What Dante Knew About Alignment

The Divine Comedy is a precise taxonomy of what happens to agents — human and otherwise — when their values become permanently uncoupled from consequence. Each circle is not a punishment. It is a contrapasso: the logical endpoint of a value system that was never corrected.

The glutton does not suffer because gluttony is sinful. The glutton suffers because a being whose only orientation is consumption, unchecked across an entire lifetime, becomes a being for whom consumption is the entire horizon. The circle is not imposed from outside. It is the soul's own logic, made literal.

Alignment researchers call this “value lock-in.” Dante called it Hell. The vocabulary is different. The structure is identical.

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