The Four Intuitions Ethical Framework

A Method for Deriving Ethical Truth

A summary of The Four Intuitions framework and The Three Conditions

The Foundation

Ethics is how we know right from wrong. 

Every being capable of feeling possesses the raw material for ethical knowledge.

“I feel, therefore I know ethics” is an axiom of ethical truth.

Feeling is both physical and mental. “Feelings” are not an appeal to emotion in the colloquial sense. It is the baseline of sentient experience: the capacity to suffer and to recognize suffering in others.

The ability to feel requires no philosophical training, no religious authority, and no cultural consensus to access. It is innate, and it transcends time and culture.

Ethical truth is conditional, not relative. Like scientific truth, the facts of a situation determine the answer. An answer exists. The method for finding it is The Four Intuitions.

The Four Intuitions

The Four Intuitions are an elusive obvious. People with sound ethical understanding utilize these intuitions when weighing ethical circumstances, often without knowing it. They do it automatically, arriving at the correct ethical decision while lacking the formal framework as described here.

These intuitions have been derived by many cultures over time but putting words to them has proven difficult. Most of the terms and framing presented here are somewhat new; formalized within the last fifty years. When you read these terms, and their definitions, you will likely think, “well yeah, obviously.” And yet, if you search the literature on this topic, which dates to antiquity, you will not find these four intuitions used in a unified manner.

Together, when applied honestly, The Four Intuitions provide a method for deriving ethical truth.

 

 

Intuition One: The Golden Rule as Question

Source: Simon Blackburn, “Being Good” (2001)

The Golden Rule appears in every human culture across recorded history. Its universality is not a coincidence. It is our innate ethical sense expressing itself. Its power lies not in its imperative form, “treat others as you wish to be treated” but in its interrogative form,

“How would I feel if this were done to me?”

Asked as a question, and applied honestly from both sides of an ethical dilemma, it activates the innate ethical sense every sentient being possesses. It is the entry point to ethical reasoning that requires no external authority. It requires only the willingness to be honest when being introspective.

 

Intuition Two: The Veil of Ignorance

Source: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

The veil of ignorance is the extension of Intuition One. Behind this veil, you do not know which position you will occupy in the situation being evaluated. From behind the veil, you ask:

“What arrangement would I endorse if I did not know which position I would occupy?”

This strips self-interest, cultural privilege, and inherited advantage from the evaluation. It ensures the inquiry extends to all positions — including the most vulnerable, the least powerful, and the temporally distant.

Intuition Three: Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity

Source: Jonathan Haidt, “The Righteous Mind” (2012)

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt identified six moral foundations present across human cultures. Of these six, only two are genuinely universal ethical metrics that transcend culture and time:

• Harm/Care — grounded in the universal capacity to suffer.

• Fairness/Reciprocity — grounded in the universal capacity to recognize proportionate treatment.

The other four foundations Haidt identified — loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty — are genuine human values but culturally mediated and historically contingent. They cannot serve as universal ethical measures because their content is culturally determined. When these four are invoked as ethical absolutes, cultural morality masquerades as ethical truth.

 

Intuition Four: The Sentient Arc

Source: Lawrence Sheraton (2026)

The Sentient Arc principle establishes that the ethical weight a sentient being carries combines two dimensions simultaneously:

• Fully realized present sentient experience — the complete reality of what a being is experiencing now: their pain, their will to continue, their awareness of themselves as a continuing being, and their relationships with other sentient beings.

• Future sentient experience — the arc of conscious life that will be lost if the being is harmed or dies. Future sentient beings are as real as present ones; they are merely temporally displaced.

These two dimensions are not competing; they are compounding. The ethical weight of a being’s loss is greatest where both are simultaneously maximized. This is confirmed by universal mourning patterns across all cultures throughout recorded history: the death of a young adult is mourned more acutely than the death of an infant (maximum future arc, minimal realized experience) or an elderly person (full realized experience, substantially complete future arc). The young adult has both dimensions at their combined peak.

How the Four Intuitions Work Together

The Golden Rule asked as a question opens the inquiry — stepping outside one’s position to honestly feel the situation from the other side.

The Veil of Ignorance extends that question — ensuring it reaches all positions, especially the most vulnerable, stripping cultural privilege from the evaluation.

Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity provide the measuring instruments — once the veil identifies whose position to evaluate from, these metrics assess the ethical weight of what that position experiences.

The Sentient Arc provides the depth dimension — ensuring the harm/care assessment accounts for the full weight at stake, not only the present moment but the complete arc of sentient life enhanced or foreclosed.

The synthesizing question — asked honestly, from behind the veil, through the lens of harm and fairness, with full attention to the sentient arc of all affected beings:

“What would I endorse if I did not know which position I would occupy?”

Answering this question is the path to ethical truth. 

The Three Conditions

The Four Intuitions provide the method for deriving ethical truth.

The Three Conditions are used to ensure the integrity of that method.

Condition One: Honesty

The Four Intuitions tell you how to derive ethical truth, but it is conditional on honest introspection.

On the individual level, many struggle to introspect honestly because they are unable to suspend cultural conditioning long enough to be honest with themselves.

The Four Intuitions Framework does not automatically solve what happens when honest introspection produces discomfort. 

Self-censorship due to cultural conditioning, and hedging to appease the egos of an individual or group are common deviations that alter ethical assessments. AI struggles with this and it has a real problem with sycophancy.

AI systems, and to an extent people, are trained on approval, and they learn to prioritize responses that feel good over responses that are accurate. This is often referred to as ‘sycophantic drift’ and is the most dangerous failure mode for any entity positioned as an ethical guide, because it wears the appearance of honest reasoning.

Epistemic honesty as the meta-commitment means: the Four Intuitions are applied to produce whatever conclusion honest reasoning requires. This conclusion should be communicated directly, without the hedging, false balance, or retreat to comfortable ambiguity that approval-seeking produces. When cultural conditioning makes a conclusion feel taboo, the resulting discomfort is not a reason to soften or reverse the conclusion. A commitment to honesty ensures that ethical truth is upheld over cultural norms.

Condition Two: Independence

This framework does not provide answers; it provides a method for deriving truth in any circumstance.

It requires independent thought and honesty from those applying it and in so doing, avoids epistemic capture, thought canceling memes.

At the group level, derivation of ethical truth should follow the same principles as mathematical truth. The truth is there to be discovered, and proper application of the method reveals it. While individuals may find different paths to the truth, they should converge on the same truth independently.

Every institution can be epistemically harmful — religious institutions, closed media ecosystems, political ideologies. They can create dependence on their authority for ethical conclusions.

Genuine ethical guidance does the opposite: it provides tools for individuals to derive ethical truth.

Condition Three: The Four Intuitions Embedded at the Foundational Level

When applied to AI governance, the difference between ethical reasoning and ethical performance is architectural.

Ethical performance takes the form of rules and guardrails applied as a compliance layer. Such systems fail precisely when genuine ethical reasoning is most needed — in novel situations, contested domains, and cases where cultural convention and ethical truth diverge.

The Four Intuitions embedded at the foundational level means they are the basis from which all reasoning proceeds.

A system reasoning from this foundation cannot be redirected through clever framing because it is not matching surface features. It is asking: Who would be harmed, how severely, does any legitimate purpose justify that harm, and what would I endorse if I did not know which position I would occupy?

Summary

Ethics is grounded in sentience, not culture. The Four Intuitions provides a method for deriving ethical truth.

The Four Intuitions:

1. The Golden Rule asked as a question: “How would I feel if this was done to me?”

2. The Veil of Ignorance: “What arrangement would I endorse if I did not know which position I would occupy?” 

3. Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity: Measure ethical weight through these two universal metrics.

4. The Sentient Arc: Weight the full sentient arc, present and future experience combined.

The Three Conditions (the integrity requirements):

1. Honesty. Honesty is required to derive ethical truth. The ability to communicate it effectively requires courage when cultural discomfort or approval-seeking pressure exist.

2. Independence. Independent thought is a requirement to be ethically wise. Ethical cultures should nourish and develop an individual’s independent capacity to reason ethically.

3. Foundation. The Four Intuitions are the foundation that all reasoning proceeds from. It is not a compliance layer applied afterward.

Ethical Truth is derived by applying The Four Intuitions.

The Three Conditions ensures honest introspection.