Transparency

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Nothing hidden from sight. Available to all for further examination.

Transparency of ethical behavior. Demanding to be trusted is unethical because it enables betrayal. Trustworthiness must always be provable through Transparency. So the law of ethical transparency is introduced, stating:

# For a system to be truly ethical, it must always be possible to prove retrospectively that it acted ethically with respect to the appropriate ethical schema.

Whereas it does not really matter whether the programmers of a chess playing robot can find out why a particular piece was sacrificed during a game, the logic of ethical decisions must never be hidden in the depths of opaque processes, neural networks, or lost to the passage of time. Generally, this requisite can be satisfied by having multiple independent witnesses or keeping an audit trail that is adequate and secure.

When an ethically adequate system violates an ethical constraint, as they sometimes will, analysis of the audit trail will identify the reason. For example, because a faulty neural network wrongly identified a boy leading a cow as a calf leading a man, or it will prove who in the chain-of-command knew what about illegal corporate activities.

Integrity and transparency are codependent security requisites: We require both integrity of transparency and transparency of integrity.