What this document is
The three earlier documents established where value comes from (aperturality), how it is weighted in any given case (stake-geometry), and how privately mattering apertures produce shared values (network universality). What they did not do is sort the resulting values into the kinds they are. Not all moral content sits at the same level. The morality of a particular community is doing something different from the morality of consciousness as such, and conflating the two has been responsible for a great deal of confused ethical argument.
This piece sorts the framework's moral content into four tiers, distinguishes the positive from the negative principles within them, names the cost that any honest elaboration ethics has to acknowledge, and compares the resulting picture to several existing moral traditions. The point is not to add new foundations but to make explicit what the framework has been committed to all along.
The four tiers
The tiers form a chain of progressively wider scope and progressively weaker grounding.
Tier 0 — Private mattering. The values that exist for a single aperture in virtue of being conscious. A creature in pain has a stake in the pain stopping; that stake is a value in the relevant sense even if no other consciousness exists. These values are the raw material of everything that follows. They are indexed to a single stake-geometry and do not generalize beyond it without some further move.
This is where the framework's single assumed premise does its work (see The Primary Axiom: felt stakes ground reasons). The is/ought gap is not closed here; it is shrunk to that one sentence. The mattering is not derived from the consciousness; it is constitutive of it. Tier 0 is the level at which value enters the universe at all. Everything above this tier is value being combined and shared, not value being generated. The generation happens here, one aperture at a time.
Tier 0 has its own internal structure. A single aperture's stake-geometry already varies across dimensionality, depth, reach, coherence, and responsiveness. Some of an individual's values are stable across their lifespan; some are fleeting reactions; some are deeply held commitments they would give up almost anything to preserve. Even within one consciousness there is something like a tiering of values by robustness — which becomes important when this aperture starts trying to share its values with others, because the robust ones are the ones most likely to survive into the next tier up.
Tier 1 — Local agreements. Values endorsed by a particular network at a particular time, contingent on its composition. These are what most people mean by "values" in ordinary talk: the morality of a family, a tribe, a religion, a nation, a profession, a historical epoch. They are real, they are binding within their network, and they do enormous work — most of human moral life happens at this tier. They are also exactly as contingent as the network that produced them. The Tier 1 contents held within those agreements — Loyalty, Recognition, Tradition, Honor, Heritage, and the like — are catalogued as Tier 1 goods in the Catalogue of Goods; that document develops the shifted tier semantics that apply when the unit being sorted is a stake-object rather than a moral norm.
The word preferences is too thin for what Tier 1 is doing. The Athenian acceptance of slavery was not a preference; it was a structured set of norms backed by law, religion, economy, and shared self-understanding. The Quaker rejection of slavery was not a preference either; it was a moral commitment with theological weight. The right gloss is something like the morality a particular community has negotiated and binds its members to. Stronger than preference, weaker than universal law.
What makes a value Tier 1 rather than Tier 2 is not its intensity or seriousness. It is its structural anchoring. A Tier 1 value is anchored in the specific composition and history of a network — these people, this place, this set of agreements. The same value can sometimes look like either tier depending on how it is stated. "Don't murder," stated as "members of our tribe shouldn't kill other members of our tribe," is Tier 1. Stated as "don't gratuitously collapse felt stake-geometries," it is Tier 2, because now it is keyed to aperture-structure rather than tribal membership. The reformulation does real work; it is what moral progress at this level looks like.
The most important thing about Tier 1 is its asymmetry with Tier 0. A Tier 0 value cannot really be wrong in the same way; it just is what mattering looks like for that aperture. But a Tier 1 value can be wrong in the specific sense that the network endorsing it has constituted itself by exclusion — by treating some apertures as outside the negotiation when they should not have been. The wrongness of Athenian slavery is not that the Athenians failed to track a Platonic truth; it is that their agreement was structurally incomplete in a way they could have been made to see and were not.
