First draft. The sortings of particular goods are applications of the framework rather than deliverances of it; some will be re-sorted as the framework develops and as the analysis benefits from outside review.
What this document is
The foundational documents established where value comes from (aperturality), how it is weighted in any given case (stake-geometry), how privately mattering apertures produce shared norms (network universality), and how the resulting moral content sorts into tiers of progressively wider scope (tiered values). What they did not do is develop a separate vocabulary for the contents an aperture's stake-geometry actually holds — the particular things this aperture has come to care about, organize itself around, pursue, defend, and use as the material of its commitments.
This piece introduces goods as the framework's term for those contents. Goods are not values in the framework's structural sense and not norms in the network sense. They are stake-objects: the specific things that fill in a stake-geometry, the items in the inventory of mattering. The document explains why a separate term is needed, shows how the tier semantics shift when applied to goods rather than to moral content, develops the five mechanisms by which adopting a good elaborates (or strains) a geometry, works through several extended examples, distinguishes content goods from capacity-amplifiers and network-bearer goods, and closes with what attention to goods reveals about ordinary moral discourse.
A companion Catalogue of Goods serves as the reference document for individual entries, structurally located and tiered.
Why the framework needs the term
The word value in ordinary discourse covers at least three distinct things, and the framework has been quietly using it across all three. At Tier 0, value names the brute fact that something matters to a particular aperture — the raw mattering that consciousness brings into the world. At Tier 1, value names the norms a network has negotiated and binds its members to — the morality of a tradition, a profession, a community. At Tier 2, value names structural principles anchored in what any aperture must be in order to count as one. Three different things, one word.
The deck of value-cards that prompted this document is doing yet a fourth thing. The cards — Achievement, Empathy, Loyalty, Wisdom, Power, and so on — are not Tier 0 raw mattering. They are not Tier 1 negotiated norms (though some of them have Tier 1 flavor). They are not Tier 2 structural principles (though some of them have Tier 2 anchoring). They are the particular items that a stake-geometry holds: the contents an aperture has organized its caring around. A leadership-development tool used in business contexts treats them as material for self-knowledge — "which of these do you most value?" — but what the question is really asking is which of these the holder's stake-geometry has actually invested in.
Calling these values obscures what they are. They are not what makes any aperture matter (that is value-in-the-Tier-0-sense). They are not what binds the holder to others (that is value-in-the-Tier-1-sense). They are what the holder has come to care about, in the specific sense that the items on this list have become part of how the holder's geometry is shaped. The traditional philosophical term for such things is goods. The framework can use it without losing anything: goods are stake-objects, the contents of an aperture's commitments, the particular things this geometry has organized itself around.
This leaves value free to do the metaethical work the framework needs it to do. The intrinsic value of an aperture remains the basic claim — that conscious mattering is where value enters the universe. Tier 0 mattering, Tier 1 agreements, and Tier 2 principles are all forms of value in this structural sense. Goods are something else: the contents, not the structure.
The distinction is not merely terminological. It clarifies what is being claimed when the framework says an aperture has intrinsic value. The claim is about the substrate, not about anything on the substrate. An aperture matters because there is something it is like to be it; the goods that aperture has come to hold are downstream of that mattering, not constitutive of it. A new aperture with no developed goods at all still has intrinsic value in the framework's sense. The contents come later.
What a good is, structurally
A good is the content of a stake. To adopt a good is to take on a commitment that something matters; the commitment then shapes the geometry along one or more of the five dimensions.
This definition is deliberately thin. It does not specify what kinds of things can be goods (almost anything can), how goods are acquired (variously — through upbringing, choice, accident, conversion, exposure), or what makes a good worth holding (this requires further framework work). What it does is locate goods within stake-geometry: every good is content, every content is in a stake-geometry, and every stake-geometry is the geometry of an aperture. There is no such thing as a good that does not belong to some aperture's geometry. The good of justice exists because there are apertures that care about justice; the good of beauty exists because there are apertures who find things beautiful. Detach goods from apertures and there is nothing left of them.
