Taxonomy of Extant Loci

Modal Path Ethics uses the word “locus” often because moral life does not happen only to isolated human individuals. Persons matter most clearly, but persons are not the only active sites of continuance in extance. Families continue. Cultures continue. Rivers continue. Institutions continue. Games continue. Archives continue. Symbols continue. Species continue. Some artificial systems may eventually continue in morally relevant ways. Some fields are thin, derivative, dependent, closed, or emerging, but still active enough that their future-space can open, narrow, burden, or be repaired.

A locus is a site where future-structure is morally available for analysis.

A locus is not sacred by default, automatically protected from pruning, or automatically equal to every other locus.

Not every entry below is an extant locus proper. Some entries classify active loci; some classify weakened, derivative, closed, trace-bearing, emerging, or replacement cases; some mark boundaries where locus-language should stop.

Extant Locus.

Definition: An extant locus is a real, currently active site of continuance within extance. It is not just an object, category, possibility, or idea, but something whose future-space can meaningfully open, close, burden, transition, or be repaired.

Justification: Moral analysis needs a unit of attention broader than “person” and sharper than “thing.” Persons are clear extant loci because they possess continuity, vulnerability, memory, agency, care, relation, and future-space. But other fields can also carry real continuance: ecosystems, institutions, cultures, relationships, species, games, archives, symbols, and some technical systems.

Generic examples: A person, animal, family, river, school, language, game, institution, forest, legal system, software service, archive, or public.

Specific examples: A living child. The Whanganui River as a river-field. The American chestnut as a damaged species-field.

Diagnostic Signals.

A field becomes more locus-like as it shows more of these signals:

Continuity: It persists across time as meaningfully the same field.

Boundary: It can be distinguished from surrounding extance, even if the boundary is porous.

Integration: Its parts constrain, support, or respond to one another.

Vulnerability: Its future can be narrowed, burdened, damaged, or closed.

Repairability: Damage to it can be meaningfully repaired, stabilized, or reopened.

Memory or trace: Its past remains active in its present.

Agency: It can select, respond, adapt, resist, or direct transitions.

Care: It can perceive contraction as contraction and respond to it.

Relationality: It is sustained through relations with other loci.

Future-structure: It has meaningful continuations that can open or close.

A person scores high on most of these. A game scores high on continuity, boundary, relation, trace, and repairability, but low or zero on suffering and care. A legal corporation may score high on agency and continuity, but not on embodied vulnerability. A corpse scores low as a continuing locus, but high as a trace-bearing field for grief, memory, ritual, dignity, evidence, and repair.

Strength Scale.

Strong locus: Person, many animals, close relationships.

Emergent locus: Fetus, new community, early institution, possible future artificial system.

Dependent locus: Infant, patient, server-dependent game, fragile language community.

Distributed locus: Ecosystem, culture, institution, civilization.

Thin locus: Game, symbol, archive, model, dataset.

Derivative locus: Tool, infrastructure, protocol, legal form.

Trace locus: Letter, fossil, testimony, photograph, monument.

Closed locus: Dead person, extinct species, dead game, lost language.

Non-locus: Inert object without its own future-structure.

False locus: Abstraction mistaken for an acting field.

Quick Rule.

A locus does not need to be a person.

A locus does not need to suffer.

A locus does not need legal standing.

A locus does not need to be preserved.

But a locus must be more than a label.

It must be a real site of continuance whose future can meaningfully open, close, burden, transition, or be repaired.

Not everything real is a locus. Not every locus is a person. Not every locus should be preserved. Not every non-locus is morally irrelevant.

Strong Locus

Definition: A locus with high continuity, vulnerability, future-structure, memory, relational depth, and usually agency or care.

Justification: Strong loci are the clearest moral patients and often the clearest moral agents. Their futures can be opened or closed in rich, direct ways.

Generic examples: Human persons, many nonhuman animals, close relationships, families, living communities.

Specific examples: A patient in a hospital. A child in school. A dog in a family. An elephant herd. A threatened Indigenous language community.

Person Locus

Definition: An individual human person as an embodied, socially situated site of memory, agency, vulnerability, relation, care, and future-space.

Justification: Persons are the clearest case of extant locus-status. They are not the only morally relevant loci, but they are the strongest everyday reference point.