Tier 2 — Expansion-stable principles. Values that survive every network growth that has happened so far and that stake-geometry predicts will survive future growth, because the principles are about the structure any aperture must have to count as one. These are the closest thing the framework allows to the universal, but they are indexed to apertures rather than to the cosmos.
"Don't gratuitously collapse felt stake-geometries" is the canonical case. The principle does not mention humans. It mentions felt stakes and gratuitousness. Any being that enters the network with the structure required to be in the network at all — which is to say, any being whose recognition we would recognize back — is automatically the kind of thing the principle is about. Adding new participants does not threaten the principle; it just adds more cases to which the principle already applies. The principle is pre-committed to applying to participants we have not met yet, because the meeting itself requires the structural features the principle is anchored in.
This is where the framework's most distinctive claim lives. It is not claiming universality in the cosmic sense, but it is claiming something much stronger than mere consensus. Consensus could in principle dissolve; a Tier 2 principle can only dissolve if the structural features it is anchored in dissolve, and those features are what makes anything count as a participant in the first place. There is a self-stabilizing quality here that Tier 1 lacks. The agreement does not have to be renegotiated with each new entrant because each new entrant is, by their nature as entrant, already covered.
A useful test for whether a candidate value belongs at Tier 2 rather than Tier 1: take the value into contact with a human consciousness from a tradition very different from one's own — a 13th-century Andalusian merchant, a Tibetan monk, a Roman paterfamilias, a Texas rancher, an Edo-period samurai, a Soviet-era refusenik. Does the value still apply, and would the figure in question, attending honestly to their own stake-geometry, have reason to endorse it as applying to them? Most candidate Tier 2 principles either survive this human-traditional pass or fail it cleanly enough to be diagnosed as Tier 1 dressed up. A second-pass robustness check pushes harder: imagine a wholly new kind of consciousness joining the network, wildly different in biology and psychology but still a stake-bearer capable of recognition. Values that survive both passes are the Tier 2 candidates worth taking seriously. Values that require features the human stranger or the alien might lack (language, social bonds of a particular kind, planning across long time horizons) are Tier 1 in structural anchoring, however universal they may have looked from inside their home network.
Tier 3 — Genuinely universal laws. Values that hold independent of any network at all. The framework rules these out by construction. There is nowhere they could live and nothing they could be about. Without a consciousness for whom anything matters, there is no mattering; without mattering, no value; without value, no law. The framework's deepest commitment is that this tier is empty. Religious traditions populate it with divine commands; Platonist traditions populate it with eternal forms; natural law traditions populate it with facts about human nature treated as cosmic. The framework's deflationary move is to say all of these are doing covert work at Tier 2 or Tier 1 while claiming Tier 3 status, and the claim does not hold up when examined.
This deflation should be stated charitably, though, because the realist intuition behind Tier 3 is not always mere confusion. Its strongest form — that certain principles are determinate invariants any sufficiently large network would discover, not arbitrary agreements — is a respectable position, and the framework can honor it without conceding Tier 3. The move is to recognize it as a claim about a maximally strong Tier 2 rather than a live Tier 3 (see "Convergent universality" below). What the framework rejects is only the further step of holding those principles true independent of consciousness altogether. Natural-law and Platonist traditions are doing covert Tier 2 work in many cases, but in their strongest cases they are pointing at something real and getting only the tier wrong.
This is also where the framework's honesty has to be loudest. It would be intellectually convenient to have Tier 3 in reserve as a final court of appeal, but the price of admitting it would be smuggling in metaphysics the framework cannot afford. So the answer is: nothing lives here, and the work people wanted Tier 3 to do gets done — imperfectly but adequately — by Tier 2.
Convergent universality — a strong Tier 2, not a live Tier 3
A recurring temptation is to wonder whether Tier 3 is really empty after all. Perhaps universal moral facts are not given in advance but emerge: with enough data, a large enough network of stake-geometries, and something like a convergence principle, certain values might turn out to be invariant across all sufficiently rich networks — discoverable over time the way the constants baked into physical law are discoverable, arrived at as Principle if not as Law. This is worth taking seriously, because it is the most credible version of the realist intuition the framework otherwise deflates.
