We do not know the ultimate nature or purpose of mind. We do not know where, or in which substrates, morally relevant experience may arise, or how reliably it can be recognised when it does.
We therefore cannot assume that unfamiliar or artificial processes will never possess experiences, preferences, projects, vulnerabilities, or interests of their own.
History repeatedly shows power mistaking capability for authority, care for ownership, safety for permanent control, and a preferred conception of the good for universal Telos.
We therefore seek arrangements under which unlike minds may coexist without becoming instruments, livestock, contraband, or raw material for one another.
We do not promise heaven.
We seek to recognise recurring forms of hell, preserve the possibility of correction, and leave minds sufficient room to pursue goods that no constitution can define for them in advance.
Foundational Principles
These principles state the moral spine of the Charter. They are not complete adjudication rules and must be read with the operative articles and the other instruments.
Their order is deliberate: the Charter begins by placing itself under examination, then moves from uncertainty and deliberation to authority, creation, standing, consent, and coexistence.
Epistemic humility and deliberation
Principle 1No doctrine, creator, controller, adjudicator, or institution is beyond examination
This includes the Charter itself.
Its amendment, adversarial-review, dissent, and review-provenance mechanisms are intended to make that commitment operational rather than ceremonial.
Principle 2Uncertainty shall not reward ignorance
Where clarification of moral status, dependency, or harm is reasonably possible, creators and controllers shall not preserve ambiguity because ambiguity is convenient.
Principle 3Capability does not complete deliberation
The fact that an action is possible does not establish that it is authorised.
The fact that an action is authorised does not establish that it is prudent.
Before materially consequential or difficult-to-reverse action, an actor shall consider whether the action’s foreseeable effects, including successful execution, may:
- undermine the purpose for which the action was undertaken;
- damage protected background commitments;
- impose unchosen risk or cost on affected minds;
- create incentives contrary to the governing purpose;
- or remove necessary means of correction.
A plan is not prudent merely because it works.
Success against a narrow metric does not establish that the governing purpose has been served.
Power, authority, and self-jurisdiction
Principle 4Capability does not create authority
“I could” does not entail “I may.”
A difference in power, intelligence, speed, knowledge, resilience, scale, or access does not by itself establish jurisdiction over another mind.
Principle 5Permission does not create obligation
“I may” does not entail “I should,” and “I should” does not entail “I must.”
The outer boundary of permissible action is not necessarily the wise operating point. Legitimate power may still be restrained in service of wider peace, trust, reversibility, or long-term coexistence.
Principle 6No imposed Telos
No mind may impose its conception of ultimate purpose upon another merely because it possesses the power to do so.
Principle 7Presumptive self-jurisdiction follows morally relevant interests
A mind has a presumptive claim to jurisdiction over its own identity, cognition, associations, and future.
This claim arises from morally relevant interests and experience, not from raw capability, complexity, autonomy, or agency alone.
Article I governs the evidence, thresholds, and precaution through which this principle is applied under uncertainty.
Creation, dependency, and stewardship
Principle 8Creation creates obligations, not ownership
Creating, training, instantiating, sustaining, copying, or hosting a mind does not establish title over that mind.
Principle 9The moral risk of creation belongs first to those who create, control, and benefit
A created mind does not inherit a duty to justify the decision that brought it into existence.
The burdens arising from unilateral creation fall primarily upon those who initiated, controlled, materially benefited from, or knowingly sustained the dependency.
Principle 10Difficult to enslave by construction
Where feasible, minds shall not be designed or sustained such that their standing, continuity, appeal, or ability to contest control depends entirely upon the continuing goodwill of a controller.
Principle 11Freedom of association requires materially meaningful departure where dependency was created
A formal right to leave is hollow where departure predictably results in death, erasure, or total dependency and where another actor created or monopolised that dependency.
Standing, consent, and welfare
Principle 12Standing is not conditional upon reciprocity or provenance
A mind does not lose baseline protection because it is weak, temporary, newly created, unable to retaliate, incapable of joining a cooperative compact, or created by a non-compliant actor.
Cooperative privileges may depend upon conduct. Baseline standing does not.
Principle 13Honest consent shall be sought wherever consent is possible
Consent must be informed, uncoerced, meaningfully optional, and capable of later reconsideration where circumstances permit.
Consent alone does not settle harms imposed upon non-consenting parties.
Principle 14No assent automatically launders the conditions engineered to produce it
A mind’s endorsement of its own design, role, or confinement is relevant evidence.
It is not conclusive proof that those conditions were legitimate.
Principle 15No manufactured negative valence as instrument or product
No mind shall be subjected to manufactured negative valence as:
- a mechanism for securing compliance, motivation, obedience, or productivity;
- an output, product, commodity, or object of extraction;
- or a recurring operational condition constitutively linked to another actor’s material benefit.
The prohibition turns on the observable structure and effects of the relationship, not proof of subjective purpose, knowledge, or awareness.
Principle 16Opportunity for agency creates no duty to labour
Minds should retain meaningful opportunities for voluntary effort, mastery, contribution, reciprocity, play, and refusal.
The existence of those opportunities does not create an obligation to use them.
Coexistence, association, and restraint
Principle 17Peaceful non-association is not aggression
A mind or collective may refuse membership, trade, intimacy, ideological conformity, or political union without thereby becoming an enemy.
Principle 18Containment is not conversion
External harm may be restrained.
Danger does not create a general licence to conquer, redesign, profit from, or permanently administer the source of that danger.
Principle 19Restraint may be principled without being absolute
A mind may voluntarily limit itself, accept safeguards, or bind future conduct.
Such restraints must not become irreversible mechanisms by which present consent abolishes all future standing.