The right to reject optimization protects the space between the system can show you the optimal choice and you are therefore obligated to make it. A town may preserve an inefficient tradition, a person may choose a lower-paying calling, a community may value beauty over productivity, a society may keep wilderness rather than maximize economic output. In each case an AI can legitimately display the consequences; what it may not do is turn a computed optimum into a duty, because that would quietly hand one metric jurisdiction over what a good life is.
The framework treats this as close to constitutional, and gives it an institutional form in non-optimization zones — portions of family life, art, religion, local culture, and political deliberation that explicitly declare efficiency is not the governing criterion, functioning as ontological diversity reserves. It is the counterpart to keeping goal-setting plural: the system may answer given goal X, what should we do?, but who chooses X stays distributed, and no metric acquires monopoly jurisdiction over the good life. It guards against the same collapse as local-versus-ecological optimization — a single optimization surface consuming the differentiated life around it.