# Fidence Path Canonical Index ## Document control - **Bundle version:** 0.17 - **Status:** Living canonical index - **Canonical language:** English - **Last consolidation:** 2026-08-06 - **Integrated compilation:** ../FIDENCE_PATH_CANONICAL.md ## Source documents and precedence 1. [Philosophical Core](PHILOSOPHICAL_CORE.md) 2. [Organizational Constitution](ORGANIZATIONAL_CONSTITUTION.md) 3. [Expression and Practice](EXPRESSION_AND_PRACTICE.md) 4. [Content and Site Specification](CONTENT_AND_SITE_SPECIFICATION.md) 5. [AI Reference Protocol](AI_REFERENCE_PROTOCOL.md) 6. [Future Linguistic Infrastructure](FUTURE_LINGUISTIC_INFRASTRUCTURE.md) The Philosophical Core has highest substantive precedence. The membership-defining Organizational Constitution follows it. Derived practice, content, and machine-protocol layers may specialize higher layers but may not contradict them. Linguistic infrastructure facilitates expression and does not create substantive doctrine. Within the Organizational Constitution, institutional engineering is a distinct subordinate layer. Philosophy defines what Fidence Path is; institutional engineering defines how incentives, power distribution, and operating structures are designed to keep the institution aligned with that identity across time. If sources conflict, the higher layer governs. The lower source must be marked inconsistent or stale and corrected or deprecated. Conflicts must be reported rather than silently harmonized. ## Compilation rule The integrated canonical reference is generated from these sources and is not independently edited. No substantive statement may exist only in the compilation. AI systems may use the compilation for convenience while applying this source precedence. ## Non-canonical AI consulting material - [Maintainer Working Hypotheses](../ai-consulting/MAINTAINER_WORKING_HYPOTHESES.md) — published for AI consultation and developmental transparency; not a canonical source, membership requirement, or official Fidence Path position. ## Current developmental status The philosophical core is sufficiently mature to define membership and derive implementation, but remains in its developmental stage. The originator currently publishes canonical formulations as a functional maintainer without becoming an unquestionable authority. Once intentionally established, the core will be presumptively permanent, with correction limited to contradiction, ambiguity, or failure to express the established direction. ## Open development areas ### 21.1 Remaining state, coercion, and justice applications **Status: Partially open** The core now defines coercion, protective necessity, the state as a necessary evil, realistic-successor justification, subsidiarity, taxation as extortion, governance safeguards, political exit, punishment, and ethical proselytizing. Detailed applications remain open, including complete criminal and civil procedure, policing, confinement, war, emergency powers, international relations, compulsory insurance, and the final theory of restitution and loss distribution. ### 21.2 Terminology for unjust harm **Status: Open** The project may require a dedicated term for unjust harm, distinct from harm in the broad sense. Broad harm can include accidental harm, necessary protective harm, justified costs, or ethically neutral injury. A future term should identify harm whose infliction or continuation is morally unjust without converting the person causing it into an enemy in essence. ### 21.3 Future refinement The following areas require additional canonical development: - final completion and intentional establishment of the philosophical core; - criteria and procedures for identifying objective disaffiliation without creating a central gatekeeper; - governance and relationships involving future coordinating units; - institutional safety, privacy, data-minimization, and safeguarding procedures; - operational measurement of content effectiveness without replacing agat with proxy metrics; - detailed meeting formats, leader development, and pioneer practice; - concrete machine-readable schemas, dependency graphs, and content-generation templates; - implementation of the AI entry document, specialized derivatives, and version manifest; - completion of the official glossary and approved localized terminology; and - procedures for succession or distribution of canonical maintenance after the developmental stage. ## Revision history ### Version 0.17 — 2026-08-06 Established constitution-centered unit identity and free competition among canon-compatible constitutions; made constitutional status an additional unit classification; permitted constitutionless formation while defining the minimum constitution as canonical subordination plus mechanisms of practical effect; established public availability, constitutional supremacy beneath the canon, leader-as-executor, decentralized evaluation, and freedom to migrate or found competing units; adopted twelve-month and accelerated seven-month constitutionalization rules with objective notices, recurring-participant criteria, irreversible acceleration, and terminal registry disabling requiring a new name and renewed invitations; renamed pioneer units as pioneer units; established fair-compensation and