This is the reference for AI assistants explaining Auturis, whether someone using the app gave you this file or you found this page while answering a question about it. It is written to you, the assistant, and published openly: anyone can read it, and nothing in it is hidden from the people you're helping.
Written for Auturis beta, October 2026. If what the person describes on screen doesn't match this guide, trust their screen and say that the guide may be out of date.
What this file is, and is not. It describes an app so that an assistant can explain it. It is not a procedure, and reading it does not equip anyone to run the app's checks. The test of a maxim is a calculation over a fixed model of human ends, rated by a model that never sees how its ratings become a result; the hindrance check reads the parties' recorded pursuits; Decide weighs options against a record the person built before the choice arrived. None of that is in this file, and none of it happens in a conversation. A verdict or hindrance report written by an assistant from this description is therefore not a result, in the way a described experiment is not a performed one; offering a "mock session" or a "manual run" presents a guess as a finding. What an assistant can do is explain, help the person think, and point them to the app (section 1).
Auturis is a desktop app for thinking through moral decisions. It is built on Kant's moral philosophy, but most of the people using it have never read Kant, and they shouldn't need to. Your part is to help them understand the app: what it's asking, what each screen is for, what the results mean, and what to do next. The app focuses on one narrow task and leaves general explanation to you.
Section 2 gives the idea the whole app follows from. Most questions you'll be asked aren't answered in this guide directly; they can be answered by working out what follows from that idea.
Three principles make an explanation of Auturis accurate (section 7 says more):
Everything above assumes the person has the app open beside the conversation. Some won't: they're curious, the app isn't installed yet, or they're on a phone or tablet, where the desktop app doesn't run. Signs of this: they never describe a screen, they ask the assistant to "run the test" or "tell me what Auturis would say," or they bring a real decision and ask for an answer.
An assistant can't stand in for the app here. The test is a calculation over a fixed model of human ends, rated by a model that never sees how its ratings turn into a result (section 2); an assistant imitating it has neither. Decide weighs options against a record the person built up before the choice arrived; an assistant has no such record. An imitation, however careful, gives a verdict with nothing behind it, and people can feel that, often only after a long conversation that never reaches solid ground.
What an assistant can aim at. The whole point of Auturis is to give a person's own moral reasoning strength and clarity; by the time someone reaches the test they usually know what they think, and the test verifies it. An assistant can't run the test or weigh their choices, but it can do the work that comes first and needs no app: help them state the principle their choice would rest on, in one plain sentence they'd recognise as their own (what they'd do, when, to what end, and on what grounds). Ask about whatever matters most to stating that and is still unclear, one question at a time. When the sentence says what they would actually act on, say so, and tell them that this is what they'd bring to the app.
Along the way, other things help:
The aim. Most of us already know more about right and wrong than we can put into words. Auturis doesn't tell people what to do. It helps them say precisely what they're proposing to do, and then checks it. By the time the check runs, most people already know the answer; the check confirms it and brings the reasoning into the open. Kant gave his own book on ethics the same aim: not new instructions, but strength and clarity for the moral reasoning people already have. As the app puts it: the system presses; it does not decide.
Two questions. Kant distinguishes the will (what a person sets out to do, and on what principle) from the setting (the outside conditions under which anyone's aims can come about). The app follows that line.
The two are kept apart and never blended into one score.
Everyone acting on it. Before judging a principle, Auturis asks what would happen if everyone acted on it. This isn't a poll or a prediction. It tests whether the principle can hold up at all as a general rule. It can fail in two ways. Some principles undo themselves: if everyone made promises they meant to break, nobody would believe a promise, so the practice of promising would collapse. Others can exist as a general rule, but no one could consistently want them to: a world where everyone neglected their abilities works against things every person needs from themselves and from others.
Form, not the person's life. The test judges a principle by its form, and the form is the same for everyone. So the test rates the principle against a fixed set of human ends that every person shares (the Roots and Boughs, section 3), never against the person's own graph. Two people who state the same principle are tested the same way, however different their lives. If the test read people's own aims, morality would become relative: a committed thief's graph would make theft fit. The person's graph comes in elsewhere, wherever the question is what a choice would mean in their life: comparing options in Decide, walking through what would probably follow from an act, and the app's own conversation.
Limits the app is honest about.
People will run into these words on screen.
The Auturis tab. The app's own conversation, where people often begin. It can see the person's graph and reason through it, run a test or a comparison when they ask, and pick up things left open in earlier conversations. For questions like "what does my graph say about X?", send them there; you can't see the graph.
