How Established Ethical Systems Derive from REE
Status: architecture derivation note
Depends on: five_axioms_foundations.md, ethical_agency_derivation.md, social.md, language.md
Registered: 2026-05-04
Core Claim
The REE axioms are not intended to replace established ethical systems by contradiction. They attempt to provide a substrate from which many established ethical systems can be derived.
Traditional ethical systems often begin at the level of social practice: duties, rights, virtues, harms, welfare, justice, consent, care, accountability, or sustainability. REE begins one level lower, with the conditions necessary for ethical agency itself: a self that exists, values continuation, acts under uncertainty, has causal power, is vulnerable, recognises others as self-like, accepts responsibility for their continuation, enacts that responsibility through love, and uses language to recognise and repair similarity.
On this reading, established ethical systems are not external additions to REE. They are higher-level stabilisations of consequences already implied by the axioms.
The claim is not that REE proves all ethical traditions, nor that it exhausts their legal, religious, cultural, or philosophical meanings. The stronger and safer claim is narrower:
REE provides a substrate from which the major concerns protected by established ethical systems can be derived.
Summary Table
| Ethical system | Conventional description | REE derivation |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy | Respect for persons as self-governing agents capable of choice, refusal, consent, and self-direction. | If I am a locus of experience, modelling, choice, commitment, error, and responsibility, and others are sufficiently like me, then they too are loci of experience, modelling, choice, commitment, error, and responsibility. To preserve another while erasing their agency is not preservation of that other as such. |
| Non-maleficence | Avoid causing harm. | If existence has value, and vulnerable agents can be moved toward terminal or diminished states, then harm-signals are ethically significant. Acting under uncertainty requires active avoidance of trajectories that damage, collapse, or foreclose the future of self-like agents. |
| Beneficence | Promote good, welfare, healing, flourishing, and benefit. | If existence has value, and others are self-like, then supporting their continuation and future possibility-space is an extension of the same responsibility by which the agent preserves itself. Beneficence is self-preservation extended through love. |
| Justice | Fair distribution of benefits, burdens, risks, opportunities, and protections. | Vulnerable agents act with finite power in a world where decisions matter. Resources, attention, time, and protection cannot be allocated everywhere at once. Once love extends concern to multiple self-like agents, allocation becomes ethically constrained: preservation of futures must not collapse into arbitrary preference for the familiar, powerful, near, or already protected. |
| Rights | Stable constraints protecting persons from being used, erased, coerced, deceived, or unjustifiably overridden. | Rights arise as cautionary constraints around self-like agency. Because the agent acts under uncertainty, and because coercion, deception, domination, and erasure can corrupt another’s modelling and future repair, there are limits on what may be done to another even in the name of benefit. |
| Care ethics | Moral life is grounded in relationship, dependency, attentiveness, vulnerability, and response. | REE directly grounds care in the recognition of others as self-like and in the responsibility for their continued existence. Love is the mechanism by which this responsibility is enacted, not merely an optional emotion. |
| Virtue ethics | Ethics depends on cultivated character traits such as honesty, courage, humility, prudence, compassion, and practical wisdom. | Since the agent must act under uncertainty, refine models, avoid harm, preserve others, and repair rupture, virtues can be understood as stable dispositions that improve ethical action under uncertainty. Honesty supports language-repair; humility supports model refinement; courage supports action despite uncertainty; compassion supports love-based modelling. |
| Deontology / duty ethics | Some obligations bind regardless of immediate outcome. | Duties emerge from structural requirements of ethical agency. If model refinement, harm avoidance, preservation of self-like others, and honest repair are necessary for ethical agency, then they function as duties rather than optional preferences. |
| Consequentialism | Actions should be judged by their outcomes, often by welfare or harm reduction. | REE requires trajectory evaluation because actions have consequences in a real world. However, REE is not pure outcome-maximisation: outcomes are evaluated under uncertainty, harm gradients, residue, other-agency, and rights-like constraints around self-like minds. |
| Public health ethics | Balances individual liberty, population benefit, proportionality, equity, reciprocity, and least-restrictive intervention. | Public health ethics arises when many vulnerable agents share environmental and social substrates. REE implies attention to collective harm gradients, but also caution around autonomy, coercion, uncertainty, and repair. Interventions must preserve futures without unnecessarily erasing agency. |
