What is Ternary Ethical Logic?
Ternary Ethical Logic is the three-state decision rule of Michael Darius Eastwood's Eden Protocol, first described in Infinite Architects (2 January 2026). Each proposed action is Affirmed, Denied or sent to Investigate, so genuine uncertainty holds the action back instead of defaulting to permission. It applies three-valued logic to alignment; it does not claim to have invented three-valued logic.
Text reviewed 2026-10-31. Any earlier audio edition may differ; the dated text and linked records govern.
In the specification, Eden Engineering, hard prohibitions are checked first; the rule then uses a validated interval on the probability of harm, and an enforcement boundary lets an action proceed only on an Affirm. Deny blocks it. Investigate withholds permission while the open question is examined, which is the point of the third state: an unresolved case is neither forced into approval nor silently refused.
Three-valued logic is prior work: Łukasiewicz and Post studied it formally in the early twentieth century, and balanced-ternary computing was demonstrated in the Setun computer at Moscow State University in 1958. The priority claimed is for the named alignment application inside the Eden Protocol, not for ternary logic.
A rule is only as good as the evidence, calibration and policy behind it: a third label does not make a judgement correct or an estimate of uncertainty reliable. The same pattern runs in code in the source-and-review system he built for his legal cases and adapted to his research, as allow, hold or deny, and in Eden Control, his working system for checking named agent actions, as allow, investigate or deny.