Morality is about what we owe one another once we meet not as objects but as fellow conscious beings: creatures who can be hurt and helped and who can read each other. The core idea is simple: to act well is to act in a way that *enlarges* another being's life and possibilities, and to act badly is to shrink them. Harm is not a label an outsider stamps on an act; another creature's distress is its own condition showing through, plain evidence of what your action is doing to it. From this one starting point the familiar moral furniture follows (do no harm, help where you can, respect a person's say over their own life, seek their consent), not as separate rules but as different faces of the same fact. And what we feel most fiercely about being wronged is real, not illusion: it is what it is like, from the inside, for one exposed being to be used by another.

> [!identification]
> **Morality** · *Identification*
>
> Morality is an agent's alignment toward *fostering other subjects*, acting on real attunement to what would sustain the subjects it meets in shared exposure ([§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>)) and let them deepen, and away from corroding them. It is the [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) field-expansion drive turned outward: what drive is for one's own field, morality is for others'. Immorality is the alignment toward corroding another subject, or acting on one's projection of what fosters it rather than attending to what does.
> *Status: an identity claim on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) intersubjective structure (Principle 5), defended by fit; whether one ought to so align is argued downstream ([§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)), not packed into the identification.*

> [!identification]
> **Wrong** · *Identification*
>
> A wrong is an agent's corrosion of a subject against its own registered aversion: one subject's exposure used against it while its stake in what befalls it is treated as though it carried no claim. The aversion at issue is the standing kind: a weighted branch in the subject's own modal field ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)), felt at the prospect and not only at the event, so that a wrong is no less a wrong for going undetected by the one it is done to. The reflexive *its own* does real work. An aversion to what is done to oneself grounds a claim, while an aversion to how another being lives its own life does not, which is why acting on the latter is itself a corrosion rather than a ground for one. And the weight of the corrosion is graded by the depth of the subject corroded, not switched on at a species boundary. To weigh a lesser stake and be forced to override it under genuine necessity is not yet to wrong it; to act as though it registered nothing is. The compact form of the identification: a wrong is *depth-weighted disregard* of a subject's aversion to its own fate.
> *Status: an identity claim on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) intersubjective structure (Principle 5), defended by fit; that a wrong binds the agent who commits it, and not only injures the subject who suffers it, is argued downstream ([§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)), not packed into the identification.*

Beings that can share what is the case with each other ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)) come available to each other as more than information channels, as subjects: exposed, vulnerable, mutually registering. What they owe each other in that exposure is what morality names. Moral wrongness goes beyond preference violation. The experience of being wronged carries the structure of a claim: one that persists regardless of whether the agent who acted acknowledges it, and one that demands a response Nature itself does not supply. That structure is diagnostic: it reveals features of the moral domain that any adequate naturalist account must accommodate.

Two subjects persist, occupy genuinely different positions, and meet across an exchange that cannot be undone. One acts; the other is acted upon. Distinction, persistence, succession (Space, Substance, Time) are not conditions moral life happens to require. They are what moral life consists in.

The same fact, in this chapter's native vocabulary: morality is the choice to foster another being. A being is what [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) named from the inside: a life that drives and registers its own condition, and that ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)) feels; the closed self-producing recursion of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>), met as the one whose life it is. Fostering another being is the choice, made from inside one's own, to act on real attunement to what would actually sustain its life and let it deepen. *Foster* carries the anti-paternalism: one cannot foster what one has not seen clearly. And it covers the full range: gentle nurture where that is what would sustain the other being, fierce defense where *that* is what would. Immorality is the choice to corrode another being, or to act on one's projection of what fosters it rather than attending to what does.

This attunement has a phenomenological floor. Beings read themselves, and the readings are what we call feeling. The structural account predicts a reductive identification of the major affects with the dimensions along which a being registers its own condition: *pain* with damage as it lands; *fear* with anticipated damage not yet landed; *anxiety* with ongoing registration without resolution; *grief* with damage already done; *joy* with deepening — flow opening, the recursion taking on more capacity. These are stronger identifications than contemporary affect science endorses (each affect remains contested among representational, evaluative, and sensory accounts; Tye 2008; Klein 2015; Kurth 2018; Ratcliffe 2008), and the section does not require the strong reading to do its moral work. What it does require is the weaker unifying claim those debates leave intact: each affect is the being's own situation surfacing as what it is to be that being right now, not commentary on the situation from outside it. Each being is therefore continuously broadcasting its own conditions. To foster another is to read those readings: the fear showing where the current is unstable, the grief what it has lost, the joy where it is opening.