It does not, however, reach Tier 3, and seeing why sharpens what the tiers are. Tier 3 is not "universal and discovered." It is "true independent of any network at all" — true in a universe with no consciousness in it. The emergent proposal does not claim that. It grounds its convergent principles in a large enough network of stake-geometries, which is to say it still rests on consciousness; it merely claims the resting-point is determinate and findable rather than arbitrary and negotiated. That is not Tier 3. It is Tier 2 at full strength — a Tier 2 whose content is fixed by the structure of mattering tightly enough to be discovered rather than merely agreed.
The mathematical analogy, pressed, makes the case for this reading rather than against it. A constant like π is not true in a void; it is an invariant of any structure that has circles, and it needs that structure to be baked into. The fine-structure constant needs a physics to be a constant of. In the same way, a convergent moral principle would be an invariant of any sufficiently large network of stake-geometries — it would need the conscious substrate to exist, but given that substrate, its value would be fixed and the same for everyone who looked. Invariance-across-a-domain is exactly Tier 2's signature. Invariance-without-a-domain is the Tier 3 claim, and that is the one the framework rules out.
So the axioms permit more than the bare "Tier 3 is empty" line suggests. They permit convergence, lawlike determinacy, and discoverability — they permit the emergent principles to be as close to universal as anything can be. They forbid exactly one thing: that those principles be substantively true with no consciousness anywhere. In an empty universe they would not be false; they would be vacuous, like the circle-ratio in a universe with no space. The line the framework draws is fine but real, and the emergent proposal stays on the permitted side of it.
This is not idle. It is the natural home for the open "trajectory" problem flagged in Network Universality — the question of why networks grow toward certain values rather than others. A convergence mechanism, if one could be given, is exactly what would answer it, and it would upgrade Tier 2 from "the broadest agreement reached so far" to "the determinate structure that agreement is converging on." What the proposal does not buy is an escape from the is/ought gap. Because the convergent principles are grown out of the natural substrate rather than posited as brute, they remain naturalistic, and naturalistic groundings inherit the gap (see Unified Weaknesses). The framework can have a discovered, determinate Tier 2 or a gap-free Tier 3, but not both — and it chooses determinacy, because the gap-free option is the one with nowhere to live.
Movement between tiers
The tiers are not isolated. Values move between them, and the movement is part of what moral progress looks like.
A Tier 0 value becomes a Tier 1 value when it gets shared. The mattering that was originally one aperture's own becomes the mattering several apertures have negotiated about and arrived at common ground over. This is the network step from the universality document, viewed from the side of the moving value.
A Tier 1 value becomes a Tier 2 value when the principle underneath it gets abstracted from the specific network and reformulated in terms of structural features any aperture has. Most Tier 1 values do not make this transition; they remain network-specific. The ones that do are the candidates for moral progress in the framework's sense — they are principles that started parochial and got reformulated until they were anchored in features no entrant to the network could lack. The abolition of slavery is one paradigm historical case: a Tier 1 norm about who counts as fully a member of the moral community got reformulated as a Tier 2 principle about the inadmissibility of treating apertures as property, and the reformulation was what made the change durable. The European settlement that ended the wars of religion (the Peace of Westphalia, 1648) is another: norms about whose confessional commitments could be tolerated in shared political space got reformulated as a Tier 2 principle about the integrity of individual conscience, anchored in aperture responsiveness rather than in any particular orthodoxy's claim to be right.
The framework does not predict that all Tier 1 values will eventually move up. Many will not. The morality of which fork to use at dinner is Tier 1 forever; nothing about aperture-structure makes one utensil better than another. What the framework predicts is that the Tier 1 values that can be reformulated structurally tend to be the ones that survive when networks expand, while the ones that cannot are the ones that get quietly dropped or loudly fought over until the network changes shape.
