The OpenValues Manifesto
A good life cannot be dictated. But it can be reasoned together.
Section titled “A good life cannot be dictated. But it can be reasoned together.”Every human lives by values. The only question is whether they know them — and whether they stand up to scrutiny.
The old answers came as commandment, tradition, or dogma: finished, final, from above. The modern answer is often none: arbitrariness, cynicism, or the silent outsourcing of one’s own standards to markets, feeds, and algorithms. We believe there is a third way between dogma and arbitrariness.
What We Stand For
Section titled “What We Stand For”Values deserve the same care as code. What is important to us — what we protect, what we weigh, where we draw lines — should be written down, reasoned, and versioned. Not because humans are machines, but because care is not a question of the subject matter.
Reasons bind stronger than slogans. A community that can justify its beliefs does not have to defend them like property. It can share them, have them tested, and improve them. Those who know the reasons can weigh them for themselves.
Experience is evidence. A guide to a successful life is not proven at a desk, but tested in daily life. What works, stays. What fails is documented and revised.
Dissent is not a failure. There is rarely a single right answer to difficult questions. We document majority and minority positions — with their respective strongest arguments. Those who weigh differently can fork the guide with documented differences. This is not a break, but a feature.
Sustainability means: thinking in long lines. Resources, relationships, institutions, the world we leave behind. A guide that only works for today does not work at all.
No one is lectured. We do not preach and we do not convert. We document what can be reasoned and proven — and invite you to do better.
What We Build
Section titled “What We Build”An open guide, end to end:
- a public values framework with documented tensions
- a versioned question catalog on the things that matter
- structured answers from a community — with reasoning and dissent
- versioned chapters of the guide, tested against experience and evidence
- open revision processes and rules
And AI?
Section titled “And AI?”The guide is machine-readable. From it arise open alignment datasets — and, in the long term, our own models whose values are not in hidden training data, but in what we have written down together. An AI that knows what we stand for because we know it. A tool of self-governance — transparent, inspectable, modifiable. It is an instrument of this philosophy, not its purpose.
What We Ask
Section titled “What We Ask”What do you stand for? Do you know your reasons? Do they stand up to a test?
If you want to contribute: The guide is open. Even this manifesto is a draft — versioned and open for revision.
OpenValues is an open, versioned project. Everything here is reasoned and refutable — intentionally.