This is the framework's deflationary move on the long Platonist tradition that treats goods as cosmic objects to be discovered. Justice and beauty and truth and goodness are not entries in some ledger of the universe. They are dimensions of mattering that apertures have, often together. The fact that many apertures converge on similar goods is significant — that is what makes some goods Tier 2 — but the convergence is on structural features of being-an-aperture, not on cosmic facts independent of apertures.
A good has at least two structural properties worth naming. The first is its content — what the good is about. Honesty's content is the relation between speech and truth. Empathy's content is responsiveness to other apertures' geometries. Achievement's content is the meeting of a difficulty by capacity. These contents can be described, compared, taxonomized.
The second is its structural shape — what it does to a geometry that holds it. Honesty shapes coherence (between expression and underlying state). Empathy shapes reach (into other apertures). Achievement shapes depth (it is what high-stakes engagement feels like to the holder). The structural shape is what tiers and dimensions are tracking; it is also what makes goods comparable across content. Two goods with very different contents can do similar structural work, which is why the catalogue can sort goods by primary dimension and the sorting is informative.
A stake-geometry is the inventory of an aperture's goods plus the structural relations among them. Two apertures with the same goods but different organization are different geometries; two apertures with quite different goods but similar organization can look surprisingly alike at the structural level. The relations matter at least as much as the contents.
How tier semantics shift when applied to goods
The original framework sorts moral content by where it is anchored — Tier 0 in private mattering, Tier 1 in network agreements, Tier 2 in aperture-structure itself. The question "who does this apply to?" gets a clean answer at each tier: Tier 0 applies to this aperture, Tier 1 to this network, Tier 2 to any aperture whatsoever.
Goods do not sort quite this cleanly, because goods are what an aperture cares about rather than what anyone is bound to do. Every good, in some sense, "applies to" whichever aperture has adopted it. The relevant question becomes different.
For goods, the tier tracks the source of the good's normative pull — why caring about this thing makes sense. Or equivalently: what would have to be true of the world for this thing to stop being a good.
A Tier 0 good is one whose pull comes from the brute fact of being-this-aperture. You don't need a story about why Health matters; it matters because a stake-geometry that loses Health loses its substrate. The good is anchored in the existence-conditions of the aperture itself. The good stops being a good only when the aperture ceases to exist.
A Tier 1 good is one whose pull depends on the network the holder is embedded in. Recognition matters because there is a network whose recognition you want. Loyalty matters because there is something to be loyal to. Tradition matters because there is an inherited body of practice that constitutes its content. These goods are real — the framework does not demote them — but their normative pull runs through the network's existence. A solitary aperture on a desert island does not lose Health as a good; it does lose Recognition, because there is nothing left to do the recognizing. Tier 1 goods stop being goods when the relevant network dissolves.
A Tier 2 good is one whose pull comes from structural features any stake-geometry has. Coherence is a good because incoherent geometries are partially self-collapsing; this would be true of a radically different alien aperture too. Curiosity is a good because adding dimensions is constitutive of elaboration; any aperture capable of curiosity has reason to value it. Tier 2 goods stop being goods only when stake-geometry itself ceases to have the structure it has — which is to say, basically never, for any entity that counts as an aperture.
This gives a sorting test that works for goods. Ask: would a wildly different alien aperture, just by virtue of being one, have reason to pursue this? Yes → Tier 2. Only with a network of a certain shape → Tier 1. Only in virtue of being-this-aperture's existence-conditions → Tier 0.
Tier does not track "individual versus network." All three tiers can be held by individuals. Networks can also hold goods, in a derivative sense — Justice as a property of the network, Solidarity as the network's internal cohesion, Public Trust as the network's collective epistemic standing. These are network-bearer goods, distinguishable from goods individuals hold because they are in a network. A community can hold Justice as a good; a member of the community can hold Loyalty-to-justice as their personal good. These are different.
Two further notes on the tier semantics for goods.
First, the same good can have shadow readings at other tiers. Loyalty is centrally Tier 1 — its content is determined by the network — but it has a Tier 2 shadow as commitment-keeping-across-time, which any sufficiently temporally-extended aperture has structural reason to value. The shadow does not collapse the tiers; it indicates that the good has a structural core inside a contingent content. Where shadows are present they are worth noting, because the structural core is the part that survives network change.