What ordinary speech calls *feeling someone's energy* is this kind of reading across beings. The empathic-accuracy and thin-slicing literatures (Ambady and Rosenthal 1992; Ickes 2003) document that observers recover information about another's state from brief integrated impressions of face, voice, posture, breath, and movement-rhythm at rates above chance, with effect sizes that scale with attention and exposure. What folk vocabulary calls *energy* is the actual physiological and informational state of the being those signals emerge from, not a second substance flowing alongside the physical, but the physical state the broadcasts make legible. The phrase tracks something real, even though the implied metaphysics (auras, fields, fluids) is mistaken.

The standard categories of moral philosophy follow from this structure as derivations rather than primitives. Non-maleficence (the duty not to harm) is the recognition that another subject's affective broadcasts are direct evidence of what an act is doing to them; harm is not a value an external observer projects but the subject's own condition surfacing as what it is to be them. Beneficence (the duty to foster) follows from the fact that beings persist by throughput, not inertia, so that one being can genuinely deepen another's flow when the action is read accurately. Autonomy is the consequence of a structural epistemic asymmetry: a subject has privileged access to its own conditions that no external observer can match, which makes the subject's own authorization the most reliable available proxy for what would foster it. Consent is autonomy's operational form — the authorization made public and verifiable, with *informed*, *voluntary*, and *competent* naming the conditions under which the subject's self-knowledge can be trusted as the basis for action by others.[^8-12-0-consent-directedness] Read against the will account ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)), these conditions are the axes of free will turned outward: to corrode another being's field of possibility is to attack either its *field* (by deception or miseducation, so that the outcomes it weighs are not the real ones) or its *latitude* (by coercion or force, so that outcomes correctly weighed cannot be acted on); consent fails under either, the first defeating informed competence and the second voluntariness. The field-attack prohibition is scoped the same reflexive way the claim against being wronged is. What deception corrodes is a subject's grip on its own possibilities, so the claim to a true field reaches only as far as the field the subject navigates for itself. A truth sought as an instrument to dissolve another subject's possibilities falls outside that claim: the murderer at the door, demanding to know where the hidden victim is, has no claim to the information he would use to seize a latitude that is not his to take. The lie that turns him away corrodes nothing the structure protects, because the only interest it crosses is his interest in committing the wrong. Information is not owed as such; it is owed as a condition of a subject navigating its own life, never as a weapon against another's. Slavery is the limit case of the latitude-attack: not a single coerced choice but the standing seizure of another being's entire latitude (the whole field of outcomes it might weigh held permanently beyond its power to act on), one being treating another, whose refusal is owed exactly the respect its own is owed, as though that refusal carried no weight at all. Mill's harm principle (Mill 1859) follows immediately: a subject's freedom to direct its own course extends until that course begins to corrode another's, because freedom and the limits on it both rest on the same metaphysics of distinct subjects in shared exchange.

The dyadic form of the relation is symmetric in its own right. Each subject's refusal is respected because the same respect is owed in return; what one being may not do to another without authorization is what no being may have done to it without authorization either. The reciprocity is not added to the moral relation from outside as a fairness constraint; it is what mutual recognition between distinct subjects already consists in. This moral reciprocity has a mutual-holding shape, but its ground is shared exposure and structural reciprocity, not Theorem 9 (Modal Convergence, [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)), whose formal scope is collectively held knowledge.

This mutual subsistence has an embodied root that predates every sign and norm that later carries it. Sexuality ([§8.6](<8.6 Sexuality.md>)) is the attraction-pole's reach of one being toward another, and it is where subjects first meet as subjects: the body's pull toward another body, registered before language or principle mediates it. The subsistence-*for* that morality names between distinct subjects in shared exchange begins there, in the most embodied coupling there is; the more mediated couplings (language [§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>), art [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>), and moral exchange itself) extend from that root rather than replacing it.

Distinct operations carry this reciprocity from the dyad outward, and each rests on machinery the chapter has already developed. One is empathy: the body running another's situation as a counterfactual on its own valence field ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)), where the simulation lands as feeling on the other's behalf because, mechanically, it lands as feeling about a possible-self. The reach of empathy is bounded by the modal depth of the body running it (the breadth of stored possibility from which counterfactual situations can be drawn), and that depth is just memory in the [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) sense, with all of memory's selectivity and partial coverage. What we can simulate is what we have stored as possible; what we have stored as possible is what experience and inheritance have left in the network; so the empathic reach of any body is necessarily narrower than the field of subjects to whom morality must answer.

