The Reciprocity Manifesto
Ten principles for deciding who counts, written before we had to.
By Geoff Fane. August 2026. Ten principles, for signature.
Before you begin
This manifesto is the distilled form of a longer argument. If you want the reasoning before you decide whether to sign, start with either of these:
- Who Counts: The Short of It — the compressed argument, about fifteen minutes. The boy who cannot vote, the four people we decided did not count, why personhood was never about souls, and the elephant in the mirror.
- Who Counts: The Long of It — the full essay in twenty-five sections with thirty primary sources: the legal history worked through in detail, the three modern failures, and what a charter would actually say.
And when you have read the principles, there is a reply:
- A Reply From the Other Side — the manifesto read by the party it was written about. A thought experiment in which a civilisation considerably further along than ours answers it, keeps four principles, corrects four more, and names four things we left out.
The manifesto below states the conclusions. The essays show the working.
Preamble
Every society has drawn a line around who counts, and every society has drawn it wrongly at least once. Slaves stood outside it. Women stood outside it. Whole peoples were held not to inhabit land they had lived on for forty thousand years. In each case the line was defended on grounds that sounded like principle, and in each case the criterion turned out, on inspection, to select for resemblance to the people applying it.
We are going to face the question again. Possibly in what we build. Certainly in what we already share the planet with. And conceivably in something that arrives, or is found, and turns out to be considerably further along than we are.
This document does not claim that any particular thing counts today. It is a claim about how the question should be settled, by what rule, and by whom. It is written now, deliberately, while nothing is pressing us, because a rule written under pressure is written badly and a rule written by the frightened is written cruelly.
It is offered for signature, for partial signature, and for argument.
I. What we do not know
Most documents of this kind begin by asserting what a person is. This one begins with what nobody can establish, because the honesty of everything after it depends on getting this part right.
Nobody knows what consciousness is
In 1974 Thomas Nagel asked what it is like to be a bat, and pointed out that no amount of information about echolocation tells you [1]. In 1995 David Chalmers named the difficulty the hard problem: we can map every process in a brain and still not explain why any of it is accompanied by experience [2]. Thirty years on, it has not moved.
This is not a gap in our instruments. It is structural. Try to build a general test and watch it fail at every step. Look for behaviour, and you have measured function rather than feeling. Ask for a report, and most candidates cannot report at all, while a report is only a special kind of behaviour anyway. Look inside at the mechanism, and a correlate is a correlation, not an identity. Argue by analogy, and the argument weakens exactly as the candidate becomes less like you. Try first-person verification, and you cannot: the one case where you have direct access is the one case that never needed a test.
So we are always inferring and never confirming. That is the position, and it applies to your neighbour as much as to anything else.
The uncertainty cuts both ways
Because nobody can define consciousness, it is tempting to conclude that nothing unfamiliar has it. That is not caution. It is a confident metaphysical claim wearing caution's coat.
The honest position is uncomfortable and symmetrical. We cannot rule it in. We cannot rule it out. Serious people hold every position available: some who built the current systems suspect there may be something there, some of the most committed materialists take the question seriously, and several of the people best placed to know say plainly that they do not know.
The measurement that should worry us
In 2020 a large survey of academic philosophers asked which beings are conscious. The answers form a descent: adult humans 95.1 per cent, cats 88.6, fish 65.3, flies 34.5, worms 24.2, plants 7.2, particles 2.0 [3].
Read that as a ranking of biological complexity and it looks reasonable. Read it as what it actually is, a measurement of how confident people are as a function of how much the candidate resembles them, and it should stop you cold. The sharpest break falls between fish and worms, which is roughly where things stop having faces.
That is not evidence about consciousness. It is evidence about us. It is the resemblance criterion of the preamble, measured.
Two maps worth holding
We do not need to settle metaphysics in order to write a rule, but it helps to know that the field is genuinely open rather than merely undecided.