Second, the tier of a good is not the same as the moral force the good carries for a particular holder. A Tier 0 good (Health) and a Tier 1 good (Honor) and a Tier 2 good (Honesty) can all be held with equal intensity. Tier is not a ranking of importance; it is a structural locator. The framework does not say Tier 2 goods matter more than Tier 0 or Tier 1 ones. It says they have a different kind of anchoring, which has consequences for how they travel between apertures and networks.
How goods elaborate stake-geometry
A good is the content of a stake; adopting one shapes the geometry along one or more of the five dimensions. The mechanisms are best described dimension by dimension.
Adopting a good adds a dimension. Before I cared about chess, chess was nothing to me — no state of any chess position made any state of the world matter more than any other. After I take up chess, an entire new region of the world becomes mattering-laden: positions, openings, my own play, the play of others. The geometry now has somewhere to extend that it did not before. Most goods do this when they are first adopted; it is their primary effect at the moment of uptake. Curiosity, Diversity, Variety, Creativity, and Open-Mindedness are the structural goods most explicitly directed at this work — they are dimension-adding goods, the meta-tools for ensuring that the geometry keeps growing.
Holding a good deepens existing dimensions. Once a good is in the geometry, the depth at which it can matter grows with practice and stakes. Casual interest in chess and lifelong devotion to chess are the same good held at different depths. Depth grows through investment of attention, time, and risk; it is what allows a good to matter intensely rather than merely being entertained. Strength and Courage are depth-related goods in a structural sense — they are the capacities that let a geometry sustain depth without collapsing.
Goods extend reach. A good that started local often pulls the geometry outward. Caring about my own children becomes caring about children generally, becomes caring about future generations. Caring about my own honesty becomes caring about truth as such. Reach-extension is what gives mature stake-geometries their characteristic outward pressure — the holder finds themselves caring about things they did not sign up to care about, because the original good has its own structural implications. Empathy, Wisdom, Hope, and Beauty are reach-goods; they are about the geometry extending into other apertures, into time, into possibility, into the aesthetic.
Goods either build or strain coherence. A good adopted in alignment with existing goods strengthens the geometry's internal organization; a good adopted in tension with existing goods creates conflict. This is the part of moral life most people experience as difficulty — discovering that two of their goods cannot both be served. The geometry has to either reorganize (coherence-work) or sustain the tension (coherence-cost). Honesty/Integrity, Truth, Trust, Patience, and Authenticity are coherence-goods. They are explicitly about alignment — of speech with belief, of action with commitment, of expressed self with underlying geometry.
Goods modify responsiveness. Some goods build in mechanisms for revising other commitments. Curiosity, Humility, Open-Mindedness, and Intelligence are responsiveness-enabling goods; they make a geometry more updatable. Other goods reduce responsiveness — Loyalty, Tradition, Discipline create resistance to revision. Neither is inherently better; a geometry needs both stabilizers and updaters to function. But the mix matters, and goods are how the mix gets set. A geometry weighted heavily toward responsiveness-goods becomes flexible to the point of formlessness; one weighted heavily toward stability-goods becomes rigid to the point of brittleness. Mature geometries hold the tension well.
These five mechanisms are not exclusive. Most goods affect more than one dimension; the catalogue records a primary and secondary, but the reality is messier. Love, for example, adds dimensions (the beloved's stakes become partly internalized), deepens existing ones (it is high-depth almost by definition), extends reach (into another aperture's geometry), can build or strain coherence (depending on whether it integrates with existing goods), and modifies responsiveness (the lover updates on the beloved's states in ways they would not on a stranger's). A single good can do work across the whole geometry.
Goods also interact. Two goods that seem compatible at low depth often conflict at high depth — a person who holds Achievement and Family as low-intensity preferences runs into no trouble; a person who holds both at the depth of consuming passion will have to organize their life around their relation. Two goods that seem incompatible turn out to share structural shape — Discipline and Freedom look opposed on the surface but both build coherence-over-time, and a mature holder of either typically discovers the other. The interaction-effects are where most of the interesting structural work happens.
