What are the Three Ethical Loops?

The Three Ethical Loops - purpose, love and moral - are recursive decision procedures Michael Darius Eastwood proposes should run continuously inside an Eden Protocol system rather than as after-the-fact filters. They sit alongside the Three Pillars of the Eden Protocol - harmony, stewardship and flourishing - and are presented as internalised patterns of moral reasoning that shape every decision, not gates that a completed decision must pass.

The loops are original to Infinite Architects (2 January 2026, ISBN 978-1806056200) and are elaborated in a dedicated book essay. The purpose loop asks whether a proposed action serves the system's stated purpose. The love loop asks whether the action would be recognised as care by the beings affected. The moral loop asks whether the action would be defensible under the standing ethical constraints of the substrate. The book treats these as nested rather than sequential, so that each loop shapes the framing under which the next one runs.

The Three Ethical Loops are a design proposal for how substrate-embedded alignment might look in practice, not a claim about how any current artificial-intelligence system works. They are one of the mechanisms by which the Eden Protocol thesis - alignment must precede capability, not follow it - is meant to be operationalised. Companion architectural elements referenced in the book, including the Six Questions and the Purpose Saturation Architecture, are held at concept level.