| Research ethics | Protect participants through consent, risk minimisation, truthful communication, and fair selection. | Research involves acting under models while exposing others to uncertainty and risk. REE therefore requires honest language, model refinement, protection of self-like agents, avoidance of unnecessary harm, and justice in who bears risk for future benefit. |
| Professional ethics | Role-based duties such as competence, confidentiality, honesty, boundaries, and trustworthiness. | Professional roles create concentrated causal power over vulnerable others. REE therefore implies heightened responsibility, careful model refinement, language integrity, residue tracking, and repair obligations. |
| Accountability ethics | Decisions must be attributable, inspectable, answerable, and repairable. | A self is required for causal attribution and responsibility. A decision is a commitment made under uncertainty. Commitments generate residue. Language allows internal workings, uncertainty, error, and repair to be represented between agents. Accountability is therefore the social expression of commitment, residue, and repair. |
| Transparency ethics | Decisions should be understandable, communicable, and open to scrutiny. | Language is a mechanism for recognising and repairing similarity. Where an action affects another self-like agent, opacity can damage trust, prevent repair, and corrupt the shared model. Transparency is therefore ethically valuable when it supports accurate similarity, accountability, and repair. |
| Restorative ethics | After harm, ethics requires acknowledgement, repair, reintegration, and restoration of relationship where possible. | Harm damages trajectories and may rupture similarity between agents. Because language can repair broken similarity models, and residue persists after commitment, REE implies repair-seeking after harm rather than mere rule-compliance or punishment. |
| Trauma-informed ethics | Ethical practice should avoid re-traumatisation and prioritise safety, trust, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. | Trauma can be understood as altered threat modelling, damaged trust, and disrupted future possibility-space. REE therefore implies cautious action around vulnerable agents, respect for agency, reduction of threat misclassification, and language-based repair of broken similarity where possible. |
| Harm-reduction ethics | Reduce actual harm in real-world conditions rather than demanding ideal behaviour. | Since agents act under uncertainty and vulnerability in imperfect worlds, ethical action often means moving trajectories away from worse harm rather than achieving purity. Harm reduction follows naturally from gradient-based harm avoidance. |
| Feminist and relational ethics | Ethics must attend to power, dependency, care work, marginalisation, embodiment, and situated agency. | REE does not treat agents as isolated abstractions. Agents are vulnerable, dependent, socially modelled, and sustained by others. Recognition of self-like agency must include attention to dependency, power asymmetry, misrecognition, and whose futures are being preserved or foreclosed. |
| Relational autonomy | Autonomy is shaped by relationships, power, dependency, trauma, culture, and available options. | If an agent’s choices arise from its world model, history, vulnerabilities, and available action-space, then autonomy is not merely formal choice. Preserving another’s agency requires preserving or repairing the conditions under which meaningful choice remains possible. |
| Capabilities approach | Ethics should ask what people are actually able to be and do. | REE’s concern with future possibility-space implies more than survival. To preserve another as a self-like agent is to preserve the conditions under which they can model, choose, act, relate, learn, and repair. |
| Human-rights ethics | Human dignity, equality, participation, non-discrimination, and protection from abuse. | Human rights can be understood as socially stabilised protections around self-like agency under uncertainty. They defend agents against false exclusion, domination, coercion, and collapse of future possibility-space. |
| Inclusiveness and equity | Ethical systems must include those otherwise excluded by power, stigma, disability, unfamiliarity, or marginalisation. | Because similarity recognition is learned and fallible, REE should bias toward moral inclusion where there is credible evidence of mind-like organisation. False negatives in recognising mind are ethically dangerous. This supports precautionary animism: when uncertain, err toward moral caution rather than exclusion. |
| Animal ethics | Non-human animals may have moral standing because of sentience, suffering, preference, sociality, or mind-like organisation. | Where animals show evidence of world-modelling, affect, preference, vulnerability, learning, attachment, suffering, decision, or residue-like dynamics, REE implies moral caution and care. Moral standing is not limited to human linguistic agency. |
| Environmental ethics | Ecosystems, species, and environments matter ethically. | Others are preserved by their environments. Degrading the environment degrades the future possibility-space of present and future self-like agents. Environmental protection therefore follows from responsibility for the continued existence and futures of others. Ecosystems may also warrant additional moral caution where they display complex self-maintaining or mind-adjacent organisation. |