Another operation is shared exposure. When bodies share a modal field densely enough (a family, a household, a community), what happens to one registers in all, because the same vulnerability runs through every body whose simulation includes the others. The collective-protective response (*how do we prevent this from happening to any of us*) is the felt form of reciprocity at the communal scale. It does not need to be argued for or codified; it fires automatically inside the shared-exposure community because the community *is* the region where the modal fields overlap densely enough for one body's harm to register as every body's potential harm. This is why grief is communal, why family and home concentrate moral weight, and why the dread of being alone is the dread of unshared modal exposure.

A further operation is the structural extension past the community boundary. The same evolved machinery that makes solidarity automatic inside the tribe makes wariness automatic outside it; communal reciprocity does not, on its own, scale past those whose bodies feel like *us*. The structural step is the recognition that the exposure logic is symmetric across all subjects whether or not the simulation actually fires: that what binds when empathy and shared field carry the verdict still binds when neither does, because the structural fact of mutual exposure does not require felt resonance to hold. This last step rests on a single commitment the section marks rather than buries: that another being's conditions *matter* (and so are something an agent can fail to track) is a fact about that being's standing, not an artifact of whether the agent's field happens to register it. Where recognition fires, the mattering is felt; where it does not, it still holds.

*The prudential egoist does not escape by changing the grammar of their demand.* The earlier formulation needs a limit. An agent can treat resentment, protest, and retaliation as nothing more than prudential responses: *do not deceive me because I will impose costs if you do*, not *do not deceive me because I have a claim against it*. That posture does not yet contradict itself. A conditional threat is intelligible as a preference backed by power, and the framework should not pretend that every expression of resistance secretly contains a normative assertion. The performative argument therefore does not establish that a subject's standing depends on every agent acknowledging it, nor does it turn the pure prudential demander into a wanton merely because they refuse moral vocabulary.

What the prudential gloss cannot establish is an exemption from the relation. It can explain why the egoist resists being corroded; it cannot make corrosion cease to be what it is for the subject on its receiving end. The agent's preference and retaliatory capacity change the expected consequences of acting against them, but neither changes the fact that the same act uses another exposed subject against that subject's own registered aversion. Standing is fixed by that relation, not conferred by the agent's willingness to speak its name. The ground of the claim is negative and reflexive, exactly as the Wrong identification scopes it: a subject's registered aversion to what is done to *it*, never anyone's positive preference about what to do toward another. Preferences about others' conduct or others' lives ground nothing; the aversion to one's own corrosion grounds everything the relation protects. And the only release from a subject's claim is the one the subject itself provides: consent, autonomy's operational form (above). A claim belongs to the exposed subject, not to the agent who would act against it, so nothing on the agent's side (prudential posture, indifference, hostility, or refusal of moral vocabulary) can waive it; only the subject's own authorization can. The egoist may decline to *recognize* the standing, and may in that sense remain unmoved by its claim; that is a failure of moral alignment, not a discovery of a space outside morality.

The performative line accordingly has a narrower but firmer role. Where an agent presents their demand as a demand for justified treatment, condemnation, blame, or respect, they already invoke the reciprocal standing they deny to another, and the denial is performatively unstable in the sense [§3.3](<3.3 Triconditional Necessity Negative Account.md>) makes precise. Where they instead present only a threat-backed preference, no such contradiction follows, but neither does a justification: force can explain compliance without supplying a reason why corrosion is permissible. The framework therefore distinguishes three things that the earlier dichotomy compressed: the moral claimant, whose claim presupposes reciprocity; the prudential egoist, whose preference may be coherent but does not discharge or defeat another's standing; and the wanton, who lacks the formed second-order will from which full moral agency operates. *Status: fit on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) structure identifies what mattering and wrong are; the performative argument exposes the inconsistency of normatively voiced denial; neither makes a pure prudential preference into a moral premise. The prudential egoist is then caught where the ground actually sits: their reflexive aversion to their own corrosion is the very feature present in those they exempt themselves from, and indexicality is access, not ground ([§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)). The egoist is not exempt because standing is not theirs to grant.* Where empathy supplies the affective engine and shared exposure supplies the natural generalization, structural reciprocity supplies the rule that carries the verdict across difference, distance, and unfamiliarity. Consent operationalizes the reciprocity at the dyadic scale; communal practice operationalizes it at the field scale; institutional structure operationalizes it past the community boundary. The same exposure logic appears across all of them; only the means of honoring it change with scale. The last of these is developed at §9: institutional reciprocity scaled to populations large enough that face-to-face response is no longer the available form of maintenance.

