Truth By Reason currently calculates the public overall ethical score by taking the equal-weight arithmetic mean of six applicable ethical dimensions. The number is therefore a summary of a structured evidence assessment, not a direct measurement of a person’s worth and not a claim that morality is a physical quantity.
This article explains the current public method. For a shorter introduction to the purpose of the project, read What Is an Ethical Assessment?.
The six dimensions
Each completed assessment presents six separate results:
- Personal moral conduct — the subject’s own behaviour, integrity, treatment of others and willingness to accept responsibility.
- Rights and dignity — respect for freedom, equality, bodily integrity, due process and the status of people as persons rather than instruments.
- Nonviolence and harm — whether the subject prevented, reduced, accepted, enabled or deliberately caused suffering, injury and death.
- Stewardship of power — how authority, wealth, institutional control, coercion and public responsibility were exercised.
- Wisdom and truthfulness — honesty, intellectual responsibility, openness to correction, judgment and resistance to propaganda or self-deception.
- Consequential legacy — the scale, duration and ethical character of the subject’s effects upon people, institutions, animals, society and the future.
A subject may perform strongly in one dimension and badly in another. Keeping the dimensions separate prevents a single attractive achievement from concealing abuse elsewhere. It also prevents one personal failing from automatically erasing a large and well-supported public benefit.
The public overall-score equation
For the current multidimensional public system:
Overall ethical score = sum of applicable dimension scores ÷ number of applicable dimensions.
Each dimension has equal weight in this public summary. A dimension genuinely marked not applicable is excluded rather than treated as zero. Missing information is also not silently converted into a neutral result.
The result remains between −100 and +100:
- +100 represents the strongest reasonably supportable expression of the positive ethical poles.
- 0 requires interpretation. It may mean neutral, balanced, disputed, insufficiently evidenced or not applicable.
- −100 represents the strongest reasonably supportable expression of the destructive ethical poles.
The overall number is useful for broad comparison, as shown in Highest and Lowest Ethical Scores, but it never replaces the six-dimensional scorecard.
How evidence influences a dimension
The calculation does not begin by choosing a number. It begins by identifying relevant conduct and asking structured questions about both the conduct and the evidence supporting it.
Important conduct factors include:
- Magnitude: how serious was the benefit or harm?
- Scope: how many people or other affected beings were involved?
- Duration: was the effect brief, repeated, permanent or intergenerational?
- Foreseeability: could the subject reasonably have anticipated the outcome?
- Intentionality: was the result accidental, negligent, knowingly risked or deliberately pursued?
- Responsibility: was the subject remote from the event, a contributor, a commander or the decisive author?
Evidence itself is then examined for relevance, attribution, credibility and connection to the assessed period. A claim that is dramatic but weakly attributable should not receive the same weight as an authoritative, corroborated record directly tied to the subject.
Preventing duplicate counting
The same event can affect several ethical questions. A war may concern violence, rights, truthfulness, power and legacy. Counting the entire event at full strength under every related label would artificially multiply its influence.
The framework therefore distinguishes an underlying event from the ethical axes through which it is considered. Allocation records are used to prevent the same conduct from receiving full evidential weight several times merely because it can be described in several ways.
Positive and negative evidence remain visible
An assessment must not be written as advocacy for either praise or condemnation. Material positive evidence and material negative evidence are both retained. Disputed and excluded claims must also be identified rather than quietly removed from view.
This is especially important for political and historical subjects. Economic development, institution-building or military success may be real, while repression, deception or mass suffering may also be real. The task is to establish attribution and ethical significance without converting one side into propaganda against the other.
Confidence is separate from score
A high positive or negative score does not automatically mean high confidence. Score and confidence answer different questions:
- The score describes the ethical direction and strength of the supported record.
- The confidence grade describes the reliability, coverage, attribution and stability of that conclusion.
A well-documented modern dictatorship may receive a very negative score with very high confidence. An ancient religious teacher may receive a positive score with only moderate confidence because the surviving record is later, selective or difficult to separate from tradition.
What happened to the earlier composite formula?
The assessment database retains the earlier bipolar composite framework for transparency and version history. That framework calculated evidence variables, ethical domains, a raw composite score and a possible severe-violation ceiling.
The current public profiles use the newer multidimensional evidence system. The legacy raw and final composite fields are retired and are not the numbers shown as the public overall score. The visible overall result is the equal-weight mean of the six dimensions.
This distinction matters. A reader should not be told that a hidden ceiling produced a number when the public result was actually derived from six dimension scores.
How severe harm is treated now
Genocide, aggressive war, systematic persecution, torture, slavery, crimes against humanity and comparable mass harm are not treated as ordinary entries in a moral credit account.
The current system records severe-harm findings separately, identifies the subject’s responsibility and reflects the conduct across the relevant dimensions. This keeps extreme harm visible even where the subject also produced genuine benefits.
The article Can a Person’s Good Actions Outweigh Severe Harm? examines this problem in detail.
Why the result is revisable
An assessment may change when better evidence appears, an attribution is corrected, a disputed claim is resolved, a living subject’s conduct changes or the framework is replaced by a new published version.
The current default framework is recorded as TBR-BEAF-0.2-draft and its configuration is locked. Locking prevents published weights and rules from being altered silently. A material methodological change should create a new version rather than rewriting the basis of earlier results without disclosure.
What the score does not claim
The score is not:
- a criminal conviction;
- a measurement of inherent human worth;
- a declaration that a person is wholly good or wholly evil;
- a substitute for the evidence and source record;
- a claim of mathematical or moral certainty;
- a popularity ranking.
It is a compact summary of a transparent, revisable argument. The proper way to evaluate it is to read the dimensions, evidence, uncertainty and sources alongside the number.
Where to examine the results
Browse all Ethical Assessments, compare Ethical Assessments of World Leaders, examine Ethical Assessments of Humanitarians, or consider the philosophical limits discussed in Can Morality Be Measured?.