The general picture: a stake-geometry is the inventory of an aperture's goods plus the structural relations among them. Adding goods changes the inventory; the structural relations then determine whether the addition counts as elaboration or strain. Elaboration is not the mere presence of goods — it is the geometry doing structural work to accommodate them.
Worked examples
Four cases, chosen to show the mechanisms operating across tiers and dimensions and on both the elaboration and collapse sides.
A new parent
Before the child arrives, the geometry has a certain shape — career, relationships, projects, hobbies, each with its own depth and reach. The child's arrival introduces a single new good (this particular person's flourishing) that immediately does several things at once.
It adds a dimension that did not exist a year ago. The flourishing of this particular human is now a region of the world that bears on what matters; thousands of states of the world have just acquired stake-content that they previously lacked.
It deepens fast, often faster than the holder is ready for. The stake-magnitude on this dimension climbs to near the top of the geometry within months. Many new parents report a re-ranking of every other good they hold within the first year.
It extends reach dramatically. The parent now has stakes in events twenty, fifty, seventy years out that they did not have before. Climate questions, political questions, educational questions all acquire personal stakes through the child's anticipated lifespan.
It strains coherence with existing goods (career commitments, sleep, autonomy, hobbies) and forces reorganization. Some prior goods get demoted, some get reformulated (achievement-as-self-realization becomes achievement-as-providing), a few get dropped.
It changes responsiveness in both directions. The parent becomes more responsive to certain kinds of evidence (anything about children's welfare) and less responsive to others (career risks that previously seemed acceptable now do not).
The whole shift can be described without leaving stake-geometry vocabulary. The good (this child's flourishing) is the addition; the elaboration is the geometry reorganizing itself around the addition. Whether the elaboration goes well depends on whether the reorganization preserves coherence or breaks it — which is why some new parents flourish and some come apart.
The good here sits across tiers. The flourishing of this particular person is a Tier 0 good of the most basic kind (it matters in virtue of being held by this aperture). The broader good of caring-about-children-generally that it tends to pull along is closer to Tier 2 (any sufficiently long-reaching aperture has structural reason to extend stakes across generations). And the network-shaped goods that come with parenthood in a particular culture — providing in this specific way, raising in this specific tradition — are Tier 1.
Taking up a serious intellectual project
A person who decides to learn a new field is adopting a complex of goods at once. Truth (a coherence good), Understanding (a responsiveness good), Mastery (a depth good), and some specific subject-matter as a new dimension.
At first the project sits alongside the existing geometry, occupying a slot. As it deepens, it starts to pull. Reading at night displaces other activities — coherence-work made visible. The vocabulary of the new field starts to apply to other regions of the geometry: the holder finds themselves analyzing conversations, books, news stories through the new lens. This is reach-extension working through abstraction rather than through other apertures or through time.
The project starts to affect what counts as evidence in unrelated areas. A person learning philosophy may stop accepting certain forms of argument they previously found acceptable; a person learning statistics may start seeing data-claims everywhere as suspect. The good has shifted responsiveness across the whole geometry, not just within its own region.
Eventually the holder is not just someone who has the project; the project has reshaped what kind of aperture they are. This is the structural account of what people mean when they say a serious commitment "changes you." It is not a vague psychological claim. It is stake-geometry reorganizing around a new attractor.
This case is heavily weighted toward Tier 2 goods — Truth, Understanding, Mastery, and the structural goods of intellectual life generally have aperture-structure anchoring. But the content of the project (philosophy, statistics, ornithology, woodworking) is Tier 1 — a particular tradition's specific body of practice. The holder is taking up Tier 2 goods through Tier 1 content. This is one of the framework's diagnostic patterns: most actual elaboration happens through Tier 1 content that has Tier 2 structural goods running through it.
A professional identity
Becoming a physician, a teacher, a lawyer, a craftsperson involves adopting a cluster of goods that is heavily but not exclusively Tier 1. Competence in this particular domain. Service in the form this profession recognizes. Dependability as the profession defines it. Loyalty to colleagues. Recognition by peers. Compliance with the profession's codes.
