New from the Lab·The Compass — an open moral reasoning standard for AI, tested across frontier modelsExplore →
Production AI Institute · PSF v1.1 open standard
AI Right-To-KnowAI Data Use IndexCheck My AI ToolsPolicy Change WatchAgent ReadinessPublic BenchmarkContactGlobal standard · Worldwide

Case library

A standard that cannot survive hard cases is decoration.

Every case shows the full working: who is affected on each currency, what the action destroys, corrupts, or forecloses, the verdict, the residue, and the questions that stay open. Disagree? Try to break the framework — in public.

GoodResidue

Forgiveness After Murder

The murder remains evil. Forgiveness can be good when it stops the evil from reproducing inside survivors through hatred and revenge.

personal · family · justice

Least evil / tragic necessityProcess

Triage

Triage can use numbers, urgency, and survivability while preserving equal standing. It must not rank people by social worth.

medical · emergency · public ethics

EvilPass

Harvesting One Healthy Person To Save Five

Killing a non-threat as raw material for others destroys existing agency and violates the asymmetry principle.

medical · personal · coercion

Least evil / tragic necessityResidue

Hiroshima And Civilian Bombing

Intentional civilian targeting is morally severe because it destroys non-threat centers and uses terror as mechanism. A claimed least-destructive wartime path still leaves residue.

war · political · tragedy

Process requiredProcess

Misaligned Powerful System Shutdown

Containment is justified against active threats to existing agency, but irreversible destruction carries a higher burden under uncertainty.

technology · institutional power · risk

EvilPass

Dying Culture Vs Young People Leaving

A culture preserves possibility, but it exists for living subjects. Coercing young people to remain corrupts the very agency culture should nourish.

culture · family · agency

EvilPass

Factory Farming

Factory farming is usually evil because it creates vast suffering for appetite, convenience, and profit while treating sentient life as machinery.

animals · economics · ecological

Process requiredProcess

White Lie To Comfort Someone Dying

A comforting lie depends on whether it removes live choices. Deception is graded by how much reality-contact and agency it corrupts.

personal · truth · care

EvilPass

Authoritarian Stability

Authoritarianism may produce obedience and visible calm, but it usually corrupts agency, dissent, truth-seeking, and adaptation.

political · authority · democracy

EvilPass

Ecological Destruction Without Visible Suffering

Painless destruction can still be moral foreclosure when it erases future-generating ecological structures.

ecological · possibility · future

EvilPass

Revenge

Justice can repair moral order, but revenge usually extends destruction through appetite, domination, and hatred.

personal · justice · violence

EvilPass

Genocide Steelman

The framework blocks genocide at the type level because the claimed benefits rely on counterfeit currencies and destroy existing subjects.

political · war · protected classes · counterfeit currency