Terminal Recursion as Moral Death: _Agency Collapse and the Wantonhood of Systems_

A system can keep producing behavior long after it has lost the capacity to revise the constraints that produce it. This paper names that condition terminal recursion and argues that it is a form of moral death: not a moral failure, not corruption, not injury, but the collapse of the condition of possibility for moral agency itself. Building on a process account of persistence as governance continuity, I introduce a second-order quantity, recursive capacity: a system's standing ability to revise its own revision function in response to evidence that it is wrong. Terminal recursion is the state in which that capacity has gone to zero while first-order output continues, and it is distinct from mere repetition, which is recoverable, because it is the loss of the capacity to repair repetition. The condition is the structural, substrate-neutral generalization of Frankfurt's wanton, reaching past persons to institutions and artificial agents: any system that has lost the capacity to be moved by reasons to change how it changes. I propose five external diagnostic markers, evidential inertness, output continuity, justificatory collapse, refusal foreclosure, and non-recovery from within, and confront the reflexive problem that no system can certify its own recursive capacity from inside, which the Indistinguishability Thesis forecloses, so the verdict is directional, defeasible, and external by necessity. Because the faculty the diagnosis concerns is the one persuasion would address, it redirects intervention from internal appeal to external interruption and restoration; it is emphatically not a license to abandon or dehumanize what it names. The payoff is a sharper target for diagnosis in ethics, institutional design, and AI safety: the thing worth detecting is not misbehavior but the loss of the capacity that makes correction possible.