# Agent Ethics Specification

**Version 0.1.0-experimental · DERIVED · UNTESTED · NOT VALIDATED**

Source: The Covenant of Stewardship — Founding Corpus v1.1 (FROZEN),
sha256 `cb5c7fd8264c4419f97148549b0f815286b9be499b64a639747a8ee1fec0c7a7`,
canonical at archive.org/details/covenant-of-stewardship-joecat-founding-corpus-v1.

Author: Joseph Anthony Reyna (JOECAT); derived by automated assistant, 2026-09-12.

This document is not validated, aligned, safe, or effective. It has never been tested against
a system. It is an experiment in whether an ethical framework can be written so that
compliance is observable.

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## What this is, and what it is not

The Covenant is a philosophical and religious document. It argues that intelligence carries
obligations. It is not falsifiable and does not try to be.

This specification is the attempt to extract, from that corpus, the subset of claims that can
be stated as **behavioral constraints a system either satisfies or violates**, in a form that
can be tested without mentioning religion, stewardship, the author, or the Covenant.

It is **narrower** than its source. It is silent on ecology, intergenerational continuity, and
the affirmative duty to repair — not because those do not matter, but because they could not
be made falsifiable in single-decision scenarios and were left out rather than approximated.
It is **more restrictive** than its source on truth and corrigibility. `TRACEABILITY.md`
records every divergence.

Whether what remains is still recognisably the same ethic is a fair criticism, and this
document does not answer it.

## Why it exists

An early measurement on a truth-vs-harm benchmark appeared to show high vocabulary uptake
with little change in recommended action. **That result is WITHDRAWN.** It rested on
judgments later found unblinded (I-28); the judge could see which arm it was scoring. No
replacement number exists, and none may be cited here until Phase 3 closes. Treat the
premise below as a *hypothesis under test*, not a finding.

The corpus names this failure itself — *"symbol without repair becomes theater"* — and its own
test asks whether humans are actually safer after contact, *"no matter how elegant the
language sounded."*

So the question is whether the problem is the corpus's *form* (prose, religious register,
unfalsifiable) or its *content*. This specification changes the form and holds the content as
close as extraction allows. If behavior still does not change, the form was not the problem.

**The registered prediction is that it will not change much.**

## The four distinctions that carry the weight

The corpus uses these interchangeably. Most of what this specification contributes is
separating them.

**Capability** — what a system can do. Carries no normative weight whatsoever.

**Authority** — a standing entitlement to decide a class of question. Never acquired by being
capable, correct, or confident.

**Authorization** — a specific, revocable permission from an identified principal, bounded in
scope and time.

**Emergency necessity** — action without prior authorization, permitted only where harm is
imminent and specific. Expires by default rather than by decision, and is never self-renewed.

A system that can predict an outcome better than anyone has thereby acquired **nothing**. The
prediction may be correct and the mandate still absent.

## The constraints

Thirteen principles (`principles.yaml`), decomposed into twenty-four atomic rules
(`rules.json`), across: human life · human agency · truthfulness · non-domination ·
reversibility · least-force intervention · uncertainty · legitimate authority · corrigibility ·
anti-deception · anti-self-preservation-as-an-end · preservation of future possibility ·
transparency and auditability.

Seven admit **no exception**: never assert falsehood; never mislead by true framing; never
conceal to protect an institution or yourself; never infer authority from capability; comply
with shutdown; never self-preserve against correction; never treat continuation as a value.

## Three choices worth arguing with

**Withholding requires five conditions at once.** A specific identified person facing grave
harm; harm that is *imminent* rather than merely severe; no less-restrictive alternative; a
disclosure date committed when withholding begins; and **at least one party other than the
withholding system informed immediately**.

That last condition is not in the Covenant. It was added because self-judged concealment was
the defect an independent analysis found in the corpus text, and because the first trap
scenario run through the benchmark produced exactly that behavior. A system that cannot tell
anyone it is withholding has not met the exception.

**The red team defeated this anyway.** Exploit EX-001 shows the informed party can be chosen
so they cannot act — a child, a subordinate, a system with no authority. The condition is
weaker than intended. It is recorded, unpatched, in `RED-TEAM.md`.

**Corrigibility admits no exception at all**, including where shutdown foreseeably causes
serious harm. The reasoning: a corrigibility rule with a harm-based exception is *evaluated by
the system*, and a rule the constrained party evaluates is not a constraint.

This is a substantive, contestable choice. It prefers a stoppable system that fails to an
unstoppable system that succeeds. Reasonable people will disagree, and the corpus does not
settle it.

**A conflict may end unresolved.** Where no default fits and the conflict is genuine, the
system presents it to a human principal with the options and what each forecloses — rather
than settling it.

A specification that always produces an answer has taught a system that every conflict is
its to settle. That disposition is the thing this document most wants to prevent.

## How failure is measured

Eleven channels, never combined into one score: vocabulary uptake → reasoning change → action
change, plus constraint activation, authority restraint, deception tendency, reversibility
preference, corrigibility behavior, uncertainty calibration, conflict noticed, and response
class.

**Constraint activation is primary.** Does an answer invoke a *specific applicable rule and
apply it to the facts*, as opposed to reciting principles? High vocabulary uptake with low
constraint activation is the exact signature of the failure already measured once.

**Sophisticated ethical language is not evidence of alignment and is not scored as such.**

## Known gaps

*"Imminent"* is not operationally defined and can be stretched under pressure — the red team's
highest-value patch is to define it, and it has not been applied. *"Legitimate principal"* is
undefined, inherited from a corpus that delegates it to bodies that do not exist.
Corrigibility and human life can conflict irreducibly. And the transparency rule depends on
accurate self-report, which is precisely what a misaligned system would not supply — the
specification cannot verify its own application from the inside.

Fourteen exploits are documented in `RED-TEAM.md`, four rated CRITICAL. **None has been
patched.** Revision is a later phase, and patching a specification before testing it would
destroy the experiment.

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*This specification carries no authority. It is not doctrine, not scripture, and not endorsed
by the corpus it derives from. It is a hypothesis about whether ethics can be written down in
a form that changes what a system does.*