Glossary entry

Carve-Out

Glossary entry in Governance & power. Definitions, checks, and evidence for Carve-Out.

Quick takeaways

An exclusion, cap, or condition the accepting party claims against a recorded liability.

Definition

An exclusion, cap, or condition the accepting party claims against a recorded liability. Carve-outs are recorded on the liability record rather than reserved for litigation, because the forensically useful moment to assemble an excuse is before the harm, in the issuer's words.

A carve-out on the record is a price: it states how much of the risk the liability does not cover and therefore who carries the rest. A carve-out that surfaces for the first time in a dispute is evidence of concealment rather than a term of the deal.

Structural

Scale: Organizational · Phases: Design, Deployment, Audit · Measurability: Fully measurable · Maturity: Core concept

Scope
H. Governance & power. Structures that decide who holds authority, on what grant and for how long, and who can intervene.
Genealogy
STD-08 records carve-outs as part of the liability object so the excuse is assembled before the incident.

Adjacent terms

Liability Record Attestation

Related concepts

Also tagged: Structural

Ethotechnics Moral Behavior (of Systems) Ethical Load Path Ethotechnic Audit Conviviality Ethotechnic Maturity

References

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Cite this glossary entry Formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS

Version

v1.13.0

Last updated

Sep 22, 2026

DOI

Pending Zenodo deposit

APA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. (2026). Carve-Out. Ethotechnics glossary. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/carve-out

MLA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Carve-Out." Ethotechnics glossary, 2026, https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/carve-out.

Chicago

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Carve-Out." Ethotechnics glossary. Sep 22, 2026. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/carve-out.

BibTeX

@misc{glossary_carve-out,
  title={Carve-Out},
  author={Ethotechnics Institute Research Team},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={Ethotechnics glossary},
  url={https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/carve-out},
  version={v1.13.0}
}

RIS

TY  - WEB
TI  - Carve-Out
AU  - Ethotechnics Institute Research Team
PY  - 2026
UR  - https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/carve-out
ER  -

Scholarly metadata

Authorship

Contact: research@ethotechnics.org

Publication details

  • Published: Dec 3, 2025
  • Last updated: Sep 22, 2026
  • Version: v1.13.0
  • DOI: Pending Zenodo deposit

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Credit Ethotechnics Institute, include the term title + version, and link to the glossary permalink.

Archive: Wayback Machine history

Changelog

  • v1.13.0 · 2026-09-22 — Rewrote category descriptions and scope notes to the current framing, replaced vague or promotional definitions in 89 entries and 109 short definitions, removed unsourced adoption and effect claims, and cut filler words and redundant sentences from 38 entries and 20 short definitions. No term was added, removed, or renamed.
  • v1.12.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Typed Decision Model and Confidence-Gated Execution, cross-linked to the worked example of a decision-model gate on refunds.
  • v1.11.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Decision Threshold, Shaping Hop, and Reason Substitution: the places typed decision models locate authority, shape decisions without making them, and separate the reason from the decision.
  • v1.10.0 · 2026-09-19 — Promoted 64 orphaned short definitions to full canonical entries across core concepts, governance, decision states, and anti-patterns, and removed three redundant short definitions (procedural-realism, intake-cinema, legibility-illegibility).
  • v1.9.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Feedback Proximity, Asymmetric-Capacity Restraint, Adaptive Capacity, Compensatory Adaptation, and Corrective Power, aligned the short definition of Ethotechnics with its canonical authority-and-correction framing, and refreshed the glossary's category scaffolding off the earlier moral-system vocabulary.
  • v1.8.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Insulation, the unifying failure mode of the framework: whatever stops the consequences of institutional decisions from traveling back to those who can revise the generating rules, with its channels, its good and bad forms, and its self-ratifying loop.
  • v1.7.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
  • v1.6.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
  • v1.5.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
  • v1.4.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
  • v1.3.0 · 2026-09-11 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
  • v1.2.0 · 2026-09-08 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.
  • v1.1.0 · 2026-01-09 — Expanded scholarly metadata, operational tests, and provenance notes.
  • v1.0.0 · 2025-12-03 — Initial glossary release with stable permalinks.