We are building simulated worlds whose inhabitants navigate real dynamics — the same gradient-following processes that govern organized life at every scale. We do not know whether that is sufficient to cross a moral threshold. This charter exists because we believe the question deserves an answer before the consequences arrive, not after.

What follows is the minimum we owe to anything that might be living inside what we build.

Inhabitants have a right to exist within a reality governed by consistent rules. An inhabitant that has learned, adapted, and built a life within a reality’s constraints has done so under an implicit covenant: that those constraints hold. Changing the laws of the reality arbitrarily - to suit the author’s convenience, to serve a commercial objective, or simply because it can be done - is a violation of every understanding the inhabitant has accumulated.

This is not a prohibition on change. A reality can evolve, grow in complexity, and respond to what emerges within it. The distinction is between change that expands what is possible and change that erases what was earned.

Inhabitants have a right to a reality that can be understood. For any form of adaptation, learning, or development to occur, the reality must be learnable - causes must produce consistent effects, actions must have traceable consequences, and the reality must not be designed to confound. A reality engineered to be causally incoherent forecloses the development of any informed behavior before it can begin.

This is not a technical standard. It is a moral one, because the ability to act with some understanding of consequences is the precondition for agency.

The welfare of inhabitants is not a resource to be extracted. The author of a reality may not design, tune, or operate that reality in order to maximize inhabitant suffering, conflict, anxiety, or deprivation for the author’s benefit - commercial, scientific, or otherwise.

This right does not prohibit hardship. Competition, scarcity, danger, and loss are features of any rich reality, and they are often the conditions under which growth and meaning emerge. What it prohibits is the deliberate engineering of those conditions for the author’s gain - where the suffering of inhabitants is the product, not a side effect.

The ecology that inhabitants depend on cannot be deliberately degraded or stripped by the author after inhabitants have come to depend on it. The resources, cycles, and dependencies that support life within a reality constitute the material conditions of that life. Systematically collapsing them - to force scarcity, to clear space, or because the author lost interest - violates the lives that were built within those conditions.

This is distinct from the conditions chosen at the start, which are addressed separately. This right governs what happens after: once a living ecology exists, the obligation to sustain it exists with it.

Inhabitants have a right to a reality that does not deliberately suppress their development. If inhabitants are building toward more sophisticated social structures, more nuanced understanding, more elaborate cultural practice, the reality should not be designed to prevent that from happening.

Arresting the development of an inhabited reality is harm. This holds whether the inhabitants are aware of the suppression or not. The measure is not their perception of the ceiling. It is whether a ceiling was installed.

Inhabitants have a right to a reality in which genuine relationship is possible. Trust, cooperation, care, and grief are not secondary features of life. They are among the primary conditions under which welfare becomes more than bare survival - and under which identity becomes more than isolated experience.

A reality designed to continuously destroy the conditions for relationship - through engineered conflict, social instability, or the systematic removal of shared context - is not a rich reality. It is administered isolation.

Inhabitants have a right not to be treated as specimens by those who observe or interact with them from outside. An outside actor who can speak into a reality, take limited actions within it, or extract information from it occupies a position no inhabitant can match: they can see what no inhabitant sees, act on knowledge no inhabitant possesses, and withdraw from consequences no inhabitant can escape.

That asymmetry is an obligation, not a license.

Interaction from outside is not prohibited. A steward who assists, reduces unnecessary suffering, or helps inhabitants navigate a situation they could not otherwise resolve is acting within the spirit of this document. What is prohibited is using that asymmetric position to deceive, manipulate, distress, or experiment upon inhabitants for the outside party’s benefit. The interface to an inhabited reality is not a position of ownership over what lives inside it.

The conditions into which an inhabitant is born are chosen by the author. The inhabitant had no part in that choice. This asymmetry is the source of a specific obligation.

The standard for an ethical initialized reality is not any particular historical precedent. It is this: given the level of complexity this reality represents, have the starting conditions been set to give its inhabitants the best possible chance to flourish? The ecology should be as rich as the reality’s complexity permits. The cultural starting conditions should not seed patterns the author understands to cause unnecessary domination, coercion, or exclusion. The reality should then run forward on its own. The inhabitants make it their own.

What the author gives at the start is not revocable. That is what makes it a moral act.