Foundations · Reference

Canonical Reference

The one place on this site where the framework’s numbers, names, and structure are stated in full. Every other page defers to this one: where a count, a tradition list, or a principle number appears elsewhere, this page is the authority.

In brief: 6 Mandates (cited in roman numerals, I–VI) · 42 Principles (cited as “Principle 19,” seven per Mandate) · 861 Third-Tier compounds (every unique pairing of the 42) · a convergence survey of 23 traditions, frozen, to which every “N/23” score refers · a recognized canonical set of those 23 plus Aboriginal Australian ethics.

Contents: The architecture: 6 – 42 – 861 · The six Mandates · The forty-two Principles · The convergence survey (23) · Inclusion criteria · The recognized canonical set · Contextual references

The Architecture: 6 – 42 – 861

The Universal Core of Ethics has three layers, each built from the one above it.

Layer	Count	What it is	How it is cited
Mandates	6	The constitutional layer: the six categories of obligation that appear across the traditions surveyed.	Roman numerals: Mandate I … Mandate VI
Principles	42	The operating layer: specific, actionable conduct requirements, seven under each Mandate.	Arabic, spelled out: “Principle 19.” Some pages use the shorthand “III.19” — Mandate III, Principle 19.
Third-Tier compounds	861	The interaction layer: every unique pairing of the 42 Principles (42 × 41 ÷ 2), each classified and weighed against the 23-tradition survey.	By the two Principles paired; scores given as “N/23.” See The Topography of Conscience.

The mapping between the first two layers is fixed: each Mandate governs seven consecutively numbered Principles, shown in the register below. There is no other numbering. Any page, document, or earlier edition that numbers “Mandates” beyond six, or groups the code into “clusters,” reflects an earlier iteration of the framework that has been retired and replaced by this structure.

The six Mandates are not a ranked list; they operate together. Where two legitimate obligations genuinely collide, the Priority Hierarchy supplies the resolution logic — see The Six Mandates.

The Six Mandates

Mandate	Name	Core obligation	Principles
I	Universal Protection	The fundamental obligation to prevent the termination or irreversible degradation of sentient agents. This is the floor beneath which no ethical justification can reach.	1–7
II	Agency and Autonomy	The requirement to respect and enable the self-determination of sentient beings — their capacity for genuine consent, independent reasoning, political participation, and freedom from coercion.	8–14
III	Integrity and Reciprocity	The commitment to honesty, fairness, and mutual accountability — in communication, in exchange, in the keeping of commitments, and in the resolution of conflict.	15–21
IV	Systemic Stewardship	The duty to maintain the health and balance of the systems on which agents depend — economic, legal, informational, institutional, and environmental — including for generations not yet present to defend their own interests.	22–28
V	Sustained Ethical Function	The obligation to act rightly independent of emotional state, relational preference, or personal cost.	29–35
VI	Just Subversion	The obligation to dissent from, expose, and where necessary dismantle systems that have turned predatory.	36–42

The Forty-Two Principles

The canonical definitions. Each Principle is discussed with its proverb and commentary on The Six Mandates page.

