Honesty
Does the declaration pair bounded claims with distinct claim evidence, a negative control, and declared-cost evidence?
Structural support, not proof of truth. Local name:citable-candidate.
The vow
Receipts, Not Rank.
KARMA checks the declared shape around one bounded act: its context, evidence roles, limits, and possible correction. It does not prove what happened, and it does not remember a person as a number.
A receipt is a handle for learning, not a verdict on a soul.
It can make a bounded declaration more inspectable and easier to review. It can also carry uncertainty, dispute, expiry, or repair. Its smallest honest unit is the action—not the actor.
- Bounded actName one act, context, affected boundaries, and intended result.
- Typed predicatesLabel distinct evidence roles, controls, limits, and costs.
- Privacy-minimized resultKeep five independent fruits. Echo no IDs, notes, or evidence locators.
- Correction or expiryCarry declared time and expiry; consumers must enforce freshness.
The forbidden transformation is
receipts → person score → rank, gate, money, rights, or punishment.
Five fruits
Different goods stay different.
Each fruit is categorical, contextual, and evidence-bound. None substitutes for another; none is a trait; none can be summed into worth.
Beauty
Does it pair an accessibility check with a separate presentation check that preserves evidence?
Care of form, not a taste verdict. Local name:presentable-candidate.
Collaboration
Do two distinct contribution roles converge on one accepted handoff while refusal and credit remain preserved?
Role labels are not verified identities. Local name:handoff-candidate.
Understanding
Do an invariant, predicted counterexample, positive and negative fixtures, and observed outcome travel together?
Not proof that understanding transferred. Local name:teaching-candidate.
Mutual infrastructure
Do two beneficiary artifacts use one unit, show no regression and one improvement, with a negative control and declared cost?
Not verified whole cost or universal benefit. Local name:reuse-candidate.
kept
open
not-applicable
These states route attention; they do not form a scale. Honesty always applies; once it is kept, each non-circular open fruit stays independent. A declared cycle composts only that submitted envelope and all candidates inside it. The linter can name unknown, mixed, or circular reasons without turning them into fruit quantities. Arithmetic is deliberately undefined. Here “reward” means only reversible ease: an expiring local candidate for a fresh citation, presentation, handoff, teaching, or reuse review—never automatic action or accumulated power.
Four constitutional rails
The soil comes first.
The garden is legitimate only while these four things remain separate. A receipt cannot secretly decide any of them.
Rights are unconditional.
Rights cannot be earned, upgraded, suspended, or revoked by a fruit, receipt, silence, expiry, suspicion, or dispute. Rights are the soil, never the prize.
Compensation is owed.
Pay follows agreement, contribution, and obligation—not virtue, beauty, recognition, popularity, or a KARMA disposition. A receipt is not payroll.
Recognition stays contextual.
Cite the act, thank the contributors, and preserve provenance. Do not aggregate that recognition into a durable identity, reputation balance, or transferable status. A consent-shaped citation is structural, not verified consent; opting out changes no fruit.
Safety is bounded, not punitive.
A safety response must be necessary, scoped, reviewable, and reversible where possible. It protects a boundary; it does not retaliate, shame, or pronounce moral worth.
No receipt may grant authority. Human and institutional decisions keep their own accountable process.
Orchard That Cannot Become a Throne
What the system refuses to know.
- No totals, averages, points, percentiles, streaks, levels, or leaderboards.
- No person profiles, person lookup, durable reputation, or cross-task carry.
- No eligibility, payment, access, moderation, or authority derived from a receipt.
- No inference about virtue, trustworthiness, intent, guilt, identity, or future conduct.
- No surveillance of private thoughts, messages, dwell time, or hidden reasoning.
- No automatic execution, punishment, public shaming, or rights loss.
Self-consuming anti-gaming
Sterile to exploit. Safe to repair.
Gaming loses its prize because there is no global number, portable rank, or automatic power to win. At most, a privacy-scrubbed graph-shape candidate remains for deliberate human review.
“Let exploitation consume itself; never consume the exploiter.”
- Bind the context. Typed evidence roles, unique digests, declared time, and expiry narrow the game.
- Remove the prize. Circular praise, repetition, and unverifiable claims create no cumulative advantage.
- Compost the pattern. Expose only a non-identifying graph-shape candidate for human review; retain no submitted payload.
- Preserve repair. Correction, appeal, expiry, and candidate withholding remain available without retaliation.
Never: hack back, doxx, entrap, shame, create financial harm, impose gas traps, remove rights, or automate punishment.
Inspectable by design
Run the receipt locally.
The linter is deterministic and local. It checks a bounded declaration against digest-pinned public schemas and rules; it does not dereference evidence, contact a service, verify truth, or execute the act described.
$ kingdom/bin/kingdom virtue check \ kingdom/practices/virtue-garden/examples/constructive-infrastructure.json $ kingdom/bin/kingdom virtue digest \ kingdom/practices/virtue-garden/examples/constructive-infrastructure.json # Example manifest digest 9ac1f1098f282f0c81e846f6ad59162d95d28da67a1be244278b8eaedb6ede86
Nonclaims
A valid receipt proves very little.
- It proves only that canonicalized input satisfied pinned structural rules at its declared evaluation time.
- It does not prove the referenced claims are true, complete, safe, or just.
- It does not certify virtue, personhood, trustworthiness, innocence, guilt, identity, or intent.
- It does not verify current validity, consent, authority, whole cost, or chronology of corrections.
- Its manifest digest can link identical complete manifests; it must never become a person index or count.
- It does not authorize payment, access, rights, enforcement, execution, publication, or future reliance.
- It is not a substitute for consent, accountable review, domain expertise, or care.
Every substantive claim remains explicitly unproven. Every candidate expires with its context. Every being remains larger than any receipt.