It does. Wherever subjects meet subjects, moral life appears as a stable pattern rather than an optional cultural feature. The empirical record across independent disciplines confirms it.

Cross-cultural work finds that societies sharing nothing else share prohibitions against unprovoked killing, theft within the group, and betrayal of cooperative ties — exactly where persistence and distinction are most acutely at stake (Brown 1991; Curry et al. 2019). The negative formulation of reciprocity — *do not do to others what they would not have you do* — recurs as a particularly persistent instance, appearing independently in Confucian, Hebraic, Vedic, Hellenic, Buddhist, and Egyptian sources and predating its positive formulation by centuries in most traditions (*Analects* 15.23; Hillel in *b. Shabbat* 31a; *Mahābhārata* 5.1517; Isocrates *Nicocles* 49–61; *Udānavarga* 5.18). The asymmetry between negative and positive formulations is what the structural account predicts: non-corrosion is the minimum condition of any encounter between persisting subjects, while fostering depends on attunement to throughput conditions that vary across forms of life. The emotional architecture matches: empathy, shame, indignation, and guilt all track positions within a field of mutually exposed Substance (Haidt 2012; Bloom 2013), reporting the exchange from within the subject. Evolutionary biology explains how that architecture came to be stable. Reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and indirect reciprocity (Trivers 1971; Hamilton 1964; Nowak and Sigmund 2005) select for agents that can navigate other agents without destroying them — cooperation among persisting, distinct agents whose interactions extend across time. Game-theoretic formalization of iterated exchange (Axelrod 1984) reaches the same result through mathematics: strategies enacting non-initiation of harm and reciprocity-with-forgiveness dominate under noise.

The ancient Near East offers an especially sharp regional case. Across roughly fifteen centuries — from the Laws of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BCE) and Lipit-Ishtar (c. 1930 BCE) through the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE), the Hittite Laws (c. 1650 BCE), the Middle Assyrian Laws, and the Covenant Code of Exodus 21–23 — independent legal traditions in distinct languages, polities, and theologies converge on the same floor: prohibition of unprovoked killing within the polity, of theft, of false witness, of oath-violation, and of abuse of the structurally dependent (widow, orphan, resident foreigner). The wisdom literature shows the same pattern at the level of conduct rather than statute. The Egyptian *Instruction of Amenemope* (c. 1300–1100 BCE) and the Thirty Sayings of Proverbs 22:17–24:22 share thematic content, structure, and specific phrasings closely enough that documented transmission is the standard explanation (Erman 1924); the Negative Confession of the Egyptian Book of the Dead enumerates the same prohibitions in the form of a posthumous ledger. Where the codes can be shown to borrow — Wright (2009) argues the Covenant Code is a deliberate reworking of Hammurabi — the borrowing strengthens rather than weakens the structural reading: traditions adopt what they already find binding, and what spreads is the shape of what intersubjective coupling among persisting subjects already requires. Convergence at this density across this span and these languages is what the [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) prediction expects. The minimum condition of non-corrosion holds wherever subjects meet subjects; ancient Near Eastern jurisprudence is one of the cleanest visible confirmations of that floor in the historical record.

Classical China supplies a parallel test under different conditions. Across the Warring States and early Han period (c. 500–200 BCE), four traditions in deep metaphysical disagreement converge on the same floor within a shared language and political space. Confucian *ren* (humaneness) and *shu* (reciprocity) articulate the negative Golden Rule directly (*Analects* 15.23). Mohist *jian'ai* — impartial concern — derives the harm-prohibition floor from an explicitly consequentialist calculus (akin to but not identical with Western utilitarianism) that rejects Confucian role-ethics at the root. Daoist *wuwei* arrives at non-interference by way of metaphysical quietism that rejects the Mohist calculus and the Confucian ritual program alike. Even the Legalist tradition, which is officially anti-moralist and grounds rule in coercive efficiency (Han Feizi), retains the harm-prohibition floor as a precondition for state cohesion. Four traditions disagreeing about virtually everything else — the nature of persons, the standing of ritual, the metaphysics of the way, the basis of authority — agree on the floor (Graham 1989; Hansen 1992; Van Norden 2007). Where the ancient Near East isolates convergence across distinct languages and theologies in a shared region, the Chinese case isolates convergence across rival metaphysical systems in a shared linguistic and political space.

