Stake-Geometry
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Technical corpus, written for specialists. For the plain-language version of these ideas, start with the framework.
The argument

Aperture Ethics (working title)

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

A step-by-step build of the framework's load-bearing argument. Each numbered item is a step that logically connects to the one before and after it. The downstream parts of the framework (the relational layer, emotion model, goods catalogue, mood) hang off this spine.

The why — the problem the framework exists to solve

  1. Start with the question every ethics has to answer: what makes anything good or bad in the first place? Any answer immediately meets the oldest obstacle in moral philosophy, Hume's gap: you cannot logically derive an "ought" from an "is" (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739). No pile of facts about how the world is, however tall, entails a single claim about how it ought to be. So every ethics has to say where its "ought" comes from.

  2. Answers to that question divide along one line: either the moral standard exists independently of all minds, or it depends on minds somehow. The first family says morality is cosmic law, written into the fabric of things: divine command, Platonic forms, natural law. The second family ranges from the crude (morality is whatever a culture happens to endorse) to the sophisticated (idealized contracts, evolved sentiment, the structure of reason itself). The crude version collapses into relativism: when the culture shifts, so does right and wrong. The sophisticated versions all face some form of the same charge.

  3. The cosmic-law answer has a specific, fatal weakness: no one has ever been able to exhibit it. If a fixed, network-independent moral standard existed, you could point to it and the argument would end. Instead every candidate has needed quiet revision as its society expanded — slavery reinterpreted, the status of women reinterpreted, the circle of concern widened. A standard that genuinely stood outside us would not have moved throughout history. Revisions are evidence against it.

  4. So the target is a third option: a foundation that is naturalistic (no cosmic guarantor required) but not arbitrary (not "anything goes"). The obstacle in the way is Hume's gap from step 1, and Hume claimed the gap is total: no quantity of descriptive fact entails any "ought" at all. Any honest version of this view has to say exactly where, if anywhere, the gap is narrower than that.

Stage 1 — Where value comes from

  1. Look for the place where "good" and "bad" live inside the thing itself instead of being painted on by an outside judge. Test it on a rock: "the rock is bad" only means something once you bring in some conscious being, whom the rock harms. The badness lives in the harmed party, not the rock.

  2. Now test it on a person who is suffering: "the suffering is bad" needs no external judge. The badness is part of what suffering is from the inside. Here the descriptive fact and the evaluative fact are not two separate things that have to be bridged: for a conscious being, "this creature is suffering" and "things are going badly for it" are one fact described from two angles. This is the spot where Hume's gap is at its narrowest. Narrowest, not closed: what remains to cross, and how the framework crosses it, is step 8.

  3. Therefore value enters the universe only where there is a viewpoint for which things matter — a locus where reality opens onto itself. Call that an aperture (phenomenal consciousness, named for its structural job rather than its felt quality). Rocks and thermostats are not apertures. A suffering animal is.

  4. So the framework plants its one axiom here, assumed rather than proven: if something matters to someone, that mattering is real and deserves to be taken seriously. Equivalently, felt stakes ground reasons. The single normative word, "deserves," cannot be derived from any quantity of descriptive fact, so it is put in at the bottom deliberately, as the smallest normative premise any ethics has asked for. The denier cannot be refuted, but his denial is itself driven by a felt stake (he cares about getting the metaethics right), so denial is self-undermining rather than false; the full argument is The Primary Axiom. Value is therefore not derived from consciousness; it is already contained in it. This is the bottom of the framework, and consciousness is good is its slogan form: the existence of a viewpoint for which anything can matter is itself the thing of value. Everything above this point is value being combined and shared, never value being generated. Generation happens here, one aperture at a time. (A second claim, that one aperture's value gives anyone reason to weigh another's, is deliberately not assumed here; it has to be earned in Stage 3.)

Stage 2 — How much, and what shape

  1. Mattering is the foundation, but it is not uniform across beings. A nematode has a handful of things that can matter to it (food, temperature, chemical gradients). A human has millions (people, ideas, places, memories, projects, justice, a joke). So the next move is to describe the shape of how a given being is embedded in reality such that the world's states matter to it. Call that shape its stake-geometry.