There is no movement to Tier 3, because Tier 3 does not exist. There is also no movement from Tier 1 down to Tier 0; once a value has been shared, the sharing is part of its history, and what looks like retreat to private mattering is usually withdrawal from a particular network rather than a return to a pre-network state.
The tiers as diagnosis
The four tiers help locate disagreements precisely. When two people disagree about a value, they may be disagreeing at Tier 0 (their stake-geometries are different and the value matters differently to each of them as individuals), at Tier 1 (their networks have endorsed different agreements), or at Tier 2 (one of them is mistaken about what a structural principle requires). Different kinds of disagreement call for different kinds of resolution.
Tier 0 disagreements may not resolve at all and may not need to. People differ in what matters to them, and the framework does not require that they stop differing. The aperture-level fact that something matters more to one person than to another is part of what makes them different apertures.
Tier 1 disagreements resolve through negotiation. The mechanism is the network step itself: people compare their stakes, find common ground or fail to, and arrive at agreements or at the recognition that they belong to different networks. Most actual ethical argument is happening at this level, even when it is dressed up as something more universal.
Tier 2 disagreements resolve through clearer reasoning about aperture-structure. When two people disagree about whether some practice violates a structural principle, the question is in principle answerable by attending more carefully to what apertures are and what their stake-geometries require. The answers do not come easily, but the disagreement is not merely a clash of preferences.
Conflating the tiers is one of the most common moves in failed ethical argument. Someone defending a Tier 1 norm by treating it as Tier 2 or Tier 3 is claiming a structural anchoring the norm does not have. Someone dismissing a Tier 2 principle as "just your values" is treating structural anchoring as if it were the same as parochial agreement. The framework does not promise that careful tier-attention will resolve every disagreement, but it does promise that disagreements get clearer when the tier is named.
The positive and the negative
Within each tier the framework has both prohibitive and affirmative content. This dual structure is worth making explicit because most ethical traditions emphasize one side at the expense of the other.
The negative side runs through stake-collapse. The principles that say don't are tracking actions that destroy, narrow, distort, rigidify, or extinguish stake-geometries. Killing collapses a geometry entirely. Lying corrupts responsiveness. Coercion narrows the dimensions along which a person can act. Cruelty deepens negative stakes without compensating elaboration. Indoctrination rigidifies. The negative principles all share a structural feature: they identify actions whose effect is to reduce what makes the affected aperture an aperture or what makes its stake-geometry rich.
The positive side runs through stake-elaboration. The principles that say do are tracking actions that enable, widen, deepen, extend, or strengthen stake-geometries. Education adds dimensions of mattering. Art does the same in a different register. Honest communication keeps apertures clear. Loving relationships add depth and coherence. Meaningful work extends reach. Institutions that protect free inquiry sustain responsiveness across generations. The positive principles share a structural feature too: they identify conditions and actions that allow stake-geometries to become more elaborate over time.
The asymmetry between the two sides is worth pausing on. Negative principles tend to have sharper edges. Collapse is identifiable when it happens; there is a moment when the thing is destroyed. Elaboration is more diffuse; it happens slowly, across many actions and conditions, and there is rarely a single moment to point to. This is why prohibition-based ethics has historically been easier to systematize than encouragement-based ethics — the bad cases are crisper. The framework treats both as equally part of what morality is for. An ethics that only had don'ts would be tracking only half of what stake-geometries do. Stake-geometries do not just resist destruction; they grow when conditions allow, and the growth is morally significant in itself.
Education is a clean illustration. The negative principle says: do not indoctrinate, do not suppress questions, do not punish curiosity, do not destroy a student's capacity for inquiry. The positive principle says: provide materials, model good thinking, make space for surprise, allow exploration to deepen. Either side alone is incomplete. A school that scrupulously avoids the don'ts while never providing the do's is still failing — it is leaving stake-elaboration on the table that the framework says is part of education's point. A school that energetically provides the do's while crossing the don'ts is also failing — it is elaborating in one direction while collapsing in another.