Generic examples: A worker, parent, child, elder, prisoner, artist, patient, player, voter.

Specific examples: Janet Parker in the Shooter Inquiry. A real patient whose pain has not yet been believed by medicine. Thomas Drummond.

Animal Locus

Definition: A nonhuman animal as an embodied site of experience, vulnerability, continuity, preference, relation, and survival.

Justification: Animals are not moral scenery. Many have pain, memory, social bonds, fear, pleasure, preference, and future-directed behavior. Their moral relevance does not depend on legal personhood or human-like speech.

Generic examples: Dogs, cows, whales, octopuses, crows, elephants, laboratory mice.

Specific examples: Joe Martin. A lab mouse in a research protocol. A farm animal in an industrial food system. A pet dog whose future is tied to a human household.

Developing Locus

Definition: A locus whose future-structure is actively forming and whose current status is graded, dependent, or emerging.

Justification: Development is morally active, but not a magic switch. A developing locus gains integration, vulnerability, continuity, and future-structure over time.

Generic examples: Fetus, infant, child, young ecosystem, forming institution, early artificial system, new community.

Specific examples: A fetus embedded in the pregnant person’s body. A newly forming school program. A restored wetland in its early years. A prototype artificial system with persistent memory but unclear locus-signals.

Dependent Locus

Definition: A locus whose future-space depends heavily on another locus or supporting field.

Justification: Dependency does not reduce moral status. It changes the burden structure. The supporting locus must also remain visible.

Generic examples: Infant, disabled person requiring care, patient on life support, fetus, captive animal, fragile language community, server-dependent game.

Specific examples: A coma patient dependent on medical infrastructure. A fetus dependent on the pregnant person. The Crew dependent on Ubisoft’s servers. An endangered language dependent on a small speaker community.

Agent Locus

Definition: A locus capable of selecting among paths and acting into the field in ways that alter reachability.

Justification: Agency creates responsibility because the locus does not only receive transitions; it helps produce them.

Generic examples: Human adult, corporation, government, court, hospital, publisher, artificial agent.

Specific examples: Ubisoft as publisher in The Crew. A court deciding legal standing. A hospital triage board. A future artificial system directing physical tools.

Care-Capable Locus

Definition: A locus capable of perceiving contraction as contraction and responding to it as morally salient.

Justification: Care is not the same as intelligence. A system can optimize without caring. A person can reason without truthful contact. Care is the moral availability to harm as harm. Care differentiates between loci that see the field, and those that simply move inside it.

Generic examples: Most humans, some animals in limited relational forms, possible future artificial agents if they develop care-like responsiveness.

Specific examples: A parent responding to a child’s distress. A nurse preserving a patient’s dignity. A friend refusing to let a harmed relation disappear into silence.

Relationship Locus

Definition: A continuing relation between loci with its own future-structure.

Justification: A relationship is not just the sum of the individuals. It can be built, betrayed, repaired, burdened, or closed.

Generic examples: Friendship, marriage, rivalry, mentorship, parent-child relation, creative partnership.

Specific examples: Bruce Wayne and Alfred. A medical care relation. A teacher-student mentorship. A marriage damaged by hidden debt.

Family Locus

Definition: A kinship, household, or chosen-family field with shared memory, dependency, care, burden, history, and future.

Justification: Families distribute futures. They can preserve care, hide harm, transfer burden, or open paths unavailable to isolated persons.

Generic examples: Nuclear family, chosen family, multigenerational household, caregiving family.

Specific examples: A family caring for an elder. A household shaped by addiction.

Community Locus

Definition: A local or relational collective with shared practices, memory, norms, belonging, and mutual exposure.

Justification: Communities create futures individuals cannot create alone. They can also normalize harm and punish truth-contact.

Generic examples: Neighborhood, church, fan community, tournament scene, school cohort, mutual-aid network.

Specific examples: A competitive Pokémon tier community. A small church after scandal. A neighborhood organized around flood repair.

Culture Locus

Definition: A historically extended field of language, memory, art, ritual, skill, value, practice, and transmission.

Justification: A culture is not just content. It is a living transmission-field. Archiving a culture is not the same as preserving the culture.

Generic examples: Indigenous culture, regional culture, craft tradition, religious tradition, musical tradition, cuisine tradition.