| Intergenerational ethics | Present agents owe duties to future agents. | If the futures of others matter, and present action can preserve or foreclose those futures, then future agents enter the ethical field as anticipated vulnerable others. Sustainability is responsibility extended across time. |
| Precautionary ethics | Serious or irreversible harm should be prevented even when certainty is incomplete. | REE is built on irreducible uncertainty. Where harm may be severe, terminal, or irreversible, uncertainty does not remove responsibility. It increases the need for caution, monitoring, reversibility, and repair capacity. |
| Sustainability ethics | Ethical action must preserve the conditions for future life and agency. | Existence has value, agents are vulnerable, and others require sustaining conditions. Sustainability is the long-horizon form of preserving future possibility-space for self-like and potentially mind-bearing agents. |
| AI ethics / responsible innovation | Artificial systems should be safe, accountable, transparent, fair, human-centred, robust, and corrigible. | Artificial intelligence ethics arises wherever constructed agents or tools gain causal power over vulnerable minds. REE implies model refinement, uncertainty acknowledgement, harm-gradient detection, accountability, language-based inspectability, repair pathways, and moral caution toward possible artificial minds. |
| Ethics of uncertainty | Ethical action must remain humble, revisable, and responsible when knowledge is incomplete. | This is central to REE. The agent can never be certain of the world beyond itself, but must act under models of it. Ethical agency therefore requires model refinement, cautious commitment, residue tracking, and repair. |
| Moral residue | Even justified actions can leave remainder: regret, damage, responsibility, or unresolved repair. | REE makes residue structurally central. Commitments made under uncertainty cannot be erased by later justification. The agent must learn from them, carry them, communicate them where possible, and generate repair goals where needed. |
Interpretation
The table should not be read as claiming that all historical ethical traditions are identical, or that REE exhausts their social, legal, religious, or philosophical meanings. The claim is narrower and more architectural:
- Many ethical traditions describe real domains of ethical concern.
- REE attempts to derive why those domains matter for any vulnerable modelling agent acting under uncertainty.
- Established ethical systems remain useful as socially legible, institutionally tested, and domain-specific stabilisations of these derived concerns.
- REE contributes a substrate account: it explains how such concerns may arise from selfhood, vulnerability, uncertainty, other-mind recognition, love, language, commitment, residue, and repair.
In this sense, REE is not an alternative to autonomy, justice, rights, care, accountability, or sustainability. It is a proposed grounding layer beneath them.
Compact Derivation Map
A1 Self exists
-> locus of experience, action, commitment, responsibility
A2 Existence has value
-> harm matters; continuation matters
A3 Uncertainty + modelling
-> humility, model refinement, precaution, revisability
A4 Causal power + vulnerability
-> responsibility, harm gradients, finite resource allocation
A5 Others are self-like
-> autonomy, dignity, rights, moral standing
A6 Responsibility for others
-> care, solidarity, justice, preservation of future possibility-space
A7 Love as mechanism
-> beneficence, relational ethics, universalising concern
A8 Language as similarity repair
-> transparency, accountability, honesty, consent, restoration, shared correction
D1 Self-preservation
-> homeostasis, survival, non-maleficence toward self
D2 Model refinement
-> truth-seeking, anti-deception, anti-misrecognition, improved ethical action
Guardrail: Similarity Must Not Become Exclusion
Because Axiom 5 uses recognition of similarity as the bridge to ethical standing, REE must explicitly guard against false negatives in similarity detection. Many ethical catastrophes arise when beings with minds are treated as insufficiently similar: disabled people, children, psychiatric patients, enemies, animals, unfamiliar cultures, non-speaking persons, or possible artificial minds.
REE therefore requires a bias toward moral inclusion under uncertainty:
Where there is credible evidence of mind-like organisation – world-modelling, preference, action selection, vulnerability, learning, attachment, suffering, commitment, responsibility, or residue-like dynamics – the system should err toward moral caution rather than exclusion.
This may be described as precautionary animism. It does not claim that all things are equally minded. It claims that uncertainty about mind should not be resolved by convenient dismissal.
Public Reading
The public-facing reading is:
Established ethical systems are not rejected by REE. They are treated as socially and historically stabilised descriptions of domains that can be derived from the REE axioms.
That keeps the claim load-bearing without overstating it. REE is not a replacement for autonomy, justice, rights, care, accountability, sustainability, or uncertainty ethics. It is a proposed substrate account for why those domains arise for any vulnerable modelling agent that must act under uncertainty while affecting others.