Conscience Engineering Engine (v0.1): Designing Enforceable Limits into Intelligent Systems

This publication introduces Conscience Engineering (CE), a systems discipline for designing enforceable moral and operational limits into intelligent systems at the execution layer. Rather than treating ethics as guidance, policy, or post hoc review, CE formalizes constraints, refusals, and accountability as first-class architectural functions. The paper defines the CE Engine v0.1, a generalizable constraint architecture capable of producing structured refusals, redirections, safe completions, audit logs, and explainable decisions under high-consequence conditions. The framework emphasizes what intelligent systems must be structurally incapable of doing, independent of ownership, scale, or optimization objectives. This version provides a formal specification of refusal capability, context-aware constraint evaluation, compliance modes, and execution-time governance. It is intended as an initial architectural release (v0.1), establishing core concepts, interfaces, and invariants. Subsequent versions will expand implementation details, empirical evaluation, and applied use cases.