Specific examples: A living language community. A traditional craft passed through apprentices. A religious community whose ritual calendar shapes time and care.

Language Locus

Definition: A living language as a field of speech, memory, category, relation, story, and world-disclosure.

Justification: A language carries more than vocabulary. It carries ways of noticing, relating, remembering, and repairing.

Generic examples: Spoken languages, sign languages, endangered languages, dialects, technical vocabularies.

Specific examples: Scots as a language field in the Scots Wikipedia case. Cherokee revitalization. American Sign Language as a living linguistic field, not just a communication tool.

Institution Locus

Definition: A durable arrangement of roles, rules, procedures, incentives, authority, memory, and action.

Justification: Institutions persist across persons and act into fields. They can repair, distort, hide, preserve, punish, and transfer burden.

Generic examples: Court, hospital, university, publisher, police department, church, laboratory, company.

Specific examples: Arkham Asylum as a fictional institution. Ubisoft as a publisher. The University of Birmingham’s smallpox laboratory. A court system processing harm through legal categories.

Public Locus

Definition: A broad civic field composed of people, institutions, shared records, infrastructure, law, language, and collective future.

Justification: A public can be informed, misled, mobilized, ignored, governed, or burdened. It is not one person, but it can still carry shared future-space.

Generic examples: Electorate, city public, national public, public health field, affected residents.

Specific examples: The EU public field responding to digital game shutdowns. American voters. A town affected by industrial pollution.

Civilization Locus

Definition: A large-scale historical arrangement of institutions, technologies, norms, energy systems, law, violence, memory, and reproduction.

Justification: Civilizations shape ordinary reachability for vast numbers of loci. They can open extraordinary futures while normalizing hidden contraction.

Generic examples: Industrial civilization, digital civilization, liberal democracy, imperial civilization, scientific civilization.

Specific examples: Modern data-center civilization. The Council-space civilization in Mass Effect. Industrial modernity as a climate-altering field.

Ecosystem Locus

Definition: A distributed living field of species, flows, cycles, habitat, reproduction, predation, repair, and vulnerability.

Justification: An ecosystem lacks a single body but still has continuity, integration, vulnerability, relation, and repair paths.

Generic examples: Forest, reef, wetland, grassland, river system, soil ecology.

Specific examples: An old-growth forest. A coral reef under bleaching pressure. A wetland protecting a community from floods. The eastern forests changed by chestnut blight.

Species Locus

Definition: A lineage-field carrying genetic, ecological, evolutionary, and reproductive future-space.

Justification: Species carry branching biological continuance across generations. But not every species has the same moral profile; continuation can open or close futures elsewhere.

Generic examples: Wolves, humans, smallpox.

Specific examples: American chestnut as a damaged lineage-field. Northern white rhino as a nearly closed reproductive field.

Habitat Locus

Definition: A physical-ecological field that supports continuance for other loci.

Justification: Habitat matters partly through dependency. Destroying it can close many futures without directly targeting any one individual.

Generic examples: Nesting ground, spawning stream, old-growth forest, reef, prairie, river delta.

Specific examples: A salmon spawning stream. A sea turtle nesting beach. A migratory bird wetland. A reef supporting fish, tourism, coastal protection, and cultural memory.

River or Landform Locus

Definition: A geophysical-ecological continuant with flow, boundary, relation, cultural meaning, support function, and vulnerability.

Justification: A river or landform does not need to be a person to have moral relevance. Its field-continuity can carry ecological, cultural, legal, historical, and infrastructural futures.

Generic examples: River, watershed, mountain, estuary, glacier, desert basin.

Specific examples: The Whanganui River. The Mississippi River watershed. A glacier whose loss changes water futures for downstream communities.

Pre-Life Generative Locus

Definition: A nonliving or not-yet-living field whose conditions could enable later life, complexity, agency, or future loci.

Justification: Pre-life harm is one of Modal Path Ethics’s distinctive strengths. A field can be harmed before life appears if the transition toward life or complexity is closed.

Generic examples: Prebiotic ocean, hydrothermal system, habitable exoplanet, proto-planetary disk, chemical gradient.

Specific examples: A possible ocean-world biosignature field. A proto-planetary disk disrupted before planet formation. A racemic chemical gradient whose loss narrows later biological possibility.

