The Revision Function Under Pressure: _Stress-Testing Recursive Ethics Against Its Own Failure Conditions_

Recursive Ethics holds that every self-governing system is vulnerable to four failure modes — drift, capture, presentism, and integrity inversion. This paper asks whether Recursive Ethics can detect those failures in itself. I argue that it cannot do so reliably from the inside, and that the right response is to rebuild part of its self-correction outside the loop being corrected. In fuller terms: the framework is itself a system that governs the deliberation of those who hold it, and it issues an epistemic limit — the Indistinguishability Thesis — holding that no sufficiently entangled system-self relation can confirm, from within, whether its evaluative capacities are accurate or captured. If the four modes are universal they apply to the framework; if the thesis holds, the framework cannot certify from inside the practitioner-framework loop that it has escaped them. The convergent result is a corollary I call self-audit insufficiency: no self-governing framework can guarantee detection of its own degradation using resources confined to the degraded loop. The response is architectural rather than confessional — three mechanisms (witnessed re-derivation, an equalization constraint on self-interpretation, and trigger-based external re-engagement) that relocate part of the revision function outside the loop it revises, resting on a refusal-capacity floor whose loss is legible only from outside. The aim is not certainty, which the thesis forecloses, but the conversion of a closed loop into an open one in which the framework can still be stopped by a witness with standing to stop it.