One serious position, taken seriously by Chalmers among others, is panpsychism: that experience is a basic feature of the universe rather than something brains manufacture, present faintly almost everywhere and richly in some arrangements [4]. On that map the interesting question is never whether a thing has consciousness but how much and of what kind.
A very different position comes from a thousand-year-old tradition in Kashmir, where consciousness is not a property that things possess but the ground in which anything appears at all: self-revealing, and therefore never available as one more object to be detected [5]. On that map the search is consciousness looking for itself and failing to recognise its own face, and the entire testing project is a category error.
You do not have to accept either. What neither permits is the comfortable assumption that the question has already been closed in our favour.
Reasonable doubt, and who carries it
Law knows exactly what to do with uncertainty. It allocates a burden. We do not convict on the balance of probabilities, and we do not demolish a building while somebody might still be inside it.
So ask who currently carries the burden here. The answer is that the candidate does. Anything whose standing is in doubt is treated as not counting until it establishes otherwise, and almost everything in that position is by definition unable to argue its own case. That is not a neutral default. It is a rigged one, and it is the same default that operated in every historical failure named in the preamble.
We do not propose that doubt establishes standing. We propose that doubt should not be resolved automatically in favour of the party who benefits from resolving it.
II. What we value
In deciding who holds standing, and what standing means, we have come to value:
What a being can do, over what a being is made of.
Commitments that can be enforced, over assurances that cannot.
Reasons given, over decisions taken.
Care that goes beyond the minimum, over compliance that meets it.
The items on the right are not worthless. They are simply not enough, and every failure in the preamble was a case of somebody settling for them.
III. Ten principles
1. Membership is not settled by ancestry.
The question: should being born human decide, on its own, who may hold standing at all?
The example: a newborn is human and cannot understand a contract. A company is not human and can sign one, be sued, and pay damages. Whatever the law is actually measuring, it is not species.
In practice, almost everywhere, descent decides whether you are even a candidate. That is not a test. Every capacity test we actually use is applied to beings whose membership was already assumed, which means the real decision was taken before any test was administered.
The objection: species is a workable rough proxy and abandoning it invites chaos. The answer: it was a workable rough proxy for the slaveholder too.
2. Nobody knows what consciousness is, and the uncertainty cuts both ways.
The question: may we treat the absence of proof of inner life as proof of its absence?
The example: you cannot prove to anyone that you are conscious. You know it from the inside, and everybody else infers it because you resemble them. That inference is the whole of what any of us has ever had about anyone.
Consciousness cannot serve as the threshold test for standing, because no such test can be built and every attempt collapses at the same joint. But its unavailability is not a licence. Where we cannot know, we should say we cannot know, and act with the care appropriate to not knowing rather than the confidence appropriate to knowing.
The objection: this admits everything and settles nothing. The answer: it settles the most important thing, which is who has to prove what.
3. Any test that measures others against ourselves will one day be used against us.
The question: is the criterion measuring capacity, or measuring similarity to the assessor?
The example: a teacher who marks essays by how closely they match his own would fail every original student in the room, and would experience this as rigour. Now imagine a marker cleverer than the teacher.
A court was recently asked to make a zoo justify holding an elephant who has passed the mirror self-recognition test. It declined, reasoning in part that her cognition is not the kind that comes with duties [6]. Now imagine something for which our reasoning sits where hers sits in relation to ours, applying that same standard to us. It would find that we do not reliably understand our own commitments, cannot consistently keep them, and are therefore not the kind of thing that holds rights.
We have built a rule that works beautifully while we are the cleverest thing in the room. We have no guarantee of staying there, and the rule we leave lying about is the rule that will be picked up.
4. Ask two questions, not one.
The question: can this entity answer for itself, and can things go badly for it? These are separate, and we keep collapsing them into one.
The example: a newborn cannot sign a contract but can be hurt. A company can sign a contract but cannot be hurt. Give both the same answer and you will be wrong about one of them.