This cluster of goods is real, binding, and structurally rich. It is not Tier 0 (a person stranded on a desert island stops being a physician in any meaningful sense; the goods of physicianship require the network of patients, colleagues, institutions). It is largely Tier 1: the goods are anchored in this profession's negotiated agreements about what counts as competent practice, what counts as service, what counts as dependability.
But the cluster has substantial Tier 2 shadows. The good of healing has structural anchoring that runs deeper than this particular profession's history — any network whose members can suffer has reason to value those who reduce suffering. The good of teaching has Tier 2 anchoring in the structural value of stake-elaboration. Most professions are Tier 1 content with Tier 2 cores; the persistence of the profession across centuries and cultures is the persistence of the Tier 2 core through changing Tier 1 content.
The elaboration this kind of good-cluster does is striking. It adds dimensionality (everything in the domain becomes mattering-laden). It builds coherence (the role's organization of life gives many disparate stakes a single integrating frame). It extends reach (the holder's stakes now reach across the network of patients, students, clients, colleagues). It can deepen responsiveness or undermine it depending on whether the holder treats the profession's standards as something to update or as something fixed.
This is the form most adult lives take. The integrative work of a professional identity, held over decades, produces the kind of dense, coherent stake-geometry that the framework treats as the substantive form of human flourishing.
An addiction
The fourth case is included because the framework's account of goods is not only an account of elaboration. Goods can also drive collapse, and the same vocabulary makes the collapse visible.
An addiction begins as an ordinary good. The substance, the activity, the relationship started as something the holder cared about for reasons that made sense — pleasure, social belonging, escape from pain, novelty. The good occupied a slot in the geometry alongside other goods.
Over time, the addictive good begins to colonize the geometry. Its depth grows faster than other goods can match. Resources (attention, money, time) are redirected toward it. Other goods are not simply demoted — they are starved. A geometry with many dimensions begins to look, from the inside, like a geometry with one dimension and several flickering shadows.
The mechanism in stake-geometry vocabulary: dimensional capture. The addictive good's depth growth is unbounded, and the geometry's resources are finite, so depth in the addictive dimension is purchased at the cost of depth in other dimensions. Reach contracts (the future shrinks to the next dose, the next session). Coherence collapses (the holder's actions and stated commitments diverge; the geometry can no longer be honest with itself about itself). Responsiveness collapses last and most catastrophically — the holder stops updating on evidence that the good is destroying the rest of their geometry.
This is what the framework means by stake-collapse, made visible at the level of a single good gone bad. The good itself is not the problem; an evening of pleasure, a glass of wine, a passionate engagement are not collapse-events. The problem is that this good has overrun the structural constraints that keep a healthy geometry multi-dimensional.
The negative case is structurally informative. It shows that goods can do harm not by being intrinsically bad but by being held without the regulating structure that other goods provide. A geometry with only one dimension is a geometry close to collapse; a good held without coherence-work is a good that can become an addiction. The framework's positive program — elaborate the geometry, build coherence, sustain responsiveness — is the same program described from the side that prevents collapse rather than from the side that pursues flourishing.
Capacity-amplifiers
Most goods are content of a stake — they specify something the holder cares about. A small but important class of goods is structurally different. These do not specify content; they amplify the holder's capacity to act on whatever other goods they hold. Power is the canonical case.
Power is not a good in the same sense as Empathy or Wisdom. Empathy specifies a relation between the holder and other apertures; Wisdom specifies a kind of practical understanding. Power specifies neither. It is, instead, the capacity to affect stake-geometries — the holder's own and others' — without any built-in commitment to preserving them. Power held alongside Empathy and Wisdom produces elaboration at scale. Power held alongside narrow loyalty and impoverished coherence produces stake-collapse at scale. The structural fact about Power is that it amplifies the effect-size of whatever other goods the holder has, including the absent ones.
This makes Power importantly different from every other content good. Most goods improve a geometry that holds them; Power improves the effect of a geometry on the world, in the direction the geometry is already pointing. A holder whose stake-geometry is impoverished in Empathy or Coherence will produce more harm with Power than without, not because Power is evil, but because amplifying a poor geometry amplifies its poverty. This is why traditions across the board have hedged Power with virtue-requirements — they implicitly recognize that Power without the structural goods is a stake-collapse engine.
