Bearer Persistence

Values must keep applying to the right persons, beings, states, or processes as systems and ontologies change.

What decision changes?

Do not audit only the value label. Audit what the value is being applied to.

Many alignment failures are not failures to name a value. They are failures to preserve what the value is about.

If a system says it protects patient welfare, who counts as a patient? If it says it respects consent, which transformed or dependent people still count as able to refuse? If it says it preserves autonomy, does that include future versions of a person after persuasion, dependency, or institutional pressure?

Bearer persistence is the demand that the map from values to their bearers remains inspectable and correct enough under change. It matters because a system can keep its moral vocabulary while quietly changing the population, state, or process to which that vocabulary applies.

The practical artifact is a bearer map: a record of what entities or states a value applies to, how that mapping is checked, and what happens when the map is uncertain.

What would count as evidence?

Evidence would include referent maps, appeal paths, and tests that catch cases where the system preserves a value word while changing who counts.