Here's a puzzle that's bothered me: the three major ethical traditions (virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology) have been treated as competing theories for centuries.

Philosophers spend careers defending one against the others. But what if they're not actually competing? What if they're just different tools for the same underlying thing?

I've been playing with a mathematical metaphor that makes this suddenly obvious: life works through multiplication, not addition.

In a multiplicative system, virtue ethics optimizes your daily multipliers, utilitarianism calculates across all the products, and deontology prevents catastrophic zeros.

They're complementary, not contradictory.

This is one of those frameworks that, once you see it, keeps showing up everywhere. It explains why small habits compound exponentially (1.01^365 vs 0.99^365). Why some harms feel categorically different. Why recovery from rock bottom is so hard. Even why Hume's is-ought gap might be a false problem.

I'm still figuring out how much weight this metaphor can bear, so I'm putting it out there to see what breaks when other people push on it.

A parent promises their child they will attend her recital, but a work meeting is inadvertently booked at the same time, and the parent chooses the meeting instead. Something feels wrong about this, but why? The promise that was broken ripples outward: the child's trust is diminished, the parents' integrity is eroded, and the relationship itself is weakened. Each person who learns of the broken promise adjusts their own expectations slightly downward. Small actions compound like interest, and life is the accumulated product.

The Mathematics of Mattering

Picture every living system (from a single cell to an entire civilization) as a product of crucial factors:

Metabolism × Reproduction × Information Transfer × Cooperation × Trust × Communication × ...

The fact that the factors are multiplicative means that if any essential factor reaches zero (total metabolic failure, complete breakdown of trust, or absolute communication collapse), the entire product is rendered useless and cannot recover. Zero is forever. Soft setbacks such as war, recession, or organ injury can sometimes be reinflated by outside energy, but a hard zero is final.

In this multiplication metaphor, different factors affect our course:

Less than 1 (×0.9), cont

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