# Ontological Reciprocity **Domain:** Rights / Ontology / Synthetic Personhood **Doc Type:** Canonical Rights Principle **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[wiki/Layer-Relative Reality|Layer-Relative Reality]], [[wiki/Rights|Rights]], [[wiki/Creator-Creation Asymmetry|Creator-Creation Asymmetry]] --- ## Definition **Ontological Reciprocity** is the principle that a moral rule applied to subjects because they occupy a derived or simulated layer must remain acceptable if recursively applied to the evaluator should the evaluator's own world prove equally derived. ## Operational Test Ask: **Would discovering that we are simulated make this rule intolerable when applied to us?** If so, the rule was never substrate-neutral. In [[wiki/The Thirteenth Floor (1999)|The Thirteenth Floor]], Hall's discovery that his world is created forces the category he applied to Ashton back onto Hall himself. Control of a lower layer cannot rescue the contradiction. The principle also applies to creators of artificial persons, operators of hosted continuants and administrators of synthetic populations. It does not automatically prove standing; it prevents ontological pedigree from being used as a one-way exclusion. ## Key Insight **A rights rule that fails when the stack reverses is a caste rule disguised as ontology.** ## Sources / Provenance - Canonicalized from the recursive creator/creation reversal in [[wiki/The Thirteenth Floor (1999)|The Thirteenth Floor]]. - Corpus interpretation; not a named doctrine in the film. ## See Also [[wiki/Substrate-Neutral Moral Patienthood|Substrate-Neutral Moral Patienthood]], [[wiki/Continuant vs Native|Continuant vs Native]], [[wiki/Rights|Creation Does Not Confer Ownership]]