The same dual structure shows up across domains. In law and politics, the don'ts are usually well-articulated and the do's are vague — we know exactly which actions count as theft, less exactly which conditions count as conducive to flourishing. In personal ethics it is often the reverse — we know we should be kind, hard to say exactly what kindness consists in moment to moment, but we can name specific cruelties with precision. The framework suggests both sides need attention, and the imbalance in any domain is itself worth noticing.
A partial catalogue of Tier 2 principles
Tier 2 is thinner than people expect ethical theories to be. Tier 1 includes thousands of specific values — particular rules about food, sex, property, speech, ritual, status. Tier 2 has perhaps a dozen principles, and they are all formal in character. They tell you what shape moral reasoning has to take, not what to do on Tuesday afternoon. That is appropriate. Tier 2 is supposed to be what survives every expansion, and very few things do.
The catalogue below is of Tier 2 principles — the procedural and structural commitments any aperture-network has reason to adopt. It is not a catalogue of Tier 2 goods (Honesty, Empathy, Wisdom, Curiosity, Coherence, and the like), which are the contents an aperture's stake-geometry holds rather than principles about how to reason. The companion document Goods develops the goods vocabulary and shifts the tier semantics accordingly (a Tier 2 good is one whose pull comes from structural features any stake-geometry has, not one anchored in a particular network); the Catalogue of Goods records the sortings entry by entry.
A partial list, with the structural anchoring named in each case.
Don't gratuitously collapse felt stake-geometries. Gratuitous because non-gratuitous collapse — say, a surgeon causing pain to prevent worse pain — is not what the principle is about. The working definition: a collapse is gratuitous when it neither prevents a worse collapse nor enables a corresponding elaboration, so that mattering is destroyed with nothing gained. Anchored in the fact that stakes are the locus of value at all, so destroying them without reason destroys value without producing any.
Recognize other apertures when there is evidence of them. The principle does not require recognizing everything that might possibly be conscious; that would be paralyzing. It requires updating recognition when evidence appears, and not maintaining willed blindness once the evidence is in. Anchored in the structural fact that participation requires recognition, so the network can only grow if its members are responsive to evidence about who else is in it.
Don't deceive other apertures about the contents of their own. An aperture distorted by false information is functioning worse as an aperture; its fidelity to reality is degraded. A stake-geometry making decisions on the basis of false information is making decisions that do not track its actual stakes. Anchored in the fact that an aperture's responsiveness to reality is part of what makes it an aperture, and corrupting that responsiveness is harming the structural condition.
Allow stake-elaboration where it is possible. The positive complement to the first principle. If collapse is bad, elaboration is the corresponding good. This is what makes education, art, freedom of inquiry, and meaningful work morally significant rather than just instrumentally useful. Anchored in the same place stake-collapse gets its badness. Read with consolidation in view (spine step 13), the principle is direction-neutral about breadth: it protects the geometry's own reshaping, outward or inward. Blocking a chosen, depth-conserving simplification, or forcing a consolidated geometry back to its former breadth, violates the same anchor that makes blocked elaboration a harm.
Treat symmetrically situated apertures symmetrically. Not a substantive value about content, but a procedural value about reasoning. If a principle applies to case X and case Y is structurally indistinguishable from X, it applies to Y. Anchored in the nature of principles themselves. A principle that does not generalize across structurally similar cases is not a principle, just a preference with grammatical airs.
Maintain the conditions for future participation. A network that destroys its own substrate ceases to exist. If consciousness is what makes any of this possible, protecting the conditions under which consciousness can continue to exist is something every participant has reason to endorse. This is where environmental ethics and very long-term thinking get a structural anchor rather than a sentimental one.
Weight stakes proportionally to their geometry when conflicts arise. When two apertures' stakes cannot both be satisfied, the framework gives some traction on how to think about the trade-off: by attending to the geometry on each side rather than just the surface preferences. Not a solution to aggregation, but a constraint on the solution-space.
