What is Ternary Ethical Logic?
Ternary Ethical Logic, as Michael Darius Eastwood uses the term, is a specific alignment application framing - a balanced-ternary Affirm (+1), Investigate (0) or Deny (-1) decision component, in which uncertainty holds rather than silently resolving to permission offered as part of the Eden Protocol architecture. First named in Infinite Architects (2 January 2026), it is not a claim over three-valued logic itself, which is well-established prior work, notably computing (Setun, 1958).
Ternary Ethical Logic, as Michael Darius Eastwood uses the term, is a specific alignment application framing - a balanced-ternary Affirm (+1), Investigate (0) or Deny (-1) decision component, in which uncertainty holds rather than silently resolving to permission offered as part of the Eden Protocol architecture. It gives an Eden Protocol system a third settled state to sit in when a decision cannot be Affirmed or Denied on the available evidence: Investigate, meaning route to a further loop of examination rather than force a binary answer under uncertainty.
The named framing is first placed on the public record in Infinite Architects (2 January 2026, ISBN 978-1806056200) and referenced as a companion component in the Eden Vision paper on the Open Science Framework (22 February 2026, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB).
The priority is strictly over the specific named alignment-application framing, not over the invention of ternary logic or three-valued logic, which have extensive prior work. Balanced-ternary computing was demonstrated in the Setun computer at Moscow State University in 1958 under Nikolai Brusentsov. Three-valued logics have been studied formally since Lukasiewicz and Post in the early twentieth century. The priority claim on this site is therefore always paired with that prior work, and it is bounded to the named application inside the Eden Protocol governance framework.