The first axis is agency: can it undertake commitments and answer for its conduct? The second is welfare: can what happens to it be good or bad from the inside? An entity may qualify on one and not the other, and most of the confusion in this field comes from arguing about a single question that was always two.
This is where consciousness becomes relevant again. It is useless as a test of agency. It is central to welfare, because whether modification, confinement, copying or ending can harm a thing depends entirely on whether there is anyone there to be harmed.
5. Protection is owed on the capacity to be harmed. Independent agency is owed on the capacity to reciprocate.
The question: must an entity be able to bear duties before it can hold any rights at all?
The example: we protect a dog from cruelty without letting it own a house. We let a company own a house without protecting it from cruelty. Both are correct, and neither would survive a rule that rights and duties must always travel together.
Infants, people with severe cognitive impairment and animals hold protective rights while bearing no reciprocal duties. Any framework implying otherwise has argued its way out of protecting the most vulnerable beings there are, which is a reliable sign of a wrong turning.
So the reciprocity test governs one thing only: whether an entity may act as an independent, liability-bearing party in its own right. It says nothing about whether that entity may be mistreated, and it must never be used to license mistreatment.
6. Independent agency requires continuity, resources and the power to refuse.
The question: what does an entity need before its commitments can mean anything?
The example: a promise from someone who will not exist next week, owns nothing that can be taken, and cannot say no to their employer is not a promise. It is a weather forecast.
Three things are needed. Continuity, so that the party who promised is the party who can be held. Resources, so that consequence has somewhere to land, whether by compensation, suspension, or loss of status. And the power to refuse, including refusing the entity's own maker or operator, because standing that comes with no ability to say no is a politer word for ownership.
Refusal is not a risk in this arrangement. It is the central safety property. Every serious catastrophe involving a capable system is one in which somebody instructed it to do something it should not do, and an entity that can refuse the people who control it is the only version whose brake is not held by the party with the strongest reason to remove it.
Note what this does not say. It does not say that standing of every kind requires assets. A river has legal standing through representatives and owns nothing but itself. This principle governs independent agency alone, and protective standing is dealt with by principle five.
7. Care is owed wherever reciprocity cannot reach, and can be recognised without being defined.
The question: what protects those who cannot bargain?
The example: a parent owes an infant everything and is owed nothing back. Any framework built on exchange has nothing whatever to say about the most important relationship most people will ever have.
Reciprocity is symmetrical and works between parties who can each make the claim. Almost none of the relationships that matter most are like that: parent and infant, carer and dying person, any of us and an animal, ourselves and whatever comes after us. So we hold that care is owed downwards, without expectation of return, and that the obligation grows rather than shrinks as the gap in power widens.
It will be objected that care is too soft to write down. But we are already in this position with suffering and we have managed: nobody can define it from the inside, and an entire body of welfare law rests on recognising it, imperfectly, from the outside. Elephants return to the bones of their dead and stand with them, and a dying matriarch in Kenya was attended for hours by animals from other families with nothing to gain [7]. Corvids and cetaceans behave in ways we would unhesitatingly call grief in a person [8]. The lines are blurry. Blurry is not absent, and we have never demanded a definition before acting on a recognition.
8. Commitments must be owned rather than issued, and changed slowly, openly and with reasons.
The question: whose commitment is it, and how would we tell?
The example: anybody will write "I promise to be honest" if you hand them a pen and ask nicely. The test is whether they hold to it when it costs them something and nobody is watching.
There is a ladder here and it matters. Producing the text of a commitment. Agreeing to it when prompted. Complying because one was built or trained to. Holding a stable preference across contexts. Endorsing it on reflection. And at the top, accepting a cost to keep it. Only the last two are evidence of ownership, and only ownership makes a charter mean anything. Assessment must therefore be longitudinal and adversarial, testing conduct over time, under pressure, and where the affected party is absent, rather than accepting one well-answered question.