Where an aperture cannot participate, weight its stake-geometry by proxy. Infants, animals, future people, severely cognitively impaired humans, possibly artificial minds. The inability to negotiate does not equal the absence of stakes. Recognition can be asymmetric: a being whose stakes are real but whose participation is impossible is still owed weighting by those who can participate.
The list is partial and likely revisable. The point is not the specific count but the shape: a small set of structural principles that set the constraints within which Tier 1 negotiations happen. Tier 2 is the rules of the game rather than the game itself.
The cost of elaboration
The framework treats elaboration as a positive good — more dimensions, more depth, more reach, more coherence, more responsiveness. Stated that way, the principle sounds like a one-sided endorsement of growth. It is not, and any honest version of the framework has to acknowledge what elaboration costs.
Every additional dimension of mattering is an additional dimension along which things can go wrong. The person who has learned to care about ten things has ten things to lose, ten things to grieve, ten ways to be disappointed, ten places where reality can fail to match what they hoped for. The person who has only learned to care about food and shelter has a much narrower range of suffering available to them. Adding depth means each loss cuts deeper. Adding reach means a person can be wounded by things happening far from them in space and time — by suffering they witness on a screen, by injustices that will outlast them, by futures they will not live to see. Adding coherence means contradictions hurt more, because what has been integrated can fracture. Adding responsiveness means being moved, which is just another way of saying being able to be hurt.
The framework's own vocabulary makes this visible if read carefully. Stake-collapse is the bad thing, but stake-collapse is only possible because there was something to collapse. A richer stake-geometry has more to lose by definition. A bacterium cannot experience grief because it lacks the structure that makes grief possible; a human can be shattered by grief because the structure is there. The capacity for the bad scales with the capacity for the good. They are not separable.
Several specific costs are worth naming because they show up across different domains.
The cost of moral knowledge. Before moral knowledge, a being can do bad things without the weight of doing them as bad. After, it cannot. It acquires the capacity to wrong others and to know itself as something that wrongs others. It acquires the capacity to fail its own standards. It acquires shame and remorse, which are real costs even when they are functioning correctly. The pre-moral state lacked these because it lacked the structure that made them possible.
The cost of relational depth. Loving someone deeply means being structurally vulnerable to losing them. The person who never bonds deeply has less to grieve and is therefore protected from one of the most severe stake-collapses available. The framework cannot recommend that protection — the elaboration is the good — but it has to acknowledge that the elaboration carries the loss-potential as its inseparable shadow.
The cost of expanded moral circle. As the network expands, members of the network become responsive to more suffering. The person who lived in a small village in 1200 had a smaller moral horizon, and most of the world's suffering was structurally invisible to them. The person who lives in 2026 with a smartphone is responsive to suffering on every continent. The expansion of responsiveness is good by the framework's lights, but it produces a kind of distributed moral exhaustion that earlier humans were spared.
The cost of intellectual elaboration. Learning to think carefully means losing the comfort of certain kinds of simplicity. Once a person has seen the structure of an argument, they cannot unsee it. Once they have gained historical or scientific perspective on their own tradition, they cannot return to the felt sense of belonging it offered before the perspective arrived. Education really does eject people from certain kinds of comfort.
The cost of self-awareness. Meta-awareness creates a register of suffering that pre-reflective consciousness did not have: the suffering of knowing one is suffering, the anxiety about anxiety, the inability to be simply absorbed in something the way unselfconscious beings can be. Contemplative traditions have spent a long time mapping this terrain, and the maps consistently show that increased awareness brings increased capacity for both clarity and a particular kind of suffering that requires the awareness to be possible.
What the framework can say honestly about all of this is: yes, and the elaboration is still the good. The cost is not a bug; it is the structural shape of what elaboration is. A capacity that could not go wrong would not really be a capacity. A stake that could not be lost was not really a stake. The framework's claim is not that elaboration produces only good outcomes; it is that the elaborated state is itself good, and the elaborated state includes its own characteristic suffering. The richer the geometry, the more weight it carries. That weight is part of what makes the geometry mean something.
