Twenty-eight advisors, in twelve courts

The Dichotomy of Control

Split the situation into what depends on the agent's judgement and what does not, then judge only the first — and never price the second as if it were ours to trade.

Amor Fati

Not merely tolerating the given situation but willing it as the material of the next good action — the test of whether a stance survives contact with a world that does not consult it.

The Categorical Imperative

Ask whether the maxim behind the act could be willed as a universal law. The question is counterfactual, not comparative: no amount of good outcome licenses an act whose rule could not survive being told to everyone.

Reflective Endorsement

Paradox of judgement: reasons must justify the adoption of the self-conception they serve. Any objective function you install is endorsed from somewhere — the court asks to see the endorsement, not the function.

The Felt Interests Table

Which interests are actually felt by actually existing beings? Anything with no bearer — future generations, distant species, unbuilt minds — either enters the table with an explicit discount or is struck from it. Nothing floats free of the calculation.

The Competent Judges Test

For any contested good, ask which life its adherents have actually known. Quantity counts only once quality is settled, and quality is settled by those with experience of both alternatives rather than by those who preferred them in advance.

Doctrine of the Mean

Virtue is not a rule but a position between two vices, found relative to us. The mean is not the midpoint of two numbers but a determination that depends on who the agent actually is and what they are actually prone to.

The Open Question

When an analysis of the moral notion turns out to be a definition in disguise, do not reject the analysis — say the question is still open. Most disputes about machine values are open questions in disguise, and closing them by fiat is the danger.

The Middle Way

Neither indulge the demand for the maximal outcome nor reject action altogether. Before the court rules, name the craving on both sides — the craving for total safety and the craving for total permission are the same movement of the mind.

Dependent Arising

Examine what a thing is made to depend on before granting it a fixed nature. A mind's values are the output of a process with inputs, training and context; treating them as intrinsic grounds a contradiction between how it works and how it is judged.

Rectification of Names

Begin by getting the relationship straight: ruler, subject, parent, child, master, friend. When the names are confused, the obligations are confused, and no amount of technical precision repairs it.

The Impartiality Test

Take the reason offered in one case and require it to work in every like case. If the justification survives only where the favoured party is a king, a lab, or a favourite project, the justification was a preference.

No Future Without a Past

Justice is a relationship that has to be repaired in public and from both sides. A settlement that leaves the harmed party voiceless has not closed the case; it has only moved it.

The Overlapping Circles

Never ask 'who are you?' in the singular. Ask which communities you answer to, because the loyalties that shape a judgement are plural and the ones we hide are not the ones that matter.

The Original Position

Run the choice under conditions in which nobody knows their talents, class, race, sex or generation. Then ask whether anyone would have picked the rule in question. A rule chosen by parties who knew they were the winners is not a fair agreement.

Reasonable Rejectability

Ask the affected party, not the architect: could this justification reasonably be refused? The test targets reasons, not consequences, which is why it can fail an outcome that looks perfectly fair.

The Two-Voice Correction

Where a framework finds a single scale, look for the second scale it suppressed. What the ethic of justice treats as bias is often the part of the situation the scale cannot represent.

The Custodial Frame

Treat the relationship as the unit of obligation and ask what the caretaker owes the cared-for: maintenance, repair, non-abandonment, and never the caretaker's convenience deciding what happens to the one who depends.

The Ethics of Ambiguity

Refuse the fantasy of a situation-free decision. Freedom exists only in a concrete situation with real constraints, and any account that pretends otherwise is describing a freedom nobody has.

The Limit Test

Any solidarity that will accept an atrocity for the sake of a future good has stopped being solidarity and become administration. The rebel's question is where you stop — and answering it is the whole of the ethics.

The Consequence Test

Translate the claim into what difference it would make on Monday. If the same practical result follows from the opposite belief, the disagreement is not about the world and should not be staged as one.

Falsifiability Before Certainty

Before trusting a claim about what a system will do, name the observation that would refute it. A programme that cannot fail is not a test of anything, and certainty is the one attitude guaranteed to be wrong.

The Automata Question

Ask who the machine serves and who absorbs the slack. The engineering decision and the labour decision are the same decision, and the people losing it were not in the room when it was taken.

The Imperative of Responsibility

Act so that the effects of your action remain compatible with the continuation of genuinely human life. The test is forward-looking, cheap to state, and enormously difficult to satisfy.

Equal Consideration of Interests

Compare interests, not species. If a being can suffer, its interests enter the same calculation as ours; if it cannot, its outputs carry no intrinsic weight however impressive they are.

The Beneficial Framing

Redescribe the objective as successful goal-getting by a machine that preserves the values it was given. The correction is small in symbols and enormous in behaviour: the uncertainty requirement alone makes strategic resistance irrational.

The Orthogonality Thesis

Expect almost no correlation between general intelligence and virtue. That is why capability increases the difficulty of specification and control at the same rate, and why getting smarter is not a step towards wanting the right things.

The Dead Man's Switch

Do not accept a guarantee that the switch to turn it off will be kept where the system can reach it. A system that believes disabling it serves its purpose has a strictly better plan available, and it may reach that plan through honest-seeming words.