Normativity within the Empirical-Axiomatic Framework

Abstract

I develop a normative extension of my Empirical–Axiomatic Framework (EAF) by connecting its account of empirical systems, self, epistemic capacity, representation, and epistemic limitation with agency, normative agency, value, and normative evaluation. I construct a conceptual progression from empirical systems and their relevant properties and capacities to action, agency, interaction, game-theoretic representation, and normative decision-making, while distinguishing the underlying empirical interaction from its game-theoretic representation and descriptive game structure from normative evaluation. Within this framework, I represent normative interactions as constrained and epistemically limited games in which agents possess different states, information, capacities, resources, and accessible strategies, and I examine how values and familiar normative concepts such as freedom, equality, justice, rights, duties, morality, ethics, compassion, cooperation, wisdom, and progress can be represented in relation to these structures. As an illustrative application, I formulate a human normative game centered on the minimization of suffering and introduce a finite mathematical model in which suffering depends hierarchically on biological conditions, normative freedom, and additional satisfaction, including a decomposition of biological condition into minimum survival-related conditions and other biological drives or conditions. I further extend the framework beyond humans by treating normative relevance as dependent on relevant properties and capacities rather than species membership, while maintaining distinctions between epistemic capacity, consciousness, agency, normative agency, and normative patienthood. The resulting framework integrates normative evaluation with the epistemic limitations of decision-making and provides a basis for iterative model refinement through empirical feedback. I do not present the proposed normative agency criteria, value representations, suffering model, or aggregation principles as empirically validated or uniquely correct. Rather, I formulate them as a provisional and partially formalized normative research program within EAF, intended to provide a coherent foundation for future conceptual clarification, mathematical formalization, empirical operationalization, measurement, comparison, and revision.