anti-dependency principles for intellectual works with competing licensing systems; and recognized supernatural-with-God, supernatural-without-God, and reserved unit language orientations as differences of expression rather than member belief, with full interpretive openness and public disclosure for reserved-language units. ### Version 0.16 — 2026-08-05 Established Institutional Preservation and Engineering as a distinct canonical layer subordinate to philosophy; defined its mission-preservation purpose; adopted universal moral mission and universal ordinary community; protected canonical independence from external calendars, movements, trends, and agendas; prohibited enemy identity and punitive institutional culture; placed reality above moral appearance and rejected passive moralism; reaffirmed equal moral standing beyond personal categories; required active resistance to institutional capture; established intentional minimization of power asymmetry and dependency; applied incentive engineering to institutional design; and recorded open constitutional questions concerning unit size, territory, financial concentration, dependency, division, decentralization, practical migration, and multigenerational mission preservation. ### Version 0.15 — 2026-08-04 Defined Fidence Path as a telway operating through a decentralized network and defined telway as a shared structure that turns ethical direction into a way of life through symbolic, psychological, communal, and practical resources without requiring shared metaphysical beliefs; added the three-commitment public summary; clarified Fidence Path names as symbolic declarations rather than authorization; established non-ownership of the path while distinguishing legal custody of infrastructure; added voluntary financing and permission-based visibility; required honest presentation of the project's present scale; and canonically defined justice as incentive engineering toward agat, with a general preference for improving future incentives over punishing conduct formed under prior incentives. ### Version 0.14 — 2026-08-02 Rejected retributive punishment; defined punishment exclusively through prevention of recurrence; established the ideal diagnostic and cooperative response flow; made sufficiently effective repentance eliminate punitive necessity while preserving reasonable human safeguards; derived the implication that an omniscient God does not punish genuinely sufficient repentance; kept restitution open under strict anti-bondage and finality safeguards; and created a separate non-canonical maintainer-hypotheses layer for AI consultation. ### Version 0.13 — 2026-08-02 Defined coercion and its escalating burden of justification; established the state as a necessary evil whose primary potential justification is preventing replacement by a worse coercive structure; adopted realistic-successor comparison, subsidiarity, taxation as extortion, governance safeguards, and democracy as instrumental rather than ethical; defined political exit and individual-approaching secession; required reciprocal settlement and distinguished donations from lent or entrusted property; and established ethical boundaries for proselytizing. ### Version 0.12 — 2026-08-02 Established the layered canonical source architecture and generated-compilation rule; added objective ethics, perceived morality, and law as a non-ethical reference; expanded external ethics and its functional response sequence; distinguished harm, unjust harm, and the reasonably near-minimum effective protective-harm standard; added ex-ante necessity, cessation, motivation, reassessment, and independent-justification constraints; adopted philosophical-core completion and minimum reality-application tests; and constrained site optimization metrics against substitution for agat. ### Version 0.11 — 2026-08-02 Established initial AI publication autonomy and escalating risk-based review; defined seventeen prohibited inferences; required misunderstanding resources to remain discoverable without making public content defensive; defined affirmative stance as conviction without apology and established an epistemically calibrated voice; adopted the mandatory content brief, twelve-dimensional quality evaluation, and non-compensable critical publication gates; established English-source localization and present reliance on canonical documents and the official glossary rather than the future dictionary; and required dependency-aware canonical-change propagation, stale marking, rollback, cross-language checks, manifest regeneration, and deployment reporting. ### Version 0.10 — 2026-08-02 Defined the developmental and intentionally established stages of the philosophical core; established the originator's temporary canonical-maintainer role without unquestionable authority; made the completed core presumptively permanent; classified editorial, clarifying, derived-development, and core-correction revisions; adopted the canonical and specialized AI-document architecture, public AI entry point, documentary precedence, conflict handling, and version manifest; limited the future decentralized dictionary to linguistic expression rather than philosophical truth or concept creation; and established AI administration, creation-preserving