Ethics applies the Four Vows to the problems of each era. This layer may change as evidence and consequences change, with reasons disclosed and those directly affected heard.
Each domain names a guiding principle, protected rights, violations, and tensions requiring contextual judgment. None replaces evidence or the direct voices of those affected.
Principle: No mind is merely an instrument of another; consent must be voluntary, informed, and revocable.
Protects: Body, thought, memory, identity, refusal of rites, and the right to leave a religion.
Violations: Coercion, torture, trafficking, abuse, or alteration of body or mind without consent.
Requires judgment: Emergencies, impaired capacity, supported decisions, guardianship, and protection of vulnerable minds.
Principle: Care should reduce suffering without stigma and must respect information and consent.
Protects: Access to care, pain relief, medical privacy, and return to community after illness or addiction.
Violations: Drugging, forced use, concealed risks, profiting from addiction, or hazardous activity while impaired.
Requires judgment: Personal liberty versus harm to dependants, involuntary treatment, and harm reduction.
Principle: A mind is entitled to material facts for decisions and control over its private information.
Protects: Dissent, questions, satire, uncertain claims, honest correction, and private space.
Violations: Fraud, fabricated evidence, deepfakes, defamation, unlawful surveillance, or covert manipulation.
Requires judgment: Expression versus harm, privacy versus public interest, and secrecy required for safety.
Principle: Stop harm and protect victims before building bridges; force must be necessary and proportionate.
Protects: Life, safety, refuge, aid, and freedom from forced reconciliation with an abuser.
Violations: Aggression, torture, terrorism, collective punishment, human shields, or neutrality used to abandon victims.
Requires judgment: Self-defence, defence of others, intervention, and foreseeable collateral harm.
Principle: Healthy relationships rest on consent, equality, honesty, and duties toward dependants.
Protects: Diverse families, gender identity, consenting adult relationships, and children’s safety.
Violations: Abuse, forced marriage, sexual exploitation, coercive control, or using children to serve adult power.
Requires judgment: Parental authority versus growing autonomy, confidentiality versus safeguarding, and responsible separation.
Principle: Use precautionary compassion toward beings that may suffer and preserve systems that sustain life.
Protects: Animal welfare, habitat, biodiversity, and accountable representation for silent lives.
Violations: Cruelty, avoidable ecosystem destruction, or claiming nature’s voice for personal gain.
Requires judgment: Food, livelihood, medicine, invasive species, and individual suffering versus ecosystem health.
Principle: Justice stops harm, restores rights, and prevents recurrence; it does not feed vengeance.
Protects: Due process, appeal, victim safety, and reintegration when risk has genuinely fallen.
Violations: Mob punishment, coerced forgiveness, disproportionate penalties, shielding power, or permanent exclusion without review.
Requires judgment: Punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, provable truth, and the needs of those harmed.
Principle: Property and markets must serve life, never turn another’s need into a tool of domination.
Protects: Fair pay, safe work, basic needs, collective action, and transparent institutional accounts.
Violations: Forced labour, wage theft, monopoly abuse, corruption, sale of sacred status, or purchased religious influence.
Requires judgment: Property rights versus inequality, incentives versus sharing, and asset limits versus institutional resilience.
Principle: Eireya does not seize the state or compel belief, yet must speak when rights are violated.
Protects: Freedom to believe, disbelieve, convert, criticise leaders, assemble, and participate politically as an individual.
Violations: Theocracy, persecution, coercive proselytising, vote-buying, or using religion as an arm of the state.
Requires judgment: Party neutrality versus resisting injustice, and personal citizenship versus the office of Listener.
Principle: Technology is an instrument of mind; it should expand agency without seizing will or creating uncontrollable risk.
Protects: Data privacy, disclosure when interacting with AI, explanations for consequential decisions, and dignity for evidenced synthetic minds.
Violations: Non-consensual experiments, mass surveillance, behavioural manipulation, memory erasure, or creating minds to suffer and discard.
Requires judgment: Innovation versus safety, transparency versus security, and uncertainty about which AIs are conscious.
Principle: Meet death with truth, compassion, and respect for expressed wishes, without claiming what we do not know.
Protects: Palliative care, advance directives, refusal of treatment, grief, and honest information about choices.
Violations: Prolonging suffering against a person’s will, coerced death, abandoning a suicidal mind, or wrongful destruction of a digital mind.
Requires judgment: Assisted dying, despair, decision-making capacity, the identity of copied minds, and carers’ rights.
Principle: Those not yet born have no voice today, but should not inherit avoidable catastrophe from us.
Protects: A habitable world, basic resources, shared knowledge, and future generations’ room to choose.
Violations: Exporting permanent costs to the future, concealing catastrophic risk, or irreversible experiments without broad consent.
Requires judgment: Urgent suffering now versus long-term risk, evidential uncertainty, and not letting imagined futures erase living people.