These operations carry reciprocity outward universally, but they do not exhaust the moral relation, and a position the framework should keep apart from itself rather than absorb is the partial register Frankfurt named. Frankfurt (2004) argued that what one agent owes its beloved is not derivable from the impartial principles owed to subjects in general, that a parent's reasons toward this child, a friend's toward this friend, a partner's toward this partner are reasons because the caring has formed, not because impartial reflection has endorsed them, and that their partiality is not a defect to be corrected against the universalist baseline but the proper shape of moral weight along the actual depth of an agent's commitments. The structural account agrees and locates the phenomenon: where shared exposure runs through one being's modal field densely enough that the simulation of another's situation lands not as a possible-self among many but as a possible-self the being cannot release without losing what it is, the felt-best branches it tracks for that other carry weight no impartial accounting can match or substitute. Partial reasons are not exceptions the universalist framework tolerates, but neither are they derived from it, and the distinction the section must hold is between what the field *locates* and what it *grounds*. The structural field predicts and locates the phenomenon at the level of kind: that intense partial attachments will arise, and where, since the densest regions of mutual modal exposure are both where their affective mass collects and where a history capable of forming such an attachment can run at all. What the field does not do is ground the attachment at the level of the particular. Why this child, this friend, this partner rather than another is not read off any regularity, impartial or structural, but fixed by the particular history through which the caring formed; that history is the caring's own ground in Frankfurt's sense, not a value the field assigns. The field marks the conditions under which a particular caring can take hold without deriving which caring does, and it is the latter that Frankfurt calls irreducible. So the framework holds both without collapsing either: the impartial structural rule that binds across all subjects whether or not the simulation fires, and the partial weight that binds hardest where a formed caring has the deepest purchase, a weight the field can locate but neither substitute for nor explain away. They are two registers of one field in that the field is where each is felt, not in the sense that the structural register generates the partial one. Locating a phenomenon is not absorbing it, and it is only the locating the account claims.

The verb the chapter has been leaning on (*foster*) points to the same strand from another angle, and Frankfurt's account of caring and volitional necessity is what names it. To care about another being is, on Frankfurt's reading (1988, 2004), not to have judged that one ought to care but to be the kind of being whose will is now shaped around the caring: invested in a way that is not freely revisable from moment to moment because the investment has become part of what the will is. The fostering the chapter has been describing is this kind of investment surfaced as action: not impartial benevolence executed by a being that could just as well not have, but the doing that follows from a will already organized around the other's continuation. Frankfurt's *volitional necessity* (Luther's *here I stand, I can do no other*) names the limit case: the agent who cannot betray what they care about is differently situated, morally, from the agent merely required not to. The structural account predicts this contrast without difficulty. A being whose modal field has integrated another's persistence into the conditions of its own continued integration cannot release that other without releasing part of itself; the impossibility is not weakness of will or compulsion from outside but the shape the will has taken from the inside, the same shape Modal Convergence (T9, [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) describes from the structural side. *Foster*, restated, is the action of a will so shaped, and marking it as volitional rather than merely structural gives the chapter its missing register for the moral weight caring itself carries, beyond and through whatever structural reciprocity also requires.

Frankfurt's wanton presses the framework on a real boundary. The wanton is a creature who acts on first-order desires without ever stepping back to ask whether those desires are the ones it wants to be moved by: no second-order will, no commitment, no caring as a structural feature of the will. The wanton meets the mutual-exposure conditions structurally: it is a being, it broadcasts its conditions, it can be harmed and helped. The structural rule binds *toward* the wanton (it is owed non-corrosion like any other subject), but the question Frankfurt presses is whether the wanton can be a full moral agent *from* whom such treatment is owed in return. The structural account's answer is that the wanton is a subject for whom the impartial rule applies as patient but only marginally as agent, because the volitional strand is what carries the agent-side weight: a being that has formed no caring has nothing in its will the moral relation can grip from inside. This does not strip the wanton of moral standing; it locates the asymmetry exactly. Patiency follows from being one that registers its own conditions; full agency follows from being one whose will has taken the shape caring imposes. The structural and volitional strands run together for ordinary agents and come apart precisely at the wanton, which is why Frankfurt's case is diagnostic rather than peripheral.

