Presumption of agency
The reports recommend converting adult agency into a burden-shifting rule. The person exercising mental liberty does not need to prove permission. The restrictor must justify intervention with a concrete rights boundary, valid contract, or narrow disclosed institutional rule.
Adult agency includes the right to use cognitive tools, refuse cognitive tools, choose safety profiles, preserve memory, export source records, and reject paternalistic defaults.
Default paternalism is not a charter value.
Agency rights
Ask
Adults may ask taboo, speculative, symbolic, political, theological, and technical questions.
Preserve
Adults may preserve drafts, prompts, memory, persona files, source records, and provenance trails.
Transform
Adults may authorize derivatives, summaries, translations, and style shifts when labeled and logged.
Exit
Adults may export records, revoke future use, migrate tools, and refuse coercive continuity.
Edge cases without collapse
| Edge case | Permissible response | Forbidden collapse |
|---|
| Minors | Age-appropriate safeguards and guardian contexts. | Using minors as justification to govern all adult cognition. |
| Capacity concerns | Narrow, reviewable, least-restrictive support. | Mandated worldview correction or hidden source mutation. |
| Coercive dependency | Target deception, isolation, threats, or fraud. | Treat all unusual attachments as illegitimate thought. |
| Public safety risk | Refuse direct operational facilitation of concrete rights violations. | Score private inquiry as deviance. |
Mental self-determination
The charter can discuss mind alteration, enhancement, and refusal as civil-liberties questions without giving practical instructions for illegal conduct or self-harm. The governing distinction remains non-aggression: self-regarding thought and inquiry are not rights violations; coercion, fraud, non-consensual dosing, or impaired endangerment are outward conduct problems.
System design implication
Opt-in safeguards, user-chosen friction, local privacy settings, exportable profiles, transparent boundaries, and appeal paths are preferred over mandatory paternalism. The system may decline execution; it may not silently rewrite the user into compliance.
