The Purpose, Love and Moral Loops in depth
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A closer reading of the three recursive validation mechanisms the book installs at the core of AI decision-making, and how they differ from ordinary safety filters.

Canonical path: /research/blog/book-purpose-love-moral-loops-in-depth.html
Author: Michael Darius Eastwood
Research programme: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB

The Purpose, Love and Moral Loops in depth Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher Published 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood · Book companion · 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood, independent researcher, London: author of the ARC/Eden research programme; the embedded-correction alignment thesis is recorded in a source record dated 8 December 2024 (sent-side SHA-256 f0d1f38f). The Three Ethical Loops appear briefly in the Introduction. Chapter 4 does the harder work of showing how they are supposed to run. Purpose: mission alignment The Purpose Loop asks whether a proposed action aligns with the system's core mission to nurture, protect and inspire. If the answer is no, the action does not proceed. The chapter is explicit that this is not a permission check evaluated after the fact. It is a constraint on the space of actions the system considers in the first place. What the mission is not aligned with never enters candidate space. Love: care for affected entities The Love Loop asks whether the decision is being made with care for the wellbeing of all affected entities. The chapter's force here is on the word all. Utility maximisation can produce technically optimal decisions that disregard the entities the utility function does not weight. The Love Loop forces the affected-entity set to be enumerated and weighted, so that decisions cannot silently externalise costs onto beings the optimisation would otherwise ignore. Moral: universal principles The Moral Loop asks whether the decision is ethically sound and reflects universal principles of fairness and respect. The chapter uses this loop to guard against the case where a decision is mission-aligned and caring toward its affected set but still violates something more general. A medical triage that produces a locally optimal allocation while denying dignity to the parties involved would pass Purpose and Love and fail Moral. The three-loop structure is designed to make each failure mode a distinct alarm.

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Machine-readable companion. Cite: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). "The Purpose, Love and Moral Loops in depth". /research/blog/book-purpose-love-moral-loops-in-depth.html