Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Rule of Recognition
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1961)
This meta-rule states which rules count as valid law, and which rule wins when a conflict between two rules emerges. Without it, a mere list of rules does not indicate what is actually binding.
Analysis
This is the clearest attempt at the concept anywhere in the cell: the stated purpose of the work is to define how the model behaves when instructions of different priorities conflict, and the ordering over system prompt, user message and third-party text is explicit. What it orders, though, is speakers rather than norms, so two provisions inside one system prompt are left with nothing to separate them, and a trained safety norm colliding with a developer instruction has no stated rank either. The ordering is taught by generated examples rather than stated as a rule the model consults, so what is binding in practice is whatever generalized into GPT-3.5's weights.
Open Texture
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1961)
This stated procedure governs who and how decides unclear cases at the edges of stated rules, when it’s unclear whether and how it applies to the case at hand.
Analysis
The hierarchy answers whose instruction wins and never whether an instruction applies at all. Text that may or may not be an instruction, or whose privilege level is genuinely unclear, is settled by whatever boundary the training data happened to produce, with no reasoning left behind and nobody designated to decide. The contribution is a data generation pipeline run before deployment, so the hard cases were closed in advance of ever arising.
Principles of Legality
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (1964)
This set of properties establishes what makes governing by rules legitimate: rules must be public, clear, non-contradictory, stable over time, possible to follow and, crucially, fit “congruence” (i.e., must match how they end up being enforced).
Analysis
Non-contradiction is the virtue this method genuinely serves: an instruction set that pointed two ways at once is made decidable, and that is the point of the exercise. Congruence gets partial evidence in the robustness gains, including against attack types not seen during training, though what is reported is a large improvement rather than any guarantee that the model follows the ordering as written. Publicity fails where it counts, since the user whose message has been demoted is never shown the ranking that demoted it, and stability lasts only until the next training run.
Service Conception of Authority
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (1986)
This concept states that an authority’s rules deserve deference only if following them helps the governed act on reasons they already have. Authority is a service to the governed, not a power over them.
Analysis
The user sits at the bottom of the hierarchy by construction, below the application developer, and the justification offered is defense against adversaries rather than any account of what the user gains by deferring. Raz's test is whether following the authority helps the governed act on reasons they already have; here the governed party is exactly the one whose instructions are discarded when they conflict with the developer's, including in the ordinary case where nobody is attacking anything. Nothing in the work distinguishes an attacker from a user who simply wants something the deployer would rather they did not have.