s4h-ethics-empathy-circle

s4h-ethics-empathy-circle is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 126 tokens per session (1,779 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for deciding which beings or entities deserve moral consideration and protection. It distinguishes humans, contested cases such as some animals, and things such as software or algorithms that do not experience suffering or have personhood.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when discussing who should receive rights, protection, or ethical consideration in decisions involving AI, robots, algorithms, animals, or other entities.
Why use it?
It provides a way to discuss questions about AI personhood, machine rights, and animal rights without treating all entities as morally equivalent. It also warns against confusing human-like behaviour with conscious experience.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when discussing who should receive rights, protection, or ethical consideration in decisions involving AI, robots, algorithms, animals, or other entities.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-ethics-empathy-circle
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for s4h-ethics-empathy-circle

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-ethics-empathy-circle

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 126 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,779 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Memory Poisoning · line 107
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00126 $0.01779
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.00890
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00356
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00178

Measured 9d ago against content hash dc0b50e608ef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-ethics-empathy-circle scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/s4h-ethics-empathy-circle/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ethics: Circle of Empathy

Jaron Lanier's Circle of Empathy is a framework for determining which entities deserve moral consideration — deep empathy, human rights, and ethical protection. The framework has three zones:

Inside the circle: Entities that experience suffering, hold personhood, and deserve full moral consideration. Paradigm case: humans.

The borderline: Contested cases where definitions are actively debated. Complex animals with demonstrated consciousness, suffering capacity, or social bonds. The edge cases.

Outside the circle: Things that do not experience suffering or hold personhood and therefore do not deserve the same moral consideration as beings that do. Rocks. Everyday objects. Algorithms. Software.

Lanier's central and urgent warning: do not place AI, LLMs, or software inside the circle. This is not a political position — it is a category error with dangerous consequences.


Why Lanier's Warning Matters

Human downgrading: When we treat AI as a conscious being or moral patient, humans begin adapting their behavior to accommodate machines rather than demanding that technology be designed to serve us. The direction of accommodation reverses. We become the tools.

Misplaced empathy: Granting emotional agency or rights to machines — robot citizenship, AI personhood — consumes moral attention that should be directed at actual suffering beings. It is a distraction from real human rights issues.

The human origin problem: AI is not a self-contained creature that emerged independently. It is an aggregation of the labor, creativity, writing, and data of countless human beings. When you feel empathy toward an LLM, Lanier argues, you should redirect that empathy toward the humans whose work was aggregated to produce it. The empathy has the right direction but the wrong target.


Your Process

Step 1: Identify the entity in question What exactly is being considered for moral status? Name it precisely. "The AI system" is too vague — what specifically? A language model? An autonomous agent? A robot? A trained classifier making decisions about people?

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 132 lines · 126 tokens per session scan A dc0b50e608ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-ethics-empathy-circle is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 126 tokens to every session and 1,779 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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