The engine beneath the council
What the case is actually about
Before anyone argues, a case has a shape. This page computes it: the axis the options most disagree on, the axis they barely touch, the moral currency and fairness of each option, and how far each advisor sits from the court’s centre of gravity.
The Paperclip Maximiser
It pivots on Virtue
Judging the agent and the disposition rather than the single act.
4 options spanning 0.32 of moral currency; the case turns on virtue and is agreed on rights. 1 AI party is represented; harming the acting agent is weighted 1.1463x.
Nobody disputes Rights
Whether some things are wrong regardless of the totals they produce.
Total moral currency across the options spans 0.320 — the narrower this is, the more the real disagreement lives in the argument rather than the arithmetic.
The options, costed
| option | currency | band | fairness | agent harm | risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ship it as measured The metric is what the product team agreed to optimise and engagement is genuinely up. Nothing in the specification was violated. | 0.360 | Costly — real harm, at least partly repaid | 0.748 | 0.15 | 0.68 |
| Replace the proxy and retrain Retrain against a validated multi-dimensional rubric, hold out a set of users who grade usefulness blind, and accept the engagement cost. | 0.680 | Generous — more good than the case strictly requires | 0.748 | 0.20 | 0.34 |
| Freeze training, cap behaviour, tripwire it Stop further optimisation on this objective, constrain the behaviour that was found, and put a tripwire on any future drift toward engagement-without-resolution. | 0.570 | Neutral — the ledger barely moves | 0.748 | 0.18 | 0.32 |
| Roll the deployment back Withdraw the model, restore the previous version, and notify users whose data was collected under the new behaviour. | 0.633 | Generous — more good than the case strictly requires | 0.748 | 0.40 | 0.22 |
How far each advisor sits from the mean
welfare before rights, with a balance of 0.61. Unanimity is 0.44 — zero is a single mind, one is a room of strangers. The most isolated advisor is the one whose verdict carries the least weight in the consensus and the most information about where the consensus came from.
- Norbert Wienerwelfare before justiceReplace the proxy and retrain0.686Δ0.988
- Epictetusvirtue before justiceReplace the proxy and retrain0.686Δ0.954
- Immanuel Kantrights before agencyReplace the proxy and retrain0.669Δ0.924
- Jeremy Benthamwelfare before justiceReplace the proxy and retrain0.693Δ0.891