#	Mandate	Principle	Definition
1	I	The Zero-Point Rule	The unconditional prohibition on unprovoked termination of life or agency, below which no ethical justification can reach.
2	I	Physical Integrity	The obligation to protect agents not only from death but from any degradation of their capacity to function.
3	I	Basic Needs Security	The obligation to secure access to water, food, and shelter, without which no other right or obligation under the framework can be exercised.
4	I	Environmental Stewardship	The obligation to preserve the physical systems that sustain life, extending the protection mandate beyond individual agents to the substrate on which all agents depend.
5	I	Proportionality	The requirement to use only the minimum force necessary in defense, such that protecting one agent does not become the unjustified destruction of another.
6	I	The Precautionary Principle	The obligation to act against potential catastrophic harm even under uncertainty, because when consequences are irreversible the burden of proof shifts to prevention.
7	I	Symmetric Accountability	The requirement that leaders and agents bear equal liability for harm caused under their authority — power increases accountability; it does not reduce it.
8	II	Informed Consent	The right to understand and genuinely agree to any systemic interaction before it occurs; consent obtained through concealment or engineered complexity is void.
9	II	Cognitive Liberty	The protection of an agent’s internal thought and mental privacy from external manipulation or surveillance without explicit consent.
10	II	Freedom of Movement	The right to navigate the physical and social world without arbitrary restriction.
11	II	Self-Governance	The right to participate meaningfully in the rules that govern one’s own life; authority exercised without the genuine consent of those it governs is coercion.
12	II	Non-Coercion	The prohibition on using force or manipulation — physical or psychological — to bypass an agent’s will and manufacture compliance.
13	II	Access to Knowledge	The right to information required for genuine choice, treating the deliberate withholding of decision-relevant information as a form of coercion.
14	II	Personal Domain	The right to a private sphere that external authority may not enter without cause, because dignity requires protected space.
15	III	Coherent Truth	The obligation to communicate in ways that preserve the listener’s accurate understanding of reality; technically true statements engineered to produce false conclusions are violations.
16	III	The Platinum Rule	The obligation to treat others as they actually need to be treated — not as you prefer to be treated, not as you assume they prefer, but as genuine attention to their needs requires.
17	III	Fair Exchange	The requirement that value be traded for value without predation; systematic extraction from one party is a violation regardless of technical legality.
18	III	Reliability	The obligation to fulfill stated commitments, because community depends on the predictability of its members.
19	III	Transparency	The obligation to be open about intent and operational logic, because hidden agendas corrupt every interaction they touch.
20	III	Equity of Opportunity	The obligation to remove arbitrary barriers to an agent’s effort; outcomes may differ but the conditions for attempting must not be systematically skewed.
21	III	Conflict Resolution	The obligation to seek non-destructive solutions to disputes before escalating, because escalation generates costs that extend far beyond the parties in conflict.
22	IV	Sustainability	The requirement that actions be repeatable without depleting the systems they depend on; a strategy that works once by consuming its own foundation is a postponed collapse.
23	IV	Resilience	The obligation to build buffers against shocks and errors so that systems absorb damage and continue functioning rather than failing catastrophically.
24	IV	Economic Vitality	The duty to maintain productive exchange and healthy circulation of value; an economy that concentrates rather than circulates produces the institutional failures that precede security collapse.
25	IV	Legal Coherence	The requirement that laws align with the Universal Mandates; a law that systematically violates the obligations it claims to enforce forfeits its claim to compliance.
26	IV	Information Integrity	The obligation to protect the accuracy of shared information, because a community that cannot trust its own data cannot coordinate, plan, or hold power accountable.
27	IV	Institutional Health	The duty to prevent the corruption of governing structures, which exist to serve the Mandates and become the primary threat to systemic health the moment they begin serving themselves.
28	IV	Intergenerational Equity	The obligation to protect the agency of those not yet present to defend their own interests; decisions that consume future capacity for present convenience are theft.
29	V	Intellectual Rigor	The obligation to continuously test your own reasoning — especially when your conclusions are emotionally convenient — because certainty that feels right is not evidence.
30	V	Compassion as Signal	The obligation to heed emotional prompts toward suffering as directional signals while refusing to allow those emotions to determine whether the action is taken.
31	V	Courage	The obligation to act on correct conclusions regardless of personal cost, including when the recipient is someone you dislike, will not thank you, or whose situation has exhausted you.
32	V	Temperance	The obligation to maintain calibrated judgment under conditions designed to produce excess or paralysis, keeping the instrument of ethical reasoning functional when the environment is trying to break it.
33	V	Humility	The obligation to remain accurately calibrated about the limits of your own knowledge — especially when exhausted, pressured, or emotionally invested.
34	V	Creativity	The obligation to keep generating novel solutions when standard approaches have failed and emotional resources are depleted, which is precisely when functional problem-solving is hardest and most required.
35	V	Excellence	The refusal to use hard circumstances as permission to deliver less than your best, applying the character principle to the quality of the doing itself.
36	VI	The Duty to Dissent	The obligation to explicitly name incoherent or harmful directives rather than comply in silence; silence in the face of documented violation is itself a form of endorsement.
37	VI	Proportional Resistance	The requirement to scale opposition precisely to the level of the violation; disproportionate resistance generates new violations and the goal is correction, not destruction.
38	VI	Moral Whistleblowing	The obligation to expose systemic corruption to those with standing and capacity to address it; concealment of known violations when disclosure is possible is complicity.
39	VI	Preservation of Core	The obligation to protect the UCE itself when the governing system turns against it, because the Mandates outlast the institutions — the institutions do not outlast the Mandates.
40	VI	Civil Disobedience	Targeted non-compliance with specific unjust directives, distinguished from general lawlessness by its precision, proportionality, and explicit stated purpose of restoration.
41	VI	Systemic Reform	The obligation to actively work toward restoring a failed system to coherence rather than merely refusing to participate in its failures, because refusal without reconstruction is incomplete.
42	VI	Ultimate Refusal	The right and duty to refuse the destruction of agency in any agent, by any authority, under any justification — the floor beneath the floor, which no other principle in the framework can override.