Unknown Locus

Definition: A candidate field whose locus-status is uncertain but plausible enough that erasure would destroy the path to knowing.

Justification: Unknown does not mean empty. Unknown also does not mean sacred. It means the field requires anti-erasure caution where irreversible action would destroy the evidence of what the candidate was.

Generic examples: Possible alien biosignature, coma patient, ambiguous AI system, developing organism, strange ecosystem.

Specific examples: A nonresponsive patient with uncertain awareness. An extraterrestrial sample site that might contain pre-life chemistry. A future AI system with persistent memory and self-modeling.

Artificial System Locus

Definition: A technical system with enough continuity, memory, responsiveness, relation, vulnerability, self-maintenance, or field-effect to become morally active.

Justification: The substrate does not settle the case. “Only software” is not analysis. The question is whether a continuing future-structure exists.

Generic examples:
Future AI agent, persistent model instance, autonomous lab system, robotic collective, long-running software world.

Specific examples:
A persistent AI assistant with memory and self-protective behavior, if such a system develops. A self-driving laboratory system coordinating experiments over time.

Infrastructure Locus

Definition: A technical-social support field that preserves or controls future-space for many loci.

Justification: Infrastructure is not neutral background. It distributes access, safety, dependence, and vulnerability.

Generic examples: Electrical grid, water system, hospital network, public transit, cloud platform, internet backbone.

Specific examples: A city water system. A regional power grid during a heat wave. Cloud infrastructure supporting public services. A hospital network during pandemic triage.

Protocol Locus

Definition: A shared operational grammar that lets agents or systems coordinate across time.

Justification: Protocols shape what transitions are possible. They can preserve interoperability or create lockout.

Generic examples: Internet protocol, legal procedure, scientific method, game ruleset, lab automation standard.

Specific examples: TCP/IP. A digital microfluidics conformance protocol. Tournament rules in competitive play. Court evidence procedure.

Dataset Locus

Definition: A structured record-field whose contents, labels, exclusions, provenance, and uses shape future decisions.

Justification: Data is not raw reality. A dataset is a compression of a field that may later act on people, institutions, and futures.

Generic examples: Medical dataset, AI training corpus, census dataset, crime database, climate record.

Specific examples: A medical imaging dataset used to train diagnostic tools. A policing database used for risk scores. A climate dataset used to guide policy.

Model Locus

Definition: A mathematical, computational, or predictive structure that acts into extance through decisions, classifications, forecasts, rankings, or recommendations.

Justification: A model is not just descriptive once institutions act through it. It can open, close, rank, deny, approve, flag, or distort futures.

Generic examples: Credit model, risk model, AI model, climate model, recommendation system, ranking algorithm.

Specific examples: A credit scoring model denying housing. An AI benchmark shaping development priorities. A recidivism risk model used by courts. A social media ranking model shifting public attention.

Game Locus

Definition: A bounded playable system with rules, states, affordances, records, memory, community, and future play.

Justification: A game can continue, close, be preserved, be solved, be corrupted, be made unreachable, or become culturally active.

Generic examples: Chess, Go, tabletop campaign, live-service game, single-player RPG, tournament format.

Specific examples: The Crew before shutdown. RBY UU as a living competitive field. Chirality as a developing game-field. Chess as a formal game with living play cultures.

Play-Field Locus

Definition: The lived field of actual play around a game: players, etiquette, discovery, skill, metagame, records, memory, and community.

Justification: The rulebook or software is not the whole game. Play happens through agents and norms.

Generic examples: Speedrun category, tournament scene, tabletop group, competitive tier, online guild.

Specific examples: RBY UU suspect voting. A Melee tournament scene debating wobbling. A speedrun leaderboard after a rule change. A Dungeons & Dragons campaign table.

Character Locus

Definition: A fictional figure as a cultural field-object with continuity, interpretive history, public meaning, and downstream effects in our extance.

Justification: The character is not a person in our world, but the cultural field around the character can still act on real moral imagination.

Generic examples: Superheroes, literary figures, game protagonists, mythic heroes.

Specific examples:
The Batman as a symbolic field. Commander Shepard as a player-shaped moral figure. Hamlet as a long-running cultural locus. Barbie as a commercial-symbolic locus.

Symbolic Locus

Definition: A recurring sign, image, phrase, emblem, or myth that persists through public uptake and shapes action.