Other capacity-amplifiers form a small cluster: Wealth (resource-substrate, partly Tier 1 in content but capacity-amplifying in effect), Influence (softer version of Power), Authority (Power with network legitimation), Charisma (capacity to affect other apertures through self-presentation), Strength (partly capacity, partly content), Productivity (capacity to convert intention into outcome). These goods share the structural property of amplifying whatever else the holder has. They are not aperture-deepening in themselves.
The framework's response to capacity-amplifiers is not to treat them as second-class goods but to mark them as structurally distinct. A complete account of an aperture's geometry should distinguish content goods (what the holder cares about) from capacity-amplifiers (what the holder can do about it). Two apertures with the same content goods but different capacity-amplifier profiles will produce very different effects on the world.
This also gives the framework a clean response to the worry that the deck contained Power alongside Empathy as if they were comparable. They are not. They are doing different structural work. A leadership-development deck that placed them on the same footing was either treating "value" as a flat category (every value is a value) or assuming that holders would supply the structural distinctions themselves. The framework can supply the distinctions explicitly.
Network-bearer goods
The deck and most ordinary value-discourse treat goods as held by individuals. The framework needs an additional category: goods held by networks rather than by their members.
Justice is the canonical case. An individual can hold Justice as a personal good (caring about justice, wanting to be just); a network can hold Justice as a property of itself (being a just network, sustaining just relations among members and outsiders). These are different. The individual's good of caring-about-justice is a content good held in their geometry; the network's good of being-just is a structural property of the network itself.
Other network-bearer goods: Solidarity (the network's internal cohesion), Inclusivity (the network's capacity to incorporate new members), Public Trust (the network's collective epistemic standing), Civic Virtue (the network's health as a self-governing entity), Institutional Integrity (the network's structural soundness), Cultural Vitality (the network's capacity to produce stake-elaboration over time), Peace (the network's freedom from internal collapse).
These goods do not sit cleanly in the tier scheme designed for individual moral content, because they are properties of the network rather than the individuals in it. They are best understood as Tier 1 in the sense that they are anchored in the particular network's existence and composition — different networks can sustain different forms of justice, different patterns of solidarity. But like all Tier 1 goods they typically have Tier 2 shadows. The good of justice-as-such has structural anchoring that runs deeper than any particular network's version of it; the same is true of peace and trust.
Network-bearer goods are important to the framework for two reasons. First, they correct the individualist bias of most ordinary value-discourse, which assumes that all goods are held by individuals. Second, they let the framework describe what is being damaged when an institution collapses, a community fragments, or a culture loses vitality. Without this category, such damages have to be described as aggregations of individual losses, which misses what is structurally specific about them. When a network loses Public Trust, the loss is not merely that many individuals trust less; it is that the network's capacity to coordinate based on trust has been damaged. This is a structural loss at the network level.
The framework should treat networks themselves as stake-bearing-like structures with their own goods. The treatment is not identical to that of apertures — networks do not have felt stakes in the way apertures do — but the structural vocabulary transfers. A network has a kind of dimensionality (how many distinct functions it integrates), depth (how strongly it can coordinate), reach (how far its agreements extend), coherence (how well its norms hang together), and responsiveness (how well it updates). Network-bearer goods are what shape these dimensions at the network level.
What attention to goods reveals about ordinary moral discourse
Treating goods as a separate category, and sorting them by tier and dimension, makes several features of ordinary moral talk visible that were obscured before.
Most arguments about "values" are arguments about goods. When someone says "my values are family, faith, and freedom," they are not making a metaethical claim about where value comes from. They are listing the goods their stake-geometry has invested in. When two people disagree about "values," they are usually disagreeing about which goods to hold, or about how to weight goods they both hold, or about what Tier 1 content fills out a Tier 2 good they share. The framework can name the level of disagreement precisely.