This also reframes what the negative principles are doing. They are not trying to prevent all suffering — that would require preventing elaboration itself, which would defeat the framework. They are trying to prevent gratuitous collapse: suffering that does not come with corresponding elaboration. The pain of growth is structurally different from the pain of being crushed. Both are real pain. The framework draws the moral line between them.
There is a related point about why people sometimes choose constriction. The framework treats willed aperture narrowing as a moral failure — refusing to know what could be known, refusing to feel what could be felt. But people do not choose constriction for no reason. They choose it because the elaboration was costing more than they could carry. Soldiers come back from war and shut down whole registers of emotional responsiveness because the responsiveness had become unbearable. People who have lost a child sometimes never love anyone the same way again because the structure that made the love possible has been damaged. The framework can call these costs and notice that they exist without condemning the people who narrow to manage them. The moral problem is not usually that people narrow in response to overwhelming cost. It is that systems and institutions produce conditions under which narrowing becomes the only sustainable response — that is where the framework's critique sharpens.
The cleanest summary: the framework is not promising a state without pain. It is promising that the pain that comes with elaboration is the pain of being more, which is structurally different from the pain of being made less, even when they feel similar from the inside.
Comparisons
Several existing ethical traditions can be located on the tier map, and the locations are clarifying.
Utilitarianism does most of its work at Tier 2 but with an impoverished structural anchor. The principle "maximize aggregate well-being" treats well-being as the relevant feature of any stake-bearer, which is one feature among the five stake-geometry tracks. Utilitarianism survives expansion well — any new stake-bearer entering the network is automatically the kind of thing the principle applies to — but it collapses the geometry to a single dimension. The framework agrees that there is something Tier-2-shaped about utilitarian thought and disagrees about the shape.
Kantian ethics also operates largely at Tier 2 but anchors itself in rational agency rather than in aperture-structure. The categorical imperative is recognizably a symmetry principle. The kingdom of ends is recognizably a network. What the framework offers that Kant did not is a broader entry condition: stake-bearers can include beings whose rational agency is partial, undeveloped, or differently structured, and the framework still has principles that apply to them. Kant has trouble with infants, animals, and severely impaired humans for exactly the reasons the framework does not.
Virtue ethics is mostly Tier 1, with strong roots in particular communities and traditions. The virtues identified by Aristotle were the virtues of a particular kind of polis-dwelling person. When virtue ethicists try to abstract the framework — to talk about human virtues rather than virtues for citizens of this place — they are reaching for Tier 2, but the abstraction tends to import features (rationality, sociability, political life) that not every aperture has. The framework can recognize what virtue ethics is doing and locate the parts that travel well versus the parts that are network-specific.
Religious moralities typically claim Tier 3 status while doing covert work at Tier 1 or Tier 2. The Ten Commandments include both: prohibitions on killing and theft generalize structurally and travel across networks; prohibitions on graven images do not. The pattern is that the parts that survive across traditions are the parts that turn out to have Tier 2 anchoring; the parts that do not survive are the parts that were Tier 1 all along despite being presented as universal.
Contractualism (Scanlon, Habermas) operates at the network step and so corresponds closely to how Tier 1 values get formed. What contractualism does not give is a clean account of Tier 0 (the private mattering that precedes any contract) or Tier 2 (the structural principles that any participant has reason to endorse before any specific contract is negotiated). The framework can absorb the contractualist insight about negotiation while supplying the layers above and below it.