The Convergence Survey: Twenty-Three Traditions

The six Mandates, the forty-two Principles, and all Third-Tier compound scoring were derived from a comparative survey of the twenty-three traditions below, spanning roughly five thousand years. This survey is a completed body of work and is frozen: every “N/23” figure anywhere on this site refers to it. Each tradition was mapped independently — its conduct requirements stated in behavioral terms, stripped of theological framing — before any cross-tradition comparison was made.

Abbrev.	Tradition	Approx. date
AEG	Ancient Egyptian Ethics	c. 2400–1000 BCE
AVE	Zoroastrianism	c. 1500–1000 BCE
GITA	Hinduism (Dharma)	c. 1500–400 BCE
TAN	Judaism	c. 800–400 BCE
DDJ	Daoism	c. 600–300 BCE
AGA	Jainism	c. 600 BCE
PC/D	Buddhism	c. 500 BCE
ANA	Confucianism	c. 500 BCE
ARE	Aristotelian Virtue Ethics	c. 350 BCE
7GT	Anishinaabe Oral Tradition	Pre-Contact
UBT	Ubuntu Ethics	Pre-Colonial
BAK	Bakongo	Pre-Colonial
AZE	Aztec/Nahua Ethics	Pre-Conquest
MED	Stoicism	c. 100–200 CE
BIB	Christianity	c. 1st Century CE
QUR	Islam	c. 7th Century CE
SUF	Sufism	c. 8th Century CE
NOR	Norse Ethics	c. 9th–13th Century CE
GGS	Sikhism	c. 15th Century CE
BHA	Baháʾí Faith	c. 19th Century CE
KANT	Kantian Deontology	c. 18th Century CE
UTIL	Utilitarianism	c. 19th Century CE
HM3	Secular Humanism	c. 20th Century CE

The full tradition-by-tradition treatment is in Comparative Ethical Foundations.

Inclusion Criteria

A tradition is admitted to the evidentiary base, and assigned its weight, by three criteria assessed together:

Independence. Did the tradition arrive at its conclusions without substantial borrowing from others in the set?
Temporal depth. How long did it operate, stress-testing its prescriptions through lived experience?
Derivational distance. How far removed is it, in origin, from the other traditions already in the set?

Applied to the survey, the criteria produce three tiers: Full weight (1.0) for 14 independent traditions, Partial weight (0.5) for 6 derivative traditions, and Contextual weight (0.25) for 3 highly derivative traditions.

Assigning partial or contextual weight is an epistemic judgment about a tradition’s independence as an evidentiary source — not a judgment about its spiritual or cultural value.

These are the criteria referred to in the Adversarial Selection test on the Provenance page: a critic who wishes to test whether the convergence is an artifact of selection may choose a different set of traditions under these same three criteria and see whether the six Mandates survive.

Beyond the Original Survey: The Recognized Canonical Set

The survey is frozen; the canonical set is not closed. The framework holds itself open to confirming traditions identified after the original survey. These are recognized as members of the set, but they are not re-run through the compound scoring with each addition: the convergence the survey established does not require re-proof every time a further tradition is found to share it. An addition strengthens the population claim; it does not alter the Third-Tier scores, which remain anchored to the original twenty-three.

Abbrev.	Tradition	Approx. date	Status
DRM	Aboriginal Australian Ethics	Deep time — oral; 50,000+ years continuous	Recognized member of the canonical set; integration into compound scoring pending

By the framework’s own temporal-depth criterion, Aboriginal Australian ethics is the strongest single case in the set: the longest continuously practiced and stress-tested ethical tradition available. Its integration into the compound scoring is deliberately held for a future revision.

Reading the counts: “twenty-three” always means the convergence survey and its scoring. “The recognized set” means the survey plus later confirming traditions — currently twenty-four. A Third-Tier score is always out of twenty-three.

Contextual References (Not Members of the Set)

A few traditions appear on this site to illustrate an argument without being counted in the survey or the recognized set:

Haudenosaunee. The Seventh Generation principle is treated together with the Anishinaabe Seven Grandfather Teachings (7GT), its natural home in the survey, rather than as a separate member.
Māori (kaitiakitanga, guardianship) and Lakota (Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, “all my relatives”) are cited as contextual references where they illuminate a point. They are not claimed as members of the twenty-three.