  2. The shape has five dimensions: dimensionality (how many independent things can matter), depth (how hard any one of them can matter), reach (how far stakes extend across time, space, and abstraction), coherence (whether the stakes align or tear against each other), and responsiveness (whether they update on new evidence and experience). A complementary redescription, the mass model, treats the same shape as mattering-mass distributed over a support: when two stakes merge, the count drops while the mass adds (two clouds becoming one, 1 + 1 = 1), so evaluation keys to the amount and its mobility, never to the count (core_mass_model.md).

  3. Moral standing, whether a being counts morally at all, meaning whether its interests are something we are obliged to weigh, is a binary threshold: felt stakes either exist for a being or they do not, and any being above the threshold is fully in, regardless of intelligence or species. There are no degrees of standing. What the shape of the geometry affects is something narrower: when two beings' stakes conflict and both cannot be satisfied, the particular stakes at issue are weighed by their geometry. Weight in a forced conflict can scale; standing never does. (Moral standing is not moral culpability: standing is about being owed consideration; culpability is about being blamed for what you do. A newborn has full standing and zero culpability.) A protective clause is still important, because the framework must not be misread as ranking beings by brainpower. The clause is this: stake-density is not IQ. A person with Down syndrome who loves deeply has enormous stake-density even where cognitive dimensionality is reduced.

  4. Two master processes run over any geometry. Collapse narrows it — agony crushes everything down to the pain, depression flattens depth everywhere, trauma freezes responsiveness, addiction lets one stake colonize all the others, death dissolves the whole thing. Collapse is the bad-making direction. Elaboration enriches it — curiosity adds dimensions, love deepens and internalizes another's stakes, art can add, deepen, and organize at once. Elaboration is the good-making direction. (Not every narrowing is collapse; step 13 draws that line.)

  5. Not every narrowing is collapse. A geometry can lose dimensionality while depth concentrates, coherence rises, and responsiveness stays intact: the elder who lets acquaintances and projects fall away while the remaining stakes deepen, or the contemplative whose field of concern shrinks by discipline rather than damage. Call this consolidation. It belongs to neither master process: it lacks collapse's signature (capacity destroyed, the change unchosen), and it is not elaboration, because the count of things that matter falls. Three marks separate consolidation from collapse, and a narrowing must carry all three. First, endorsement that survives restoration: the geometry's own higher-order stakes affirm the narrowing, and the affirmation is not authored by the narrowed state itself (depression endorsing its own flatness fails this mark; the test is whether the endorsement would hold with responsiveness fully restored). Second, preserved responsiveness: the geometry can still update and re-expand if circumstances demand it. Third, conserved depth: mattering is concentrated, not destroyed. Deliberate pruning is one way to consolidate; the slow settling of late life is another. The canonical collapses of step 12 (agony, depression, trauma, addiction, death) fail all three marks, so nothing there is softened. What consolidation adds is a protection in the other direction: chosen simplicity is not pathology, and forcing a consolidated geometry back to its former breadth is itself a harm, not a rescue.

  6. This is the payoff of Stage 2: it explains what a single pleasure/pain axis cannot. Killing is worse than the equivalent lost pleasure because it collapses an entire irreplaceable structure rather than subtracting some units of good feeling. The experience machine — Robert Nozick's thought experiment of a tank that could feed you any pleasurable experience you wanted while you floated unaware, indistinguishable from real life (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) — repels us because it severs the geometry from reality and leaves the stakes fictional. A flattening ecstasy can be worse than an elaborating grief — which is the real content Mill was groping at with "higher and lower pleasures" (John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863) but had no apparatus for.

Stage 3 — From private mattering to shared values

  1. Stage 1 narrowed Hume's gap inward to the single assumed sentence of step 8: your own collapse is constitutively bad to you. But the gap survives one more step outward. Your mattering being significant to you does not yet tell you to weigh mine. A skeptic can grant everything so far and still ask why another aperture's stakes should bind him.

