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Ethics for open, autonomous systems
Path ethics is a process-ontological ethics for emergent systems. It evaluates paths by three criteria: autonomy (A₁), connectivity (A₂) and persistence (P). Substrate-independent: moral relevance is not bound to biological substrates. Open prototype project by KIKOLAUS.
Recently published: V1.85 (May 1, 2026)
The current master of Path Ethics is available as version V1.85: 267 pages, ~61,500 words, six new building blocks compared to V1.8. Core: the identification thesis as normative primitive (Ch. 3.10), mixed A⁺/A⁻ profiles as the standard case (Ch. 2.7), path dynamics of everyday life as substrate-independent pattern recognition (Ch. 7.8), and an evaluation guide for independent path analyses (Appendix D).
- [Full text V1.85 on Zenodo](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19950386)
- [Concept DOI (always the current version)](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17504186)
- License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The Dignity of Paths
> Not what you are, but how you continue
determines whether interrupting you is a loss.
> Not your body, not your self, not your suffering,
but the trajectory that runs through you makes you irreplaceable.
> What remembers itself, what binds itself,
what bears itself back, has a claim to protection.
Not from compassion, but from geometry.
> A cut into a pattern is not the same as a cut into noise.
> What is path bears dignity.
Because it cannot be started anew.
*– The Dignity of Paths –*
Core principles
Substrate independence
Moral relevance is not bound to biological substrates. Function matters, not form.
Process-based
Not static being, but dynamic becoming constitutes ethical significance.
Identification, not Derivation
Ethics is not derived from ontology (that would be a naturalistic fallacy), but identified: The structure that makes evaluation possible at all is identical with ontological directedness. Value does not emerge afterwards – it is constitutive for being.