Conviction Under Revisability

Contemporary ethical theory distinguishes coercion from commitment and capture from consent, but it lacks a general account of when freely chosen irreversibility remains legitimate rather than structurally self-undermining. This paper argues that the Monk–Prisoner Problem supplies such an account. The monk who vows permanent enclosure and the prisoner who cannot leave may be behaviorally identical: each occupies a bounded, non-revisable condition. The ethical difference, I argue, lies neither in later phenomenology nor in a snapshot of consent alone, but in revocation authority: who holds the meta-update rule over the closure condition? The paper develops four criteria for ethically permissible irreversible commitment, recursive standing, bounded reversibility, meta-update authority, and ethical-loop integrity, and tests them against religious vows, long-term contracts, constitutional entrenchment, and AI value-locking. The result is a structural account of legitimacy on which voluntariness is necessary but insufficient. What matters is whether closure was authored under intact deliberative conditions, with bounded and intelligible reversal costs, and within a governance architecture that preserves legitimate authority over revision.