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Home Argument Route

Locus and Anti-Erasure

Reader. AI ethics, animal ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, legal-status readers, rights-threshold readers.

Argument. The primitive question is not "is it a person?" but "is there a coherent site of continuance whose future-space can be opened, closed, burdened, or repaired?" The Unknown Locus article gives the route's central operational rule: uncertainty is not permission to erase the path by which truth could become knowable.

This route teaches Modal Path Ethics by breaking the person/nothing binary.

The route, in order

  1. Formal: What Makes Something a Locus
  2. What Is Not an Extant Locus
  3. Taxonomy of Extant Loci
  4. Applied Case: The Unknown Locus
  5. Applied Case: The Missing Link
  6. Applied Case: The Bing Chat
  7. Modal Systems: A Taxonomy for the Post-Language Model Stack
  8. Applied Case: The Crew
  9. Applied Case: The Epicurean Death Problem
  10. Solving the Parfit Puzzle Suite
  11. Thought Gauntlet XVIII: Antinatalism
  12. Biosphere as Structure
  13. The Narrow Path Ahead

The five keystone moves

Every route is built so the reader is forced through these five structural moves.

  1. Harm. Harm is contraction, not just suffering, blame, rights-violation, or bad feeling.
  2. Bearer. The bearer is an extant locus, not necessarily a person.
  3. Reach. Reachability matters more than abstract possibility.
  4. Weight. Weighting prevents flat optionality. Not every lost branch matters equally.
  5. Resistance. Resistance and burden transfer explain hidden harm before final closure.