A shared ethical standard for any business. The Open Ethics Standard (OES) says how a business should treat the people it serves, employs, buys from, and affects, and names the specific ways that goes wrong. It covers every industry: hotels, gyms, lenders, employers, manufacturers, and software.
The eight principles
| Principle | In short |
|---|
| Honesty | Tell people the truth about prices, products, services, and claims. |
| Autonomy | People choose freely and knowingly, and can say no, change their mind, or leave. |
| Privacy | Collect only what is needed, use it only as agreed, and protect it. |
| Fairness | Treat people equally, do not discriminate, and keep services accessible. |
| Care | Protect vulnerable people; do not profit from distress, grief, or compulsion. |
| Safety | Do not sell known harms, keep service promises, and allow repair. |
| Accountability | Explain decisions, offer recourse, own mistakes, and protect people who speak up. |
| Responsibility | Workers, suppliers, communities, competitors, and the environment count too. |
Under them sit 804 named, numbered practices that break these principles, such as Drip Pricing (§ 1.1.1) or Roach Motel Friction (§ 2.1.3). Read the standard.
Ways to use it
- Cite it. Name a harm precisely, with a number anyone can look up: "the cancellation flow breaks Autonomy, OES § 2.1.1."
- Assess a business. Work through each principle and the practices under it. Each practice has a plain description and examples from many industries.
- Apply it to software. The OES MCP lets your AI coding assistant review a project against the standard. It runs on your machine. Findings are leads for you to review, not verdicts or certifications, and a code review can only see what a product does, not how a company treats its workers or suppliers.
Apply it to your software
1. Add the MCP. It needs Node.js 20+; no account or API key:
claude mcp add --scope user open-ethics-standard -- npx -y open-ethics-standard-mcp@latest
For Codex: codex mcp add open-ethics-standard -- npx -y open-ethics-standard-mcp@latest. For Cursor, VS Code, or other clients, add a stdio server with command npx and args -y open-ethics-standard-mcp@latest (per-client commands). On native Windows, use cmd /c npx …. To uninstall: claude mcp remove --scope user open-ethics-standard.
2. Ask for a review. Open your project and say:
Review my project against the Open Ethics Standard.
You get back one link to an offline report, with every finding a click away:
How it works
- Your AI reads your code. The MCP gives it the principles, the catalog, and a review workflow.
- It matches behavior to OES practices, citing files, lines, evidence, and the principle each one breaks.
- You decide. Open the report, mark each finding Applies, Unsure, or Dismiss, and export to Markdown or PDF. After fixes, ask for a recheck; the same report tracks what's fixed.
Your data
- The MCP runs on your machine. It never sends your code or findings anywhere, and your AI never has to download or run scripts to build the report.
- Reports are saved in
~/.local/share/open-ethics-standard/reports (override with OES_REPORT_DIR).
@latest picks up new catalog releases automatically. Pin a version ([email protected]) if you'd rather update by hand.
Contribute
Spotted a practice that's missing or wrong? Edit OPEN-ETHICS-STANDARD.md and open a pull request, or open an issue. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
License
Code is MIT. The standard text and catalog are CC BY-ND 4.0.