Justification: Symbols coordinate, authorize, warn, distort, remember, and mobilize. They are not decoration when they alter field behavior.

Generic examples: Flag, protest slogan, religious symbol, brand mark, superhero emblem.

Specific examples: The Batman symbol. A national flag. A ribbon campaign. A corporate logo in a trust field.

Narrative Locus

Definition: A story-field that organizes memory, causality, identity, responsibility, expectation, and repair.

Justification: Stories are not less real than numbers when they shape what agents can see and do. A narrative can restore truth-contact or become false repair.

Generic examples: Origin story, national myth, family story, institutional report, conspiracy theory.

Specific examples: The official story of Chernobyl in HBO’s miniseries. The Darien Scheme as national memory. The “Joker inspired Aurora” rumor as a symbolic distortion field. A family story that hides abuse.

Archive Locus

Definition: A record-preservation field with continuity, access, curation, memory, and future knowledge.

Justification: An archive can preserve access to a closed or threatened field. It can also become a false replacement for living continuance.

Generic examples: Library, museum, oral history project, game preservation archive, family archive.

Specific examples: A museum holding cultural artifacts away from their source community. A video archive of a dead live-service game. A language archive after living speakers are gone.

Present Locus

Definition: A currently active locus whose future-space remains reachable.

Justification: This is the standard form of locus analysis: what can still be opened, preserved, stabilized, or repaired.

Generic examples: Living person, active community, functioning institution, ongoing game.

Specific examples: A still-playable game community. A living language. A patient whose care path remains open.

Closed Locus

Definition: A formerly active locus whose continuance has ended, but whose trace remains morally active.

Justification: Closure does not erase moral relevance. Dignity, memory, grief, evidence, warning, and repair may remain.

Generic examples: Dead person, extinct species, closed institution, dead game, lost language.

Specific examples: A dead family member whose body and memory remain morally active. A game shut down without preservation. An extinct lineage known through fossils.

Trace Locus

Definition: A surviving artifact, memory, record, mark, or message from a closed or altered field that acts in the continuing field.

Justification: A trace is not full preservation, but it can carry active causal or interpretive force.

Generic examples: Letter, fossil, testimony, photograph, save file, monument, scar.

Specific examples: Thomas Wayne’s letter after Flashpoint. A fossil from an extinct species. A testimony record from a closed inquiry. A family photograph.

Possible Locus

Definition: A future locus that could exist but does not currently exist in extance.

Justification: Possible loci matter through present reachability, but they are not already extant. Non-creation is not the same as killing an active locus.

Generic examples: Future child, future AI, future civilization, future artwork, possible ecosystem recovery.

Specific examples: A child who might be conceived later. A future Mars biosphere. A game that could be developed but never is.

Emerging Locus

Definition: A locus crossing from possibility into active structured continuance.

Justification: Emergence is graded. It is not a single magical threshold. Protection and caution increase as integration, vulnerability, and future-structure increase.

Generic examples: Developing organism, new institution, forming community, early biosphere, prototype artificial agent.

Specific examples: A fetus. A newly founded school. A reef restoration field. A young online community.

Replacement Locus

Definition: A new locus arranged to continue, imitate, restore, or replace a prior closed locus without automatically preserving identity-continuity.

Justification: Replacement may be valuable. It may open real futures. It does not erase the closure of the prior locus by default.

Generic examples: Cloned mind, restored archive, rebuilt institution, revived server, recreated habitat, alternate timeline.

Specific examples: A fan-rebuilt version of a dead game. A restored church after fire. A revived language program after transmission broke.

Branch Locus

Definition: A divergent continuance from a prior field, retaining ancestry while developing its own future-space.

Justification: Branches can become independently extant rather than inferior copies of the origin.

Generic examples: Forked software project, diaspora culture, game variant, splinter institution, alternate timeline.

Specific examples: A Linux distribution fork. A language diaspora. A board game variant. A religious schism. A private server community after an official shutdown. Batman Beyond.

Legal Locus

Definition: A field recognized, constituted, or stabilized by law as a standing entity.

Justification: Legal recognition changes reachability, protection, liability, ownership, and public standing. It does not create extance from nothing or erase extance by refusal.