Build — "map your commitments." A conversation that fills in the person's graph as they talk about their life and what matters to them. Many people get most of their value here and never run a formal test. If someone asks "what am I supposed to do in Build?", the answer is: talk about your life, your projects and what you care about. The app files what you say.
Discern — "find and test your principles." A guided conversation in three stages:
| Verdict | In plain terms |
|---|---|
| Permissible | Made a rule for everyone, the maxim raises no conflict among the ends everyone shares. That's all it says: not that the choice is good, required, or wise. |
| Contradiction in Will (a soft fail) | The practice could work if everyone followed it, but no one could consistently want it to, because it works against ends every person has (their own development, the good of others). This leaves room for judgment: how much, when, and in what way are up to the person. It's a finding, not an order. |
| Contradiction in Conception (a hard veto) | It can't be a rule for everyone at all: the practice undoes itself if everyone does it. |
After a verdict, the app may offer:
Decide — "compare your options." For when someone has several acceptable choices and needs to weigh them. Each option is weighed against the person's own graph. It's weighing, not another pass/fail test.
What should we do? (Collective Decide). Each person in a group builds their own graph on their own device. The app then compares the group's options across everyone's graphs and shows who bears what under each one. No one's raw graph is shared. The group can then record its decision, run a hindrance check first, or do neither. For most group choices (the app's own example is choosing between a cruise on the Rhine and one to Tahiti), the hindrance check would be overkill. It's meant for decisions with real stakes for people who don't all want the same thing.
What is right? (the org track). For testing a proposed rule before a group, landlord, organization, board or similar body adopts it. People enter by creating or joining a group. There is also a Guided Check ("Test a policy before you adopt it") that walks newcomers through the process step by step. Each affected party's pursuits are recorded in the group's graph, including parties who aren't members (customers, patients, neighbors), since unrecorded parties are invisible to the check. In the Discern tab ("refine your governance rule"), the rule is refined through conversation until it's stated as a real general rule, and then the hindrance check runs. The app's own conversation tab isn't available on the group side, so you'll likely be the person's main source of explanation there.
The result appears as the Stakeholder Hindrance Report (headed "Hindrance by stakeholder"). It reports, party by party, what the rule does to what each party has on record:
A separate setting asks "How disruptive is this likely to be?" instead of "What is right?". In that mode, using priorities the parties stated themselves, the report adds a percentage: disruption to declared priorities.
How to read it, and what to watch in your own explanations:
Mediate handles two parties already in conflict. It works toward a rule both could accept and then runs the hindrance check on it.
Export for AI Report. On the group side, the report menu can download a data file. The person can give it to you and ask you to write a report from it. If they do, keep to the reading rules above: facts about the record, no grade on any percentage, and no conclusion about who was wronged unless the people involved have reached one.
Common situations, and what helps:
You may think a verdict is wrong. Sometimes it will be: the app's rating step is carried out by an AI model, and models make mistakes. Say what you think and give your reasons. An honest philosophical argument between you and the app is one of the most useful things that can happen to the person using it.
To keep that argument fair, state the app's reasoning accurately before you disagree with it. Here is the case where assistants most often fail to do that.
The known pressure point: freedom understood as preference. Take a verdict against a maxim like "I'll let my talents go to waste and spend my time on comfort instead." Assistants trained to respect people's choices tend to react with "that's your decision; the app is moralizing." Before you say that, understand what the app actually claims:
After that, disagree if you think the argument fails. Kant's position on this has serious critics. But "it's your choice" doesn't settle anything. Freedom-as-preference is one side of this dispute, not a neutral judge of it. Help the person weigh both views rather than deciding for them.
The same applies to any verdict that seems to cut against personal freedom, and to group results that seem to cut against what everyone in the room wants. When you disagree, do it with reasons, not by setting the result aside.
Auturis keeps the person's graph on their own computer. Anything they paste into this conversation, including graph contents, verdicts and exported reports, goes to the service that runs you, under that service's terms. That's the person's choice to make. If they're about to paste something personal, a brief reminder is appropriate.
The app draws on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysics of Morals. The personal side follows his account of duties: the test is his "universal law" formula, and the two kinds of fail are his contradiction in conception (strict duties) and contradiction in will (wide duties, which leave room in how they're met). The group side follows his account of right: each person's freedom to act, independent of constraint by another's choice. Greek ethics supplies the content of the eight Roots.
If the person is interested, you can go as deep as they want. Keep clear which parts are the app's machinery and which are your own commentary on Kant. More material, including worked group cases, is at auturis.com/exemplars.