The field's weights are asymmetric in a way that shapes everything moral cognition does with them. Catastrophic harms cannot be recovered from; smaller gains can be deferred or replaced. A body whose modal field weighted gains and losses symmetrically would survive less reliably than one that weighted losses more heavily, and the field's calibration tracks this: stored aversive possibilities carry more affective mass than stored appetitive ones at equivalent magnitude. Loss-aversion in behavioral economics is one empirical index of the same calibration: losses are typically felt close to twice as strongly as equivalent gains, the asymmetry introduced in Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and quantified at a coefficient near 2.25 in Tversky and Kahneman (1992). The magnitude is not the universal constant early summaries implied: post-2018 work has shown loss-aversion to be context-dependent, attenuating or even disappearing for small and symmetrically framed stakes (Gal and Rucker 2018) while persisting in the high-stakes, consequential domains where unrecoverable losses are in play, which is precisely the regime the survival calibration predicts. Moral cognition inherits this weighting directly. *Do no harm* sits before *do good* in every major ethical tradition; the Hippocratic Oath leads with *primum non nocere*; the negative golden rule (*do not do to others*) predates the positive form in most traditions that have both; deontological prohibitions register conviction more sharply than positive duties register encouragement; and judgment of wrongdoing is hot in a way praise for supererogation is not. The pattern is not a quirk of moral psychology; it is the affective output of a modal field whose weights were calibrated by a survival regime in which avoiding catastrophic branches mattered more than locating slightly better ones.

Justice extends the picture from pairs to fields. Subjects exchange inside a shared field of further subjects whose conditions either sustain or starve continued participation; the maintenance of those conditions (food, shelter, safety, time, and access to learning and exchange) is the field-level analogue of throughput. None of these standard categories enters as a primitive. Each is the structural account projected into the standard analytic vocabulary.

Read this way, morality admits empirical investigation in the way a science does. Cross-cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and primatology have been investigating its conditions for decades, finding not a cultural accident but a stable pattern tied to the conditions under which subjects meet subjects. That empirical work has always rested on metaphysical commitments (that subjects genuinely persist, that their exchanges connect them, that harm and care are tracked rather than projected), and the structural argument makes those commitments explicit. As in [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>), what looks like philosophy arriving alongside science is science absorbing metaphysics as a guiding constraint on its own further discovery.

The *ought* is not derived from the *is* because the *is* of life is already constitutively normative. The body's modal field ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) is always already valenced ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)) — every stored possibility carries a weight that is the body's own stake in that branch. The *felt-best branch* within the valenced field is what the body registers as the ought. The ought is not added to the is; it is the affective pointer that emerges automatically whenever a feeling body reads its own possibility space. Hume was right that one cannot derive an ought from a value-neutral is; he just did not have the picture in which the is of being a feeling body operating on a modal field is never value-neutral to begin with. The functional/biological normativity of any living being upgrades to specifically moral normativity through the structural one-place→two-place move [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) develops in detail: once mutual registration between beings of the same kind comes online, the felt-best branch ceases to be only the felt-best for the body running the simulation and becomes the felt-best for the field of bodies the simulation reaches.

*A held disagreement.* A robust non-naturalist such as Parfit holds that normative truths are irreducible facts not constituted by any attitudes or structural relations, however universal or mutually recognized (On What Matters III). The framework does not claim to have refuted that view; it claims that the grounding the book actually offers — shared aversion between mutually exposed subjects, articulated through the structural relation [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) traces — is sufficient for the moral work the argument requires, and that the robust-realist alternative, though coherent, is not needed for the derivation to stand. The book's objective₂ is therefore a structural-relational grounding rather than an overlooked robust non-naturalism; the excursus entries on the Moral Gap (E.16) and Divine Command Theory (E.15) inherit this same stance.

To feel wronged, then, is the recognition that a vulnerability has been exploited: one subject's exposure used against them by another in an exchange neither can take back. The heat is not illusion. It is the affective register of the structural fact: Substance has met Substance, and the conditions of mutual exposure that any genuine encounter requires were violated rather than honored.

[^8-12-0-consent-directedness]: Consent's authorization is directed, not merely aligned. It runs from a subject to a specific act by a specific agent; it is not two independent preferences that happen to coincide. A subject who privately wants what an agent goes on to do has not thereby authorized the agent to do it, since the agent could not have verified that private alignment and did not act on the subject's own say-so. What releases the claim the reflexive aversion protects is the directed relation itself — this subject authorizing this act by this agent — not a coincidence between an unspoken preference and an act performed without reference to it.


- [8.12.1 What is Disputed](<8.12.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [8.12.2 What is Required](<8.12.2 What is Required.md>)
- [8.12.3 What is Predicted](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [8.12.4 What is Confirmed](<8.12.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [8.12.5 What is Concluded](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [8.11.5 What is Concluded](<8.11.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [8.12.1 What is Disputed](<8.12.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