Generic examples: Corporation, trust, estate, municipality, legally recognized river, state.

Specific examples: A corporation as legal person. The Whanganui River as legally recognized person. A charitable trust. A city government.

Democratic Locus

Definition: A voting or self-governing field that expresses collective agency through procedure.

Justification: Democratic loci select futures. But the vote is not the field. Inclusion, exclusion, information, standing, and correction paths matter.

Generic examples: Electorate, club membership, shareholder body, union vote, tournament voter pool.

Specific examples: An EU citizens’ initiative. A national election. RBY UU suspect voters. A neighborhood association vote.

Economic Locus

Definition: A structured field of exchange, labor, debt, price, scarcity, ownership, and dependency.

Justification: Economic fields directly alter reachability. They decide what can be accessed, who bears cost, and what futures become affordable or impossible.

Generic examples: Market, household economy, company, gig platform, labor sector.

Specific examples: A housing market. A digital storefront. A medical debt field. A board game publisher-manufacturer relation.

Work Locus

Definition: A labor field where time, body, skill, agency, identity, survival, and obligation interact.

Justification: Work consumes future-space and can also open it. It should not be treated as virtue by default.

Generic examples: Job, workplace, craft, vocation, unpaid care work, gig arrangement.

Specific examples: A nurse’s shift. A game studio under crunch. A parent’s unpaid caregiving. A freelance artist contract.

Educational Locus

Definition: A structured field for forming knowledge, future agency, discipline, credentialed standing, or compliance.

Justification: Education can open futures. It can also sort bodies, train submission, burden children, and narrow curiosity.

Generic examples: School, university, apprenticeship, online course, training program.

Specific examples: A public school. A software engineering degree program. A trade apprenticeship. A standardized testing system.

Medical Locus

Definition: A repair field around bodies, diagnosis, treatment, testimony, risk, care, and institutions.

Justification: Medicine acts directly on embodied future-space. Diagnosis is not the person. Treatment is not automatically repair.

Generic examples: Hospital, clinic, patient-care relation, public health system, therapy field.

Specific examples: A coma-care team. A cancer treatment plan. A public vaccination campaign. A pain clinic.

Thin Locus

Definition: A locus with real continuity and field-effect but limited or absent suffering, agency, or care.

Justification: Thin locus-status prevents “not a person” from becoming “nothing” while still preserving moral scale.

Generic examples: Game, symbol, archive, institution, dataset, model.

Specific examples: The Crew as a game-field. The Batman as cultural symbol. A museum archive. A benchmark dataset.

Derivative Locus

Definition: A locus whose moral relevance depends heavily on the loci it supports, records, coordinates, or affects.

Justification: Derivative loci matter through relation. Their loss can harm the fields that depend on them.

Generic examples: Tool system, archive, infrastructure, dataset, protocol, legal form.

Specific examples: A wheelchair. A cloud platform supporting hospitals. A family photo archive. A public transit system.

False Locus

Definition: An abstraction, role, metric, category, brand, or system-language treated as though it were a coherent locus in order to hide real agents, burdens, and decisions.

Justification: False loci allow responsibility to disappear into language.

Generic examples:
“The market decided.” “The algorithm decided.” “History demands.” “The audience wants.” “Shareholder value requires.”

Specific examples:
A company blaming “the algorithm” for a policy choice. A government blaming “the economy” while choosing austerity. A publisher saying “the market moved on” when it made a shutdown decision.

Non-Locus Object

Definition: A real object without enough continuity, vulnerability, repairability, agency, or future-structure to count as a locus in its own right.

Justification: Not every real thing carries its own morally active future. But non-loci can still matter through relation, dependence, memory, evidence, or use.

Generic examples: Rock, chair, hammer, disconnected file, ordinary tool, inert object.

Specific examples: A hammer in a workshop. A chair in a classroom. A stone in a field. A broken laptop that matters because it contains someone’s work.

Non-Extant Possibility

Definition: A possibility that has not entered extance and therefore does not currently carry its own active continuance.

Justification: Possibilities matter by changing the reachability of extant fields. They should not be treated as already-existing victims or beneficiaries.

Generic examples: Possible child, possible artwork, possible invention, possible institution, possible future civilization.

Specific examples: A novel never written. A child never conceived. A game prototype never built. A future Mars settlement not yet attempted.