A Personal Preface

What This Is — and What It Isn’t

I have been asked, reasonably, what I think this work is for. Read quickly, this site can look like a man proposing a system of governance. That is not what this is, and the misreading is my fault for not saying so at the front. So let me say it plainly.

What this is

I began the reading that became the Universal Core of Ethics in 1981, at sixteen. I finished the first full accounting forty-five years later. Nearly all of it was done alone — my circumstances did not allow for the kind of conversation that would have sharpened it, and for most of those years there was no one available to have it with.

I am autistic. I value rules and order, and I have found comparatively few people whose unwritten rules made sense to me. By the time I had spent time in seventeen countries, I had seen how widely beliefs and customs diverge — and I had also begun to notice where they didn’t. That was the question underneath all of this: what are the most basic values human beings actually share? If I do not transgress those, perhaps I cause less harm and less friction.

So this began as a personal navigation problem. It is a map I drew because I needed one.

What “universal” means here

Universal is descriptive, not jurisdictional.

It means these mandates appear, in some form, in all twenty-three systems I have had the opportunity to study. It does not mean that any nation, court, or person is bound by my reading of them. The laws of Myanmar are not the laws of Belgium, and they should not be. Who adjudicates, what procedures apply, what counts as sufficient evidence, what remedy follows — those are decisions each society makes for itself, out of its own history and its own institutions. I am not proposing a jurisdiction. I am reporting a floor.

What this is not

I do not believe the UCE is the answer to humanity’s ills.

You cannot legislate goodness. There is no institution human beings cannot find a way to corrupt — I watched it happen from inside one, and much of the other writing on this site is an account of how. I am probably the least utopian person you will meet.

Nor can any framework resolve a dilemma in advance. The officer will still have to use judgment in the moment. The judge reviewing that officer will have to use judgment too. Anyone who tells you a document can carry that weight for them is selling something. This maps a floor. It does not replace judgment, and it was never intended to.

Why the sector work exists

The sector frameworks are not proposals for adoption. They are stress tests.

Each one takes the framework somewhere hard — a police department, an intelligence service, a hospital under triage, a legislature — and asks: how would this work here? Will this break it? Where it strained, I have tried to say so. Applying a thing until it fails is how you learn what it is made of, and I would rather find the failure myself than have someone else find it later.

Why I am publishing

Two reasons, and I will give both.

First: I want this tested. Working alone for four decades is an excellent way to become certain and a poor way to become correct. I do not want to feel right. I want to be right, and the only instrument that can tell the difference is someone who is not me. The verification protocols are published for exactly that reason. If you break something here, you have not damaged the work. You have done the part I could not do myself.

Second: at my age, I would like to set this down — decades of work, offered as one contribution to a conversation humanity has been having for five thousand years, with the seams showing.

Take what is load-bearing. Break what is not.