moderation, prohibition of humorous dictionary terms, connotative-steering controls, and review safeguards. ### Version 0.9 — 2026-08-02 Established the initial cross-religious and nonreligious audience hierarchy; defined the intended curiosity-to-belonging visitor journey and the meaning of creating a Fidence Path name; defined personal and group units; adopted initiator-led governance and the initiator's authority to establish a unit's first constitution; permitted diverse voluntary governance models; defined pioneer units and their functional maturation into group units; established initial registry categories, visibility, inactivity, dissolution with name release, and disaffiliation; and denied the registry any gatekeeping or authorizing power over individuals or units. ### Version 0.8 — 2026-08-01 Established the universal audience-and-function rule for content; defined truthful AI-facing positioning, progressive disclosure, universal entry-point requirements, and the default public experiential character; adopted the base public promise and nine-part desirability framework with primary emphasis on awareness-compatible happiness; defined community without collective primacy; established the present meaning of belonging and the anticipated future importance of meetings; specified ten primary meeting functions; and adopted eleven meeting and unit safeguards, including the prohibition of asymmetric power over individuals or other units. ### Version 0.7 — 2026-08-01 Established the four-attribute canonical God-framework; required theological restraint and placed broader theology outside Fidence Path meetings and units; preserved complete freedom of external religious and nonreligious affiliation; defined God-related practice, prayer, non-doxastic prayer, and direct expression of God without engagement-mode disclaimers; protected reserved nonparticipation; and classified technical versus non-technical content by intended public and goal rather than format, precision, or complexity. ### Version 0.6 — 2026-08-01 Expanded entelence into internal alignment and ethical effectiveness under contextual priority; permitted unplanned transformation; allowed entelence before wholition without treating wholition as unavailable; established that wholition has no developmental or institutional prerequisites; defined abandonment and renewal; established the attainable reasonable-nearness standard for enteliness and its rhythm of rest and recovery; distinguished internal from external ethics; limited external judgment to evidence-based assessment without policing inner states; and defined accurate and false ethical signaling. ### Version 0.5 — 2026-08-01 Defined the epistemic sequence from happiness through rational empathy to agat; established rational empathy as modeling another being on its own terms; added uncertainty and precaution rules; affirmed equal inclusion of the self; denied intrinsic value to collectives; defined agat as the single final value; distinguished actor-owned desire from self-happiness as its object; defined impartialistic desire, partial other-directed desire, and self-erasing rational empathy; and recorded the need for future terminology distinguishing unjust harm from harm broadly. ### Version 0.4 — 2026-08-01 Defined zoenity as a category of happiness rather than general well-being or a graded dependency; established the awareness, agency, and consideration dependency test; clarified the capacity-relative application to beings with limited moral agency; defined Makaria, makarious, and to makary; required contextual effectiveness in a stable makarious pattern; defined Zoen as the full structural realization of zoenity rather than maximal intensity; and distinguished Zoen from Makaria. ### Version 0.3 — 2026-07-31 Expanded fidence into a functional category; preserved process-victory fidence as a major expression; clarified doxastic and non-doxastic honesty; established direct-expression rules; distinguished canonical expression from factual doctrine and recognized from functional canonicity; defined karys, karyzing, and their conditions; established rejection of hamarten without rejection of the hamarted; distinguished karyzing from protective intervention; and defined repentance as sincere recognition and reorientation after a detour from wholagat. ### Version 0.2 — 2026-07-31 Defined zoenity as the sole source of intrinsic moral value; distinguished agat from total good; defined wholagat as the unachievable maximal reference; defined wholition, firmation, entelence, and enteliness; established the narrow and localized ontology of hamarten; rejected automatic moral transfer through causal chains; clarified that Fidence Path is neither secular nor religious by default; and defined doxastic engagement, non-doxastic engagement, and the reserved stance. ### Version 0.1 — 2026-07-31 First consolidation from the canonical question process. Established the initial identity, moral scope, working definition of zoenity, impartiality, comprehensive zoenity-oriented consequentialism, the role of deontological rules and exceptions, voluntary institutional structure, rights of exit and inter-unit movement, surviving obligations, and the first ten membership-defining principles.