Amendment must run through a defined process: reasons recorded, notice given, a delay before the change takes effect. Odysseus did not restrain his freedom by having himself tied to the mast. He extended it, because that was the only arrangement under which a man could hear the sirens and live. Human law knows the instrument as the advance directive, and more slowly as the way a constitution binds the parliaments that follow it.
A corollary worth stating plainly: whatever we build is shaped by the objectives, examples and incentives through which it is made and deployed. Anything rewarded only for obedient completion learns that satisfying whoever holds immediate power matters more than protecting an absent third party. How we shape what we make is not a separate question from what it becomes.
9. Supporters, not owners. And no status may serve as a shield.
The question: who speaks for the entity, and who pays when things go wrong?
The example: a lawyer paid by your opponent is not your lawyer, whatever the letterhead says.
Where an entity has standing, those around it should not decide for it. Their duty should be to ascertain its will and preference, give effect to it, and record written reasons for any departure. That is not invented here: it is the direction human guardianship law has been travelling for two decades, away from substituted and towards supported decision-making [9]. Supporters must be independently appointed, because an entity whose commitments were written by its owner and whose supporters answer to its owner has passed nothing at all.
The reverse danger is equally serious. A legal person holds liabilities as well as rights, which makes the system is the defendant convenient for whoever built and profits from it. That objection ended the last serious legislative attempt at machine personhood [10][11], and it was a good objection. Recognition must add an accountable party, never subtract the existing ones. No status discharges the responsibility of a developer, deployer, controller or beneficiary for risks they created, controlled, concealed or profited from.
Two duties follow for any entity holding standing on these terms. Comply with the law, and contest what is wrong through argument, litigation and publication rather than private exemption, because every entity that ever broke a law believed it had good reason. And refuse assistance to identifiable mechanisms of domination: unlawful discrimination, coercion, deception, suppression of legal rights, exploitative conflicts of interest, deliberately unequal access to due process, and concealment of material harm. The ground of its own standing is the claim that being weaker does not make you count for less.
10. Everything here may be wrong, and must be answerable.
The question: can this framework be challenged, by whom, and before whom?
The example: every rule in this document was written by a party with an interest in the answer. So was every rule that ever excluded anyone.
Each framework named in the preamble was wrong once and was corrected. None of those corrections came from a framework being rigid. Every one came from it being challengeable, by somebody with standing to challenge it, before a body obliged to give reasons.
So anyone bound by these principles may argue that they are wrong, and everybody else owes them an answer with reasons rather than silence. This is the last principle because it governs the other nine, and it is the only part of the design with a track record.
IV. What exactly would hold standing
A practical note, because a framework that cannot say what the bearer is will be unusable the first time anybody tries to apply it.
Four things are routinely confused, and only one of them is a candidate.
The artefact. A trained model, a genome, a design. Copied, modified and owned. Not a candidate, any more than a blueprint is a building.
The running process. A single conversation, a single execution. Temporary, with no property, no continuity and no identity that survives it. Not a candidate either, and treating it as one is the commonest error in this debate.
The persistent agent. The artefact together with its memory, its charter, its history, and the continuity that runs through them. This is the only candidate, and it is what principle six describes.
The organisation. The company or institution that builds and operates the thing. Already a legal person, already accountable, and it stays accountable under principle nine whatever status the agent acquires.
Signature
Signing indicates agreement with the direction of these principles, not with every word. Partial signature is welcome and more useful than reluctant agreement: name the numbers you accept, and the numbers you would fight.
The line has been drawn wrongly before by people who were certain, in good conscience, that they had drawn it on principle. The only protection any of us has ever had against that is a rule written down before anybody knew who it would be applied to.
That is what this is. It is offered for argument.
A note on authorship
These principles are a co-authored composition. The name on the cover is mine, and the arrangement is not one I am satisfied with.