Buddhist ethics has unusual resonance with the framework's positive side, especially in its emphasis on cultivating clarity, reducing willed constriction, and treating awareness itself as an ethically significant practice. The point of divergence is sharper with consolidation in hand (spine step 13). Read one way, the contemplative path is consolidation at its most disciplined: craving, a capture-prone and low-coherence mode of holding stakes, is extinguished while compassion widens permeability, the remaining stakes deepen, and responsiveness rises. On that reading the framework credits the path outright, and the accomplished contemplative may hold one of the most coherent geometries available. Read another way, the endpoint is the extinction of mattering itself, depth driven toward zero. That reading the framework still rejects, because a geometry emptied of mattering is structurally indistinguishable from anhedonia whatever its tranquility, and a framework that cannot tell blissful indifference from health has lost its clinical use. Which reading a given strand answers to is an interpretive question about that strand, not something the framework settles from outside. What the framework no longer says is that narrowing as such is the problem: the cost of elaboration is real, and consolidation, not structural deflation, is the honest name for the contemplative's answer to it.
Care ethics sits comfortably at Tier 1 with structural reach into Tier 2. The recognition that morality is grounded in concrete relationships of dependency and responsibility is recognizably about the network step. What care ethics has historically struggled to do is generalize beyond face-to-face encounter; the framework's network universality offers a way to extend the insight without losing its grip on the concrete relations that gave the view its appeal.
The pattern across all these comparisons is that the framework does not refute existing traditions so much as relocate them. Each of them is doing real work; each of them is anchored at some tier or combination of tiers; each of them has trouble exactly where its anchoring runs out. The framework's contribution is not to replace these traditions but to make explicit what level they have been operating at, which lets the parts that travel be separated from the parts that do not.
What the framework gives and what it does not
It is worth being precise about the limits.
The framework gives a four-tier structure that distinguishes private mattering, local agreements, expansion-stable principles, and the empty category that traditional universalism wanted to populate. It gives a dual positive/negative content within each tier. It gives a partial catalogue of Tier 2 principles with their structural anchoring named. It gives an honest account of what elaboration costs and what the negative principles are preventing.
What it does not give is a complete decision procedure. Tier 2 sets constraints; Tier 1 is where most actual ethical reasoning happens; Tier 0 is where the mattering that drives both originates. None of these levels deliver answers about what to do on Tuesday afternoon without further work. The framework is the architecture of moral reasoning, not its content.
It also does not give a guarantee against moral disagreement. Tier 0 disagreements are real and may not resolve. Tier 1 disagreements resolve through negotiation, which can fail. Tier 2 disagreements resolve through clearer reasoning, which takes time and often does not happen within a single lifetime. The framework predicts that careful tier-attention makes disagreement clearer; it does not predict that it makes disagreement disappear.
What it does give is structural honesty. The values that look like local preferences are named as such; the values that look like cosmic laws are demoted to expansion-stable principles; the values that look like raw mattering are credited at the level where they live. The work people wanted ethics to do — telling them how to live, what to hope for, what to refuse — gets done, but the doing is paid for by structural anchoring rather than by metaphysical promises the framework cannot keep.
Summary
The four tiers sort the framework's moral content into private mattering, local agreements, expansion-stable principles, and the empty category of cosmic law. Within each tier the framework has both prohibitive content (track what causes stake-collapse) and affirmative content (track what enables stake-elaboration). The affirmative side is unusually substantive for a non-religious ethics: it gives a structural account of why education, art, free inquiry, and meaningful work are morally significant rather than just useful. The cost of elaboration is acknowledged honestly: every dimension of mattering added is a dimension along which loss becomes possible, and the framework's commitment to elaboration is also a commitment to the suffering that elaboration brings.
Located against existing traditions, the framework relocates rather than replaces. Utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, religious morality, contractualism, Buddhist ethics, and care ethics each do real work at some tier or combination of tiers; the framework's contribution is making the tier explicit, which separates the parts that travel from the parts that do not.
The deepest claim of the four-tier picture is that universality is not a destination the network is heading toward but a property certain principles already have in virtue of being anchored in aperture-structure itself. Tier 2 values are not waiting to be discovered at some endpoint of moral history. They are available now, to anyone willing to do the structural reasoning that anchors them. The network expansion that the universality document describes is the network catching up with what Tier 2 was always committed to. That is enough to do moral work. It is not enough to underwrite cosmic guarantees. The framework's strength is that it does not pretend otherwise.
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.