposite end of substitutability while keeping permeability (now diffuse) and rising a tier. Substitutability is the dimension the classical taxonomy was implicitly sorting by all along; the framework's contribution is to make the sorting explicit, and to show that the move from particular love to agape is a journey along that single axis. This is the concrete form of the inversion the next section flags as still unresolved.

Two familiar words name not kinds but kinds-at-a-modifier-value, and the taxonomy is sharper for refusing them entry. Companionate love is eros or philia at high relational duration — the same permeability and substitutability, with more accumulated shared geometry behind it; it is a settled phase of the first two, not a fourth position. Infatuation (or limerence) is the high-activation onset before the disposition settles — an unstable cluster of episodes on the mesoscale's brief-and-intense corner, love not yet hardened into a sentiment rather than a kind of love. Distinguishing genuine kinds from modifier-variants is the analytical payoff here, and it is the same move Goods makes when it says casual interest and lifelong devotion to chess are one good held at different depths.

One case marks the taxonomy's edge. Self-love does not sit on the permeability axis at all, because there is no second aperture for the geometry to be permeable to — the only party is the geometry itself. It is better read not as a relation-kind but as a coherence good: the catalogue's Self-Acceptance and Self-Respect, both Tier 2 with primary dimension Coherence. Naming it here is honest about where the relational frame runs out — it illuminates every love directed at another aperture and stops exactly where the second aperture does.

Suggested cross-references for the other documents. In the Catalogue of Goods, the Love/Affection entry's Tier 0 / Tier 2 shadow can carry a note that the shadow is the eros / storge / philia (Tier 0) versus agape (Tier 2) split worked here, with the Family and Friendship entries cross-referenced to storge and philia respectively, and the Self-Acceptance and Self-Respect entries flagged as the structural home of self-love. In Relations Between Apertures, the substitutability paragraph can point to this taxonomy as its worked case — and, more consequentially, agape's substitutability-blindness is the candidate evidence for that document's open problem about modifier-versus-primitive status: if substitutability is doing this much sorting work, it may belong among the primitives rather than the derived properties.

What the placement resolves

The puzzle it most directly dissolves is the one the seven-emotion model created. Love feels like the master emotion yet is absent from the canonical seven; the resolution is that love is a sentiment and a good, not an episode, and the episodic feelings we call love are members of love's repertoire rather than love itself.

It also explains why grief is love's signature cost. The elaboration thesis holds that every dimension of mattering added is a dimension along which loss becomes possible; love adds dimensions richly, so it exposes the lover to proportionate loss. Grief is simply love's stake-geometry under the loss of its object — which is why stake-geometry treats grief over someone deeply loved as the paradigm of elaborating pain, the opposite of collapse: "the grief, while agonizing, preserves and even deepens the geometry of caring." Mourning is the Tier 2 good that does this work, and the relations layer adds that the relation to a now-absent aperture persists one-directionally — the dead continue to shape the living geometry that loved them. Love and grief are one structure seen before and after loss.

And it gives the framework its cleanest illustration of the claim that moral weight tracks stake-density rather than sophistication, because love is exactly where depth of mattering and cognitive complexity visibly diverge.

What it leaves open

The largest open question is one love sits at the center of: whether relationality deserves its own stake-geometry dimension. At present love's relational structure is distributed across the framework — permeability lives in the relations layer, reach and dimensionality in the good, agency in a single sub-chart of the emotion object panel. The Bridge Between the Frameworks flags love as precisely the relationality the emotion model under-handles, and leaves the standalone-dimension question deliberately open. Love is therefore a test case for the joints-and-bundles problem: whether the five dimensions carve the real structural joints, or whether relationality is a sixth joint currently being split across several others.

A second open point is the substitutability inversion the taxonomy above displays. The move from the Tier 0 loves to agape is a journey along the substitutability axis — from fastened-to-this-aperture to substitutability-blind — and the journey is not yet explained. The framework owes an account of whether agape is grown out of particular love by reach-extension (the catalogue's implicit story, in which the Tier 2 shadow is the Tier 0 good's reach extended to all apertures) or is a structurally distinct stance that merely shares the name. The classical taxonomy assumed both readings at different times; the framework has not yet decided between them. This is also the place where the love work could reach back into the core: if substitutability is carrying as much sorting weight as the taxonomy suggests, it is a candidate for promotion from derived property to primitive in Relations Between Apertures — the same modifier-versus-primitive question that document already raises about voluntariness.

Third, the sentiment placement is itself provisional. Mood and Sentiment concedes that the sentiment column is offered to show the route resolves sensibly per emotion, not as a worked result, and that the mood/sentiment boundary is fuzzy on the diagonal — a love that has begun to grey into a generalized warm disposition toward the world is part sentiment, part mood, and the model does not yet represent mixtures well.

Finally, love is probably the framework's best single case for the central unresolved bridge: whether the five stake-geometry dimensions are realized by the emotion-and-sentiment apparatus or merely correlated with it. Because love is simultaneously a Tier 0 good and a sentiment that generates episodes, it is the one phenomenon where the structural account of mattering and the structural account of how mattering occurs are forced into contact. If the bridge can be worked anywhere, it can be worked here.

Summary

Love is not one of the framework's kinds of thing; it is a phenomenon that surfaces as four of them. It is not a value in the metaethical sense — consciousness, not love, is where value enters — except that agape shades into a genuine Tier 2 principle. It is a Tier 0 good, the structurally richest in the catalogue, working across all five dimensions at once. It is a relation between apertures whose home axis is permeability and whose signature is low substitutability. And it is a sentiment — joy's object-kept, persistent form — that, having internalized another aperture's stakes, generates a whole repertoire of episodic emotions rather than being any one of them.

The four placements are unified by a single mechanism: the internalization of another aperture's stake-geometry into one's own. What ordinary speech compresses into one overloaded word, the framework resolves into one mechanism seen at four scales — and locates, in the same move, why love has always felt like value and good and bond and feeling all at once.

This document records a philosophical theory developed through dialogue. It is exploratory, not peer-reviewed, and is offered as a contribution to thinking about the foundations of ethics.