Ethical Guidelines for Moral Health Assessment: A Prohibition Framework A Non-Deployable Ethics Charter Against Moral Quantification and Profiling (Version 1.0)

This document establishes an absolute, non-deployable ethical framework prohibiting the measurement, scoring, profiling, or operationalization of moral health, moral character, or ethical disposition in any institutional, commercial, governmental, or algorithmic context. It advances a prohibition-based model of ethics that rejects moral quantification not as premature or insufficiently regulated, but as inherently incompatible with human dignity. Grounded in historical precedent, philosophical analysis, and anticipatory governance, the framework demonstrates that systems purporting to assess moral qualities are structurally prone to weaponization, social control, and exclusion. A detailed case study of intelligence (IQ) testing illustrates how assessment tools developed for supportive purposes predictably migrate into mechanisms of discrimination once embedded in institutional power. Extending this pattern, the framework argues that moral assessment presents even greater ethical risk, as it targets conscience, character, and perceived human worth rather than functional capacity. The framework adopts an apophatic approach to moral health, defining it through what it is not in order to prevent the creation of measurable proxies or operational targets. It articulates categorical prohibitions against moral scoring systems, including direct measurement, proxy inference, behavioural profiling, and AI-mediated moral classification, while strictly limiting permissible engagement to non-operationalized qualitative scholarship and confidential therapeutic contexts. Rather than offering regulatory guidance or implementation pathways, this document functions as an ethical boundary marker. It contributes to AI ethics, human rights law, and technology governance by demonstrating that certain domains of human experience must remain beyond measurement, regardless of technological capability or claimed social benefit. The work is intended for policymakers, ethicists, legal scholars, and researchers concerned with anticipatory limits on invasive assessment technologies.