Start here
Orientation
Start with what is here, what it can still become, and what an actual transition does to that relation.
An actual transition harms an extant locus insofar as it nontrivially degrades a structurally significant continuation or enabling structure genuinely reachable from that locus.
What is actually here?
Extance is the field that has actually arrived: bodies, relations, capacities, records, institutions, ecologies, debts, dependencies, repairs, and history still active now.
An extant locus is a diachronically integrated causal organization with a nonredundant successor structure at the level being examined. A continuation belongs to that locus when the present field actually supports a viable route to it. Imaginable possibility is wider than reachability.
Resistance is what the route makes the bearer carry: work, cost, danger, delay, humiliation, dependency, instability, corrective labor, or fragility. A path can remain formally open while becoming materially worse.
Not every lost option is harm.
Finite action always selects. Commitment, development, stabilization, and protective pruning can close alternatives while preserving the wider structure of continuation. Modal Path Ethics calls that specification.
Contraction begins when a structurally significant part of the bearer’s reachable-continuation profile is actually degraded: a continuation is foreclosed; its resistance thickens; or the capacities and relations that generate whole families of continuation are damaged.
Why this damage is harm.
The normative bridge is explicit: a nontrivial degradation of a structurally significant part of an extant locus’s own organized, reachable continuation constitutes pro tanto harm to that locus.
Pro tanto means the harm counts. It does not decide the whole case. A protective act can contain a real harm and still be justified. Repair can answer damage without making the earlier damage disappear.
The whole transition comes next.
A harm-token names one contraction borne by one locus in one respect. A transition profile keeps the significant openings, harms, repairs, resistance changes, and burden transfers together. The overall verdict asks what should be done after that field is honestly represented.
Good is the clean case: significant continuability is preserved or opened without purchasing it through comparable contraction elsewhere. Better governs damaged choice when clean Good is no longer reachable. Choosing Better does not rename the remaining harms as harmless.
Instrument jurisdiction.
Every instrument selects. It measures, classifies, diagnoses, prices, protects, predicts, or decides some relation rather than the whole field. Instrument jurisdiction is the boundary between what that successful contact warrants and the larger field the instrument does not own.
An instrument is allowed to be smaller than the field. Success inside its function does not promote its cut into the boundary of reality. Modal Path Ethics is bound by the same rule: the field has authority over the instrument.