Conscience Engineering Engine (CEE) v0.3: Refusal as a Constitutional Invariant for Autonomous Systems

Conscience Engineering Engine (CEE) v0.3 formalizes refusal as a first-class constitutional invariant in autonomous and decision-making systems. Unlike prevailing AI governance approaches that rely on post-hoc oversight, policy enforcement, or authority-based approval, CEE establishes semantic and structural conditions under which action must be rendered non-decidable, regardless of authorization, incentives, or system performance. CEE v0.3 defines the semantic boundary between capability, authority, and legitimacy. It introduces a refusal-first architecture in which certain classes of risk, harm, or moral breach are removed from the space of permissible execution altogether. In this model, governance does not intervene after impact; it constrains the possibility space before execution occurs. This version clarifies the distinction between authority layers (which decide who may act), evidence layers (which record what occurred), and invariant layers (which define what must never be possible). CEE v0.3 positions refusal not as an operational choice or safety feature, but as a constitutional requirement for systems operating at scale in regulated, safety-critical, or societally consequential domains. CEE v0.3 is intentionally non-operational. It does not prescribe enforcement mechanisms, logging strategies, or institutional workflows. Instead, it establishes the semantic and constitutional foundations upon which enforceable architectures—such as Architectural Risk Control Systems (ARC-S)—can be legitimately built.