The Non-Compensatory Structure of Moral Health: _Against Utilitarian Aggregation in Ethical Assessment_

This paper argues that moral health is structurally non-compensatory: no dimension of ethical integrity can compensate for collapse in another. The argument is developed through the Recursive Health Score (RHS), a five-dimension diagnostic for embedded agents whose aggregate is a minimum function rather than a weighted sum, and the central claim is that the minimum function is not a conservative modeling choice but the correct formal representation of how the structural conditions of agency combine. The paper distinguishes conditions of agency from goods agents pursue, argues that compensatory aggregation is the appropriate operator only for the latter, and shows that the choice between min() and mean() encodes a substantive ontological commitment about substitutability. The thesis is corroborated by a striking convergence of formal results across unrelated disciplines (non-compensatory preference structures in decision theory, weakest-link composition in public-goods economics, O-ring production functions, fixed-proportions complementarity, and series-system reliability), each of which independently arrives at minimum-type aggregation wherever the items combined are jointly necessary rather than mutually substitutable. The thesis is then situated against its philosophical neighbors (Chang on parity, Williams on moral residue, Sen and Nussbaum on capabilities, Rawls on lexical priority) and distinguished from each. Applications to AI safety assessment, institutional design, and personal ethical self-assessment follow, and the paper closes by applying its own standard to the framework that produced it.