What can be aligned
Values
The system evaluates the relevant outcomes in an appropriate way.
A dissociation
Correct values ≠ seeing what matters
Wanting the right outcome does not guarantee that the relevant features of the situation become actionable.
Values guide action only through some organization of the situation. If the system notices the wrong distinctions, misses an affordance, or fails to recognize an error, good values may never connect to the behavior they were supposed to produce.
≠
What can still fail
Relevance
The system may fail to recognize which present features, differences, or possible actions bear on those values.
A simple example
A rule can be known without the situation being seen as an instance of it.
Someone may genuinely endorse yielding to pedestrians while failing to notice that a partially obscured person is about to enter the road. Nothing has gone wrong with the value itself. The relevant situation never became available to the value-guided action.
The same structural problem appears whenever correct principles, objectives, or information fail to connect to the features that make them applicable here and now.
What this reveals
Alignment has an upstream layer.
We often ask whether a system will choose correctly from the options it represents. But another question comes first: how did those options, distinctions, and situations become available to choose among?
A failure there can masquerade as a failure of values, reasoning, or motivation.
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