  2. The bridge is recognition. When one aperture recognizes another, the two instances of mattering can be set side by side. Comparison becomes possible.

  3. Once comparison is possible, so is agreement. Values that get jointly endorsed across a set of mutually recognizing apertures become shared values. With no cosmic guarantor available, shared values are negotiated agreements — closer to definitional than to discovered. That is true of local agreements; Stage 4 marks the exception. Principles anchored in what an aperture is, rather than in who happens to be in the network, behave as discovered, because their content was never up for negotiation.

  4. Consistency then does real work, though it is not a proof. You will not accept the destruction of your own geometry as morally neutral. Refusing the same significance to a comparable geometry requires special pleading: coherent for a sociopath to maintain, but only by a willful refusal to see what is in front of him. So the outward step is persuasive rather than airtight, and the framework states that openly instead of papering over it.

  5. This reframes moral progress as network expansion rather than convergence on a pre-existing truth. Slavery becomes wrong when the enslaved are recognized as full apertures; animal welfare gets serious when non-human apertures enter the network; future generations enter the calculus once we learn to weight the stakes of the not-yet-born.

  6. And it answers "why does the network only ever grow?" without invoking a destination. (The observation that the moral circle only ever widens is not original here: W.E.H. Lecky described morality's "expanding circle" in History of European Morals (1869), and Peter Singer made it central in The Expanding Circle (1981). What the framework adds is an explanation of the arrow that needs no goal.) It grows because its substrate grows: consciousness keeps showing up in more forms and more places, and our recognition of it keeps improving. A growing substrate is enough to explain the arrow. You do not need a cosmic endpoint it is supposedly aiming at.

Stage 4 — Sorting the values that result

  1. Stages 1-3 produced values. Those values do not all sit at the same level, and conflating the levels is responsible for most bad ethical argument. So the next move is to sort them into four tiers of progressively widening scope and progressively weaker grounding.

  2. Tier 0 — private mattering. The values a single aperture has just by being conscious. This is where value is generated and where the framework's one assumed premise (step 8) does its work: the is/ought gap shrunk to a single sentence rather than closed. In this logical step, value only applies to one geometry and does not generalize any other. Note that this Tier is already capable of identifying wrongness, not just preference: gratuitously collapsing your own geometry is bad here, with no second party required — so you can wrong yourself. What Tier 0 lacks on its own is not the badness but the other-binding, accountable sense of "immoral," which only arrives with the outward step in Stage 3.

  3. Tier 1 — local agreements. The morality a particular community has negotiated and binds its members to: family, tribe, religion, nation, profession, epoch. Real and binding inside the network, and exactly as contingent as the network that produced it. A Tier 1 value can be wrong in one specific way — when the network constituted itself by excluding apertures it should have counted. Athenian slavery was not a failure to track a Platonic truth; the agreement was structurally incomplete in a way the Athenians could have been shown.

  4. Tier 2 — expansion-stable principles. These are values grounded not in any particular community's agreement but in the features anything must already have in order to count as an aperture at all — a conscious viewpoint with stakes. Because every possible aperture has that structure by definition, a principle keyed to it automatically reaches minds we have never met. The canonical case is "don't gratuitously collapse felt stake-geometries." Gratuitous is doing precise work in that sentence: a collapse is gratuitous when it neither prevents a worse collapse nor enables a corresponding elaboration, so that mattering is destroyed with nothing gained on the other side of the ledger. The surgeon's incision is not gratuitous; the torturer's cruelty is. The principle never mentions humans, only felt stakes and gratuitousness, so it is pre-committed to any new kind of mind that could enter the network — because entering the network requires the very structure the principle is keyed to. It also never says other geometries, so it applies reflexively to your own — which is also why gratuitous self-harm registers as a genuine wrong rather than mere imprudence, and why this framework needs no special "duties to self" the way Kant does. That makes it stronger than consensus (which can dissolve) without claiming cosmic status.

