Methodology

How Alletho forms a judgment.

Alletho does not invent an ethical position. It adopts standards the world's institutions have already declared, and reports how an entity stands against them.

The core principle

Measurement against a declared standard.

The framework is stated openly here because stating it openly is part of the point: anyone who disagrees gets to disagree with a written version of it rather than guess at our intent. When a court, a regulator, or an international body has made a finding, that institutional act is a fact about the world. Reporting it, and weighting it by a rule declared in advance, is measurement, not editorializing.

“This entity was fined by its regulator for concealing emissions data, and Alletho's declared methodology weights adjudicated findings heavily.”

That statement contains no accusation by Alletho. It contains a sourced fact about the entity, a sourced fact about an institution, and a transparent, pre-declared rule. The judgment belongs to the institution.

Baseline standards

The humanistic floor.

Non-negotiable across every entity, sector, and jurisdiction, for companies and public figures alike.

Do no harm. Do not kill, and do not enable killing.

Respect people. The basic dignity of workers, of customers, and of the communities an entity’s operations touch.

Respect the natural world. Ecosystems, animals, and the long-term habitability of the planet, regardless of local legality.

Tell the truth. Documented dishonesty is an ethical breach in itself, not merely a regulatory one.

Power carries responsibility. The larger the reach, the higher the bar. Kept qualitative on purpose.

Where the floor needs authority

ICJ and UN alignment.

Where the floor needs concrete authority, we defer to the rulings, provisional measures, advisory opinions, and inquiry findings of the ICJ and the relevant UN bodies. An entity materially complicit in the operations of a state under live ICJ measures or substantive UN condemnation inherits that responsibility in its record. A complicity claim is made only when all three are true:

1The act materially contributes to the apparatus of harm, not incidental contact with a country or sector.
2The link is documented in a primary source: a UN report, an ICJ filing, a court record, or a top-tier investigative outlet.
3The entity is named in that source, by name.

Mere business presence in a condemned state is not complicity. Material support for the machinery of harm is.

Many states with documented severe harm are under no live ICJ measures or formal UN condemnation. For those we recognize a second, softer authority tier: substantive findings from credible NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Global Witness, and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, and reports from UN Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups. The same three-part test applies, at a moderated weight.

Where we step back

Documented, not judged.

Lobbying spend, political donations, and industry-association memberships are lawful political conduct. We surface them as facts on the record; they carry no moral verdict and never enter the humanistic floor. Disclosed political activity is reflected solely as the bounded, capped deduction described on the scoring page: a meter of the volume of disclosed activity, not a judgment of it. The one exception is when such conduct is itself part of a floor breach, such as fraudulent disclosure or undisclosed payments, in which case it scores under the floor as dishonesty.

Religious and cultural practices are out of editorial scope. Halal and kosher certification, modesty norms, and Sabbath observance are not judged; they are documented only where relevant to a factor, such as slaughter method under animal welfare, regardless of religious framing. The floor still applies, but the practice itself is neither condemned nor endorsed. The same restraint covers lawful private behavior, lifestyle, and political opinion that falls short of the floor.

One framework, two subjects

Companies and public figures.

One framework is applied to both, with the obvious differences called out. Truthfulness means documented dishonesty for a company and documented false claims for a figure. Complicity runs through operations and supply chains for a company, and through political conduct, voting record, and public statements for a figure. Lobbying is documented on the company side; its figure-side equivalent is voting record and advocacy, documented but not condemned on the same basis. The public-figure surface itself is not yet live; it launches after the beta.

From framework to number

This document decides what counts.

A separate, deterministic system decides how much: every entity starts at 100, the worst corroborated conduct caps the result, and the model that classifies evidence is held to a fixed severity rubric, a page of which is published there as a sample.

See how the scoring works →

Transparency

Where the evidence comes from.

Public, primary, and independent sources, never an entity's own marketing.

Investigative & wire reportingUS court recordsEU & national court recordsRegulator enforcement actionsOFAC / UN / EU sanctionsICC casesUN OHCHR databaseWorld Bank debarmentNorway GPFG ethics councilGDPR enforcementUS lobbying & PAC filingsAnimal-welfare registries (PETA, ChickenWatch)Disclosure benchmarks (Wikirate, B Corp)

News evidence is drawn from a curated core of outlets:

Wire services and global anchors. Reuters, AP, BBC, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, NPR.

Investigative and watchdog. ProPublica, Human Rights Watch, OCCRP, ICIJ, Bellingcat.

Regional anchors. DW, Der Spiegel, Politico Europe, Euronews, the South China Morning Post, Caixin Global, The Hindu, The Japan Times, Nikkei Asia, The Straits Times, ABC Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Globe and Mail, CBC, Daily Maverick, Mail & Guardian.

The list is curated and grows; for entities outside the English-speaking world, country-specific outlets of equivalent standing join it. Reporting that reaches the record from beyond this core is not banned but discounted by source reliability, and every citation names its outlet, so you can always judge the source yourself.

The contract

If the methodology and the scoring ever disagree, the scoring is wrong.

These ethics are not partisan, religious, or culture-specific, and they are not a code you must adopt to use the site. They are the editorial position the site applies when scoring the record, written down so you can hold us to it. The anchor, a humanistic floor held to standards institutions have already declared, does not move quietly; report a deviation and we fix the score. Back to About.