Where value comes from, and the shape it makes.

Every account of right and wrong has to answer one question: what makes anything good or bad in the first place? Most answers reach for a rule outside us, written into the universe or handed down from above. Each such rule has had to be quietly revised as societies grew. Slavery reread, the standing of women reread, the circle of concern widened. A standard that stood outside us would not have moved.

So look instead at where good and bad show up on their own, with no outside judge required. Call a rock bad and you have to ask who it harms. Watch a person suffer and there is nothing to add. For a being that can feel, things going badly is part of the experience, not a verdict placed on top of it.

The framework rests on one assumed starting point, and only one: if something matters to someone, that mattering is real and deserves to be taken seriously. That sentence is the entire foundation. Everything after it is built, not assumed.

Mattering is the floor, but it is not the same in every creature. A worm has a few things that can matter to it: warmth, food, a chemical gradient. You have thousands. People, places, work, memories, ideas, fairness, a joke that still lands.

The structure of all that is what the framework calls your stake-geometry: the shape of how you are tied into the world so that its states matter to you. It has five dimensions.

Two things happen to a shape over a life. It can grow richer. Curiosity adds a new dimension. Love deepens one and folds another person's stakes into your own. Learning makes the whole thing more responsive. The framework calls that elaboration, and it is the good direction.

It can also collapse. Pain crushes everything down to the pain. Depression flattens depth everywhere at once. Trauma freezes the parts that should stay open. Addiction lets a single stake swallow the rest. The framework calls that collapse, and it is the bad direction.

Not every narrowing is collapse. Someone who lets the noise fall away and keeps the few things that matter most is not damaged. They are consolidating, on purpose, with the depth intact. The test is whether they would choose it again with clear eyes. This is also how the framework reads mental health: much of illness is involuntary collapse, and much of recovery is the shape being restored.

None of this yet tells you to weigh my shape alongside your own. The bridge is recognition. When one person registers another as someone things matter to, the two can be set side by side, compared, and weighed. Shared values are what people who recognize each other agree to hold in common.

That changes what moral progress is. It is not getting closer to a rule that was always there. It is the circle of who counts growing wider: the enslaved recognized as full people, animals counted as able to suffer, those not yet born given some weight. The circle keeps widening because the thing it is made of, beings that things matter to, keeps turning up in more places, and we keep getting better at seeing it.

Values do not all sit at the same level, and mixing the levels is behind a great deal of bad moral argument. The framework sorts them into four.

• Private mattering. What matters to you alone, simply because you are conscious.
• Local agreements. The morality a particular family, faith, profession, or nation has worked out. Real and binding inside that group, and exactly as contingent as the group that made it.
• Expansion-stable principles. The few that hold for any being things can matter to, whoever and wherever they are. The central one is plain: do not pointlessly destroy what matters to someone. It reaches minds we have never met, because it is keyed to the one thing they are bound to share.
• Cosmic law. Morality that would be true with no one for anything to matter to. The framework holds this shelf is empty. With no viewpoint anywhere, there is no mattering, so there is nothing for a cosmic rule to be about.

That last claim is why this is a secular account that does not slide into "anything goes." You give up the rulebook in the sky and keep a real floor under right and wrong, anchored in the one place value was ever found: a being for whom things matter.

As a tool, the framework is a way to look at a hard choice. Name everyone the act touches, human or not. Read the shape of what is at stake for each. Ask whether the act grows those shapes or collapses them, and how needlessly. Then weigh.

It does not pretend to finish every job, and it says so plainly. The starting point is assumed, not proven; someone who insists that mattering means a divine command cannot be argued out of it from inside the system. Measuring a shape is hard, and may stay hard for a long time. When two people's stakes collide and both cannot be met, the framework disciplines the judgment but hands you no formula. Naming those limits in the open is treated as a strength, not an embarrassment.

The instrument draws your own shape across these five dimensions. The essays give the rigorous version, step by step.