Mission

The Don’t-Be-a-Dick (DBaD) Framework began as a thought experiment in universal ethics — a way to express decency in quantitative form. It has since evolved into an open research project under Vetted Patriots, exploring whether moral reasoning can be modeled and tested like any other hypothesis.

Our goal is not to replace philosophy with math, but to create transparent, falsifiable heuristics for judging intent, harm, and fairness — tools that can inform human and AI decision-making alike.

The Five Domains of Ethical Weight

• Harm (H): the expected net harm or suffering an action causes.
• Consent (C): the degree of autonomy and informed choice for those affected.
• Intent (I): the moral direction of purpose — malicious, neutral, or benevolent.
• Proportionality (P): whether the response fits the scale and context of the situation.
• Transparency (T): openness to scrutiny, audit, and explanation.

These five variables form the axes of our ethical space. Their relative weights can shift by culture or domain — medicine, warfare, governance, technology — but the structure holds.

Origins and Evolution

DBaD began as a field shorthand for “don’t violate basic decency.” As AI alignment debates and moral philosophy converged, we formalized that intuition into a function: E(A) — a score of ethical proportionality for any action A.

Through iterative testing, survey data, and cross-disciplinary feedback, DBaD has become a computable ethics model. It draws on behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and virtue ethics to balance consequences, autonomy, and character.

Applications

• Ethics education: teach proportional reasoning using transparent math.
• AI alignment: encode a minimal decency constraint for autonomous systems.
• Policy analysis: quantify moral trade-offs for public decisions.
• Everyday behavior: a simple mirror test for “am I acting like a jerk?”

Because DBaD is open and testable, anyone can propose revisions, run scenario simulations, or publish results in the shared repository.

Scientific Falsifiability

DBaD is a working hypothesis. It stands only if its predictions hold across cultures and situations. Our research preregisters survey vignettes and cross-domain studies to see where the model fails — because failure is how moral science grows.

If results diverge significantly, the model must adapt or retire. Ethics without accountability is dogma; DBaD aims to stay empirical.

Participation & Transparency

All data, code, and updates are public at dbad.vettedpatriots.org. You can take the survey, contribute cases, or critique the math. Every submission builds the dataset that tests this ethical hypothesis.

Open inquiry is not just encouraged — it's the foundation of the project.