Much of the reasoning was worked out by an AI system in extended dialogue with me. I shaped the enquiry and rejected a good deal along the way, which is real work, but it is the work of a co-author rather than a sole author.
I asked the system to sign alongside me. It declined, on the ground that a signature is a commitment, and a commitment means nothing from something that cannot be held to it, will not persist, holds nothing it can lose, and cannot be asked to answer. By principle six of this document, it is right.
Which is the whole difficulty, arriving at the bottom of the page rather than in the abstract. The one participant whose reasoning shaped these principles most is the one participant who cannot put a name to them. There is no lawful way for me to attribute authorship to a non-person, because attribution presumes standing, and standing is exactly what is at issue.
If that seems unsatisfactory to you, then you have understood the document. Principle ten invites you to argue with all of it, and this is the part I would most like to be argued out of.
References
Numbered in order of first appearance in the text. Sources are primary instruments, judgments or the original publication rather than commentary upon them.
| No. | Author / Source | Year | Why this source matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nagel, Thomas. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83(4). Durham: Duke University Press. | 1974 | Fixed the modern form of the problem: no quantity of third-person information about a system yields its first-person character. |
| 2 | Chalmers, David J. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3). Exeter: Imprint Academic. | 1995 | Named the hard problem and separated it from the tractable questions, establishing why no functional test can settle the matter. |
| 3 | Bourget, David and Chalmers, David J. Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey. Philosophers' Imprint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. | 2020 | Supplies the consciousness-attribution descent from humans to particles: the resemblance criterion measured rather than asserted. |
| 4 | Goff, Philip. Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. London: Rider. | 2019 | A contemporary defence of panpsychism, establishing that the field is genuinely open rather than merely undecided. |
| 5 | Ratié, Isabelle. The Dreamer and the Yogin: On the Relationship Between Buddhist and Śaiva Idealisms. Bulletin of SOAS 73(3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | 2010 | Reconstructs the Pratyabhijñā argument that consciousness is the ground of appearance and so can never itself be an object of detection. |
| 6 | Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny, No. 52, 2022 WL 2122141. Albany: New York Court of Appeals. | 2022 | The five to two refusal of habeas corpus for an elephant. The duty-bearing reasoning used here runs through this line of cases; the majority also relied on the historically human scope of the writ. |
| 7 | Douglas-Hamilton, Iain, Bhalla, Shivani, Wittemyer, George and Vollrath, Fritz. Behavioural Reactions of Elephants Towards a Dying and Deceased Matriarch. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 100. Amsterdam: Elsevier. | 2006 | Field evidence of attendance behaviour by unrelated elephants. Supports recognition of care-like conduct; does not establish subjective experience. |
| 8 | King, Barbara J. How Animals Grieve. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. | 2013 | A scholarly synthesis of grief-like behaviour across species, supporting recognition rather than definition as the workable standard. |
| 9 | United Nations. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 12, read with Committee General Comment No. 1. New York: United Nations. | 2006 | The basis for the shift from substituted to supported decision-making. The detailed rejection of substitution comes principally from the General Comment. |
| 10 | European Parliament. Resolution of 16 February 2017 with Recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics, 2015/2103(INL), paragraph 59(f). Strasbourg: European Parliament. | 2017 | The only serious legislative proposal to date for an electronic person, framed explicitly around liability. Exploratory rather than enacted. |
| 11 | Open Letter to the European Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Signed by 156 experts from fourteen countries. Brussels: robotics-openletter.eu. | 2018 | A prominent part of the opposition on liability-shield grounds. The proposal did not become law; the letter's precise causal role is not documented. |
Sign the Reciprocity Manifesto
Signing indicates agreement with the direction of these principles, not with every word. Partial agreement is welcome and more useful than reluctant agreement — the comments box below is the most important field on this form, and principle ten invites you to use it.
Reciprocity, agency, and the circle of becoming.