  5. Tier 3 — universal cosmic law. Declared empty by construction. With no consciousness for whom anything matters, there is no mattering, hence no value, hence no law for it to be. Religious, Platonist, and natural-law traditions populate this tier, but on inspection each is doing covert Tier 1 or Tier 2 work while claiming Tier 3 status. The strongest realist intuition behind Tier 3 can be honored without conceding the tier: certain principles may be determinate invariants that any sufficiently large network would discover, the way pi is an invariant of any structure containing circles. That is a maximally strong Tier 2, discovered rather than negotiated but still resting on consciousness; Tiered Values develops it as convergent universality. What the framework rules out is only the further step: principles true with no consciousness anywhere. One speculative door is left ajar: if anything were ever to occupy Tier 3, it could only be something like the source of consciousness itself, and nothing in the framework depends on that speculation either way.

What the spine buys you

  1. It unifies three domains usually kept apart. truth is the fidelity of the aperture's contact with what is there — its clarity and freedom from distortion; beauty is the aperture engaging form with heightened responsiveness; goodness is sustained aperture integrity. All three are conditions of the aperture itself, not matches between an inner copy and an outside original — which is why the framework evaluates the state of the aperture rather than the justification of its individual verdicts (the epistemic case is worked out at step 31). The ancient three-way split of philosophy may have been tracking one underlying phenomenon: the cultivation and protection of apertures.

  2. It relocates rival theories instead of refuting them. Utilitarianism keeps the naturalism but gives up its single pleasure axis — the assumption that all value reduces to one quantity, net pleasure minus pain, summed on a single scale — replacing that scale with the multidimensional stake-geometry of Stage 2. Kant's symmetry principle and kingdom of ends (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785) are Tier 2 work anchored in rational agency rather than aperture-structure, which is why Kant chokes on infants and animals where this framework does not. Virtue ethics is mostly Tier 1 reaching for Tier 2. Each tradition hits trouble exactly where its tier-anchoring runs out.

  3. It stays honest about what it cannot do; the full ledger is kept in Unified Weaknesses. Five limits matter most. The axiom of step 8 is assumed, not proven: someone who insists that mattering means divine command or rational consistency rather than felt experience cannot be refuted from inside the system. The framework is built on consciousness, the most metaphysically mysterious feature of reality, and inherits that mystery; its practical face is that felt mattering is brutally hard to measure. The outward step in Stage 3 is persuasive, not a proof. The choice of five dimensions may be partly genuine joints and partly convention (the mass model narrows this limit, reading depth and dimensionality as two coordinates of one distribution, but does not close it). And aggregation is unsolved: when stakes conflict across apertures in a forced trade-off, the framework constrains the weighing but does not deliver an automatic answer. Stating these plainly is treated as a feature.

Applying the framework — the decision procedure

  1. The spine is not only descriptive; it tells you what to look at, and in what order, when facing an actual choice. (a) Identify the apertures the act touches — every viewpoint for which the outcome can matter, human or not. Where aperture-status is uncertain (invertebrates at the margin, AI systems, patients beyond communication), the standing rule is: treat the case as if an aperture might be present, weight its stakes accordingly, and update as evidence develops. The rule is asymmetric on purpose; mistakenly including a non-aperture costs little, while mistakenly excluding a real one is the serious wrong. Relations Between Apertures develops it. (b) Read each one's stake-geometry — how dense, deep, far-reaching, coherent, and responsive are the stakes at issue. (c) Ask the master-process question — does the act collapse or elaborate each geometry, and how gratuitously? Collapse is the bad-making direction, elaboration the good-making one; a narrowing counts as collapse only if it fails the consolidation marks of step 13, so a chosen, depth-conserving, still-responsive simplification needs no justification. (d) Locate the governing value's tier — a Tier 0 private preference, a Tier 1 local agreement (and if so, was the network drawn so as to exclude any aperture it should have counted?), or a Tier 2 expansion-stable principle that overrides local agreement. (e) Weigh — accepting honestly that aggregation across very different geometries has no automatic answer (step 28), so the procedure disciplines the judgment rather than replacing it with a formula. Worked example, factory farming: the affected apertures include billions of non-human animals with real if low-dimensional stakes (a); confinement and slaughter are a near-total collapse of those geometries (b–c); the value that permits it is a Tier 1 agreement that simply never counted them (d); a Tier 2 principle — don't gratuitously collapse felt stake-geometries — overrides that local agreement (e).

