Chapter 76: Dignity as Meta-Ethical Foundation

What makes an ethical policy admissible at all? This chapter argues that the answer is structural, not derived from utility, virtue, or social contract. Dignity is label-independence: an ethical policy must commute with address permutations, so that its validity depends only on identity-invariants — rational agency, autonomous will, reflexive self-awareness — and never on contingent labels such as names, wealth, or social status. The Dignity Functor extracts these invariants; the admissible subworld A_dig is a reflective subcategory of the full category of agent-diagrams, and the reflection L_dig is a Lawvere–Tierney modal operator. The Dignity Universality Theorem (VII.T30) shows that every address-bearing entity — every carrier with a well-defined NF address in τ — has intrinsic dignity: the label-independence requirement is not optional but structurally forced.