Mesoamerica supplies the cleanest *independence* test in the historical record. The Aztec *Huehuetlatolli* — the "ancient discourses" recorded by Sahagún in Book VI of the Florentine Codex — and the Nahua ethical tradition organized around *neltiliztli* (rooted truth, groundedness) enumerate the same prohibitions: theft, deceit, cruelty, abuse of dependents, and the obligations of host to guest and elder to young. The reciprocity formulations parallel Old World wisdom literature closely, in a civilization without plausible contact with Eurasian moral traditions before the sixteenth century (León-Portilla 1963; Maffie 2014; Read 1998). The convergence is what the structural prediction expects under maximum independence. The floor of non-corrosion is not a Eurasian export; the cases that look like cultural diffusion in Eurasia look that way because the conditions for the architecture were dense enough to make borrowing efficient, not because the architecture itself depended on the borrowing. Where contact was prevented, the architecture appeared anyway.

Taken together, the three regional cases isolate three different variables. The ancient Near East holds region constant and varies language and theology; classical China holds language and political space constant and varies metaphysics; Mesoamerica holds the architecture constant and removes contact with Eurasia entirely. Convergence across all three controls is what the [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) prediction expects, and it is what the historical record supplies.

The pattern appears before culture can have installed it and before our species could have invented it. Infants as young as three months distinguish helpful from hindering agents and prefer the former, with subsequent work partially recovering the effect under specific conditions and raising replication questions about its generality (Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007; Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack 2012; replication concerns in Salvadori et al. 2015 and Schlingloff et al. 2020). Capuchin monkeys reject unequal pay (Brosnan and de Waal 2003); chimpanzees console victims of aggression (de Waal 1996). The animal record exhibits a finer pattern the structural account also predicts: harm-symmetric reciprocity — refusal of mistreatment, punishment of defectors, consolation of distress — is broader across species than flourishing-symmetric prosociality, because the affect-family registers damage more legibly across currents than it registers deepening. Wherever the conditions appear — persisting subjects, distinct positions, asymmetric exchange — moral life appears with them.

The pattern holds even where its proponents insist it should not. Every developed eschatology — Christian heaven and hell, Buddhist samsara and nirvana, Hindu karma, Zoroastrian Bridge of the Separator, Egyptian weighing of the heart — calibrates post-mortem outcomes to harm caused and flourishing fostered, the same currency the modal account identifies as foundational (Boyer 2001; Norenzayan 2013). A theology free in principle to ground morality on any basis whatsoever invariably builds its motivational engine out of differential exposure to suffering and flourishing — the conatus structure of [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) extended to an unbounded time horizon. The religious imagination, given maximum license, did not invent a new normative primitive; it scaled the existing one. Even the systems that claim transcendent grounding for morality cannot motivate without reaching for the structure they claim to transcend. That convergence is not embarrassment for the theological tradition. It is confirmation of the modal reading from a direction the modal reading did not need.

The record runs in time, not only across it. While cross-cultural and developmental evidence shows the floor present wherever the conditions obtain, the historical record shows uptake of that floor deepening over the long run. Rates of interpersonal violence have fallen by roughly an order of magnitude from prehistoric and tribal baselines to modern state societies, with further sharp declines across the European homicide record from the medieval period to the present (Pinker 2011, drawing on Eisner 2003 and Gurr 1981); judicial torture, chattel slavery, public execution, dueling, and warfare-as-default have been progressively delegitimized across the same span; recognition of standing has been extended successively to commoners, to women, to children, to ethnic and religious out-groups, and — incompletely but trackably — to the structurally dependent across species (Pinker 2018; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Self-reported life satisfaction tracks the same direction in cross-national data, rising in step with the conditions that lower coercion and widen participation (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2020; Inglehart 2018). The gradient is asymmetric and directional: increased recognition of subjects as subjects and reduced corrosion of the conditions under which they persist — not monotonic at every scale, but the long-run signal across the controls the data permit. That is what the structural account predicts as the historical signature of the floor coming into reflective view, and it is what [§5.1.6](<5.1.6 Intelligent Design.md>) reads against the fall-theodicy frame, where the same gradient constitutes evidence in the opposite direction from what that frame requires.

The sciences find morality already present in the substrate rather than layered on top of a neutral one, because the substrate *is* subjects meeting subjects. The conclusion is the one the modal argument reached from logic alone, restated as the convergence result the section's empirical record supports: morality is not additional to the world. It is one of the things the world is — in the structural sense [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) derives (a convergence of functional and intersubjective normativity at the recursive depth where mutual registration becomes possible), not in any stronger sense than that bridge supports.

Once the mechanism, the conceptual structure, and the empirical record all point to the same result, a number of familiar positions about morality come under structural pressure rather than remaining merely optional. Which versions fail under the framework's derived premises is named at [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>).


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← [8.12.3 What is Predicted](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [8.12.5 What is Concluded](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