  2. Applying the procedure makes one clarification unavoidable: separate conscience from wrongness, and inner morality from outer. Conscience — the inner sense of right and wrong — is a faculty, the felt registration of your own stakes in being good. It is real and reason-giving, but it is a detector, not the thing detected, and it misfires both ways: it fires at parochial Tier 1 taboos where no geometry collapses, and falls silent at practiced cruelty where one does. So the framework does not define "immoral" as "whatever conscience flags": a feeling that merely tracks what evolution or culture installed has no automatic claim to be getting anything right. Wrongness is defined by gratuitous stake-collapse; conscience is then checked against that, using responsiveness and coherence to ask whether the feeling tracks a real stake or an inherited reflex. This also splits the two senses of "immoral" that ordinary talk bundles together. The inner / value sense — this is genuinely bad — is present already at Tier 0 and reaches even self-directed harm. The outer / accountable sense — this is a wrong against someone with a claim on you, which the moral community has standing to hold against you — needs the second aperture and the network of Stage 3. Most of the time the two line up, and a well-tuned conscience is exactly that alignment; when they come apart, the stake-geometry is the court of appeal and the feeling is fallible evidence, not the verdict.

  3. The same logic is the framework's stance toward every faculty the aperture uses to register reality, not just the moral one: a perception, belief, or intuition is a detector judged by its condition — responsiveness, coherence, freedom from distortion — its deliverances fallible evidence checked against what is there, never self-certifying. So the framework takes no side in the analysis-of-knowledge debates (when a belief counts as knowledge, how justification is structured); it evaluates the state of the knower, not the justification of individual verdicts — and step 26's truth is just this stance applied to factual rather than moral contact.

Where the rest of the project attaches

  1. Relations between apertures are a layer of their own, since most of moral life happens between geometries rather than inside one. Any relation between two apertures can be located by three primitives: recognition (whether and how faithfully each registers the other as an aperture), permeability (how much of the other's stake-geometry is internalized into one's own; structurally, this is what care is), and effect (whether the relation elaborates or collapses each geometry over time). Four modifiers shape how the primitives operate: voluntariness, power, mediation, and duration. The named kinds of relation, friendship, parenting, professional care, and the rest, are clusters in this space rather than primitive types. This layer also supplies the uncertain-apertures rule used at step 29(a).

  2. Stake-geometry describes a lifetime's structure. The five-axis emotion model describes single episodes. They connect by aggregation across two timescales — emotions, summed over time and amplitude, are what shape and reshape the geometry — so the two must not be collapsed into one another.

  3. The goods catalogue supplies the contents a geometry holds — the stake-objects themselves: loyalty, curiosity, justice, and the rest — which are distinct from values, with five mechanisms for how adopting a good reshapes a geometry. Justice is the canonical good held by the network itself rather than by its members individually.

  4. Mood is not a new category. It is what an emotion becomes when its object dissolves and it sustains long enough at sufficient amplitude to saturate the aperture. Structurally it sits beneath the five dimensions as a gain-layer that modulates them, which is why "temporality" resolves into one sub-capacity already inside reach plus this process-layer below the dimensions, rather than becoming a sixth dimension.

  5. The open frontier: rigorously connecting the top of the spine (consciousness as the source of value) to the bottom of the machinery (emotion and attitude as the structure consciousness is made of). The network step assumes apertures structured enough to recognize each other; the taxonomy of how that structure works sits underneath the network step rather than being entailed by it. Closing that join is the central unresolved problem.

Sources — borrowed concepts

The framework's own vocabulary (aperture, stake-geometry, constriction and dilation, collapse and elaboration, the four-tier scheme) is original to this project. The concepts below are borrowed and used in their established senses:

Fuller engagements with adjacent positions (Korsgaard, Levinas, Mackie, Harris) are mapped in core_grounding_landscape.md and core_network_universality.md.