Harm Reduction Life Ethics: A Constructed Ethical Framework Grounded in the Physics of Rupture and Repair

This paper proposes Harm Reduction Life Ethics (HRLE) as a comprehensive ethical framework constructed in response to the physical, biological, and psychological predicament of existence. Drawing on thermodynamics, the free energy principle, and the structural biology of rupture and repair, HRLE identifies a predicament that precedes ethical choice: all systems that persist do so through processes that impose costs on other systems, and this condition is not contingent but constitutive — rooted in the thermodynamics of systems that persist by imposing costs. HRLE does not derive ethical principles from this predicament; rather, it constructs them as a deliberate human response to it. The framework is explicitly antirealist: its principles are artifacts of reflective consciousness, not discoveries of pre-existing moral facts. HRLE reorganizes the eight principles of its prior version (v3) into four core principles — accept tragic necessity, refuse to repress, contain and calibrate, and repair as sacred — with four derived principles that follow from these. The paper argues that this framework offers a more honest, achievable, and structurally grounded ethics than systems premised on the eliminability of harm.