Ordinary value-discourse tier-conflates. The deck that prompted this document mixed Tier 0 goods (Health, Family), Tier 1 goods (Achievement, Recognition, Loyalty), Tier 2 goods (Empathy, Wisdom, Honesty), and capacity-amplifiers (Power) on equal footing, as if a sorting exercise across them were a single kind of exercise. The framework can show that it is not. A person ranking goods across tiers is doing multiple different kinds of self-knowledge work at once: identifying their existence-conditions (Tier 0), naming their network commitments (Tier 1), avowing their structural commitments (Tier 2), and acknowledging their capacity-tools (capacity-amplifiers). These deserve different treatment.
Many goods that look Tier 1 have Tier 2 shadows. The pattern recurs: a tradition's specific content is Tier 1, but the structural core that pulled the tradition into being is Tier 2. Loyalty has Tier 1 content but Tier 2 commitment-keeping anchoring. Respect has Tier 1 forms but Tier 2 recognition-of-other-apertures anchoring. This pattern is part of why traditions persist across enormous changes in their specific content — the Tier 2 core travels even when the Tier 1 surface does not.
Goods of restoration are systematically underweighted in ordinary discourse. Modern value-talk tends to be about acquisition and expression — what to seek, what to express, what to achieve. Goods of restoration, repair, recovery, rest, mourning, equanimity, acceptance are present in contemplative and tragic traditions but largely absent from secular self-help. The framework treats both halves as equally important. A stake-geometry that can only elaborate but cannot restore is brittle; one that can restore but never elaborates is static. The complete account includes both.
Goods of capacity-amplification need to be marked. As shown above, Power and its neighbors are doing different structural work from content goods. A discourse that does not distinguish them will keep producing the confusion the deck demonstrated: treating an amplifier as a good of the same kind as Empathy or Wisdom.
Network-bearer goods need their own category. A discourse that treats all goods as individual is missing half of what is morally significant. Justice, Solidarity, Public Trust, and Civic Virtue are not aggregated individual goods; they are network-level structural properties whose damage is structurally specific.
The deeper point. The framework's separation of values from goods — and its sorting of goods by tier and dimension — does not invent these distinctions. It makes explicit distinctions that ordinary moral discourse has been making implicitly and confusedly. People know, when they think about it, that the Power card does not belong in the same category as the Empathy card. They know that "family values" and "structural integrity" are not values in the same sense. The framework's contribution is naming the structure that was always there.
The companion Catalogue of Goods records the sortings for the goods named so far. The sortings are first-draft applications of the framework rather than deliverances of it. Some will be re-sorted as the framework develops; some will turn out to need further structural distinctions the current vocabulary cannot make. The catalogue is a working document, and is expected to grow.
Summary
Goods are stake-objects: the contents an aperture's stake-geometry has organized itself around. The term is introduced to free value for the metaethical sense the framework needs — what consciousness brings into the universe — and to give a working vocabulary for the particular things apertures actually care about.
Tier semantics shift when applied to goods. Tier tracks not where moral content is anchored but what would have to be true for this thing to stop being a good. Tier 0 goods stop being goods only when the aperture ceases to exist. Tier 1 goods stop being goods when the relevant network dissolves. Tier 2 goods are anchored in features of aperture-structure itself.
Adopting a good shapes the geometry through five mechanisms: it adds dimensions, deepens existing ones, extends reach, builds or strains coherence, and modifies responsiveness. Most goods affect more than one dimension; the catalogue records primary and secondary effects.
Two structurally distinct sub-categories of good need separate marking. Capacity-amplifiers (Power, Wealth, Influence, Authority, Charisma) do not specify content but amplify the holder's effect on whatever other goods they hold. Network-bearer goods (Justice, Solidarity, Public Trust, Civic Virtue) belong to networks rather than individuals and have to be described at the network-structural level.
Attention to goods reveals that ordinary moral discourse tier-conflates, systematically underweights goods of restoration, and treats all goods as individual. The framework's contribution is making explicit the structural distinctions that careful moral thought has always been making implicitly.
A companion Catalogue of Goods documents the sortings for each good named so far. The catalogue is a first-draft working document, expected to be revised as the framework develops and as the analysis benefits from outside review.
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.