Comparison Discipline

Summary

The comparison discipline governs Stage 4 of the six-stage pipeline. It filters options that violate categorical or prior rules, removes options that possess anyone, and constrains comparison among the remaining claim profiles. It is deliberately incomplete: it can select, tie, or return an unresolved comparison, but it does not convert every conflict into a common quantity.

The discipline adopts a defended counting rule for claims of the same order, proposes a relevance band that silences sufficiently lesser claims against a graver one, and leaves open the case where one graver claim faces more numerous lesser but still relevant claims. Counts remain counts of distinct holders whose claims would be failed; they do not create an aggregate claimant or imply that losses to one party are compensated by gains to another.

Theory position: operational system · derived, defended, proposed, and open · clarification and completion.

Depends on: Six-Stage Pipeline · The Holder's Good · Authority Across Time · Possession · Provision Claims · Newness.

Entry filters

Several rules govern the option set before ordinary comparison:

A standard may not be enforced by putting anything into, or taking substance from within, a competent holder's body against a valid present refusal. Enforcement supplies the scope and limits of this rule.
Provision precedes prevention: a present provision claim is not answered by substituting the prevention of possible people.
A directed claim defeats a preference, institutional appetite, prestige, growth, or other claimless consideration. Provision Claims prevents public functions from being excluded or admitted by relabeling.
A valid performed exercise defeats any hypothetical, predicted, or constructed exercise offered in its place. Authority Across Time determines which exercise governs.

The constraint filter then removes every option bearing the three marks of possession toward any party. If every option would wrong someone, the remaining problem is necessity, not ordinary override.

Relevance and silencing

An unsatisfied claim counts against a graver claim only when it is of comparable seriousness: its holder could intelligibly be told, pairwise, that their claim was of the same order as the one that prevailed. Claims below that relevance band are silenced against the graver claim. No number of them combines to defeat it.

Silencing is proposed. It preserves the intelligibility of the answer to the party with the grave claim, but it relocates rather than removes a boundary problem. The Holder's Good supplies coarse gravity factors; it does not provide a metric that fixes the band's placement.

Counting claims of the same order

Where options leave claims of the same order unsatisfied, the framework's defended rule prefers the option that fails fewer distinct parties. This is counting, not summing. It asserts neither an aggregate holder nor cross-person compensation, and the answer to a losing party cannot cite a total as though the total were owed something.

The rule takes one side of a live dispute. A lottery or equal-chances view can preserve the separateness of persons while denying that a larger number should decide among same-order claims. Rejecting counting therefore reopens these cases; it does not establish aggregation.

The open cell

Where one graver claim faces more numerous claims that are lesser but remain inside the relevance band, this discipline does not decide. Numbers may sometimes prevail, but no formula here converts their claims into the graver one. Any proposed resolution must remain expressible to each losing holder without invoking an aggregate claimant.

Recurring conflict types should use rules adopted in advance, publicly, and contestably. Pre-commitment does not prove a rule correct. It makes the judgment visible, reviewable, and less available for opportunistic adjustment in a favored case.

Unresolved comparisons

An unresolved comparison is a legitimate output with duties attached. The defended default is the available option that minimizes irreversible foreclosure across affected parties. Delay and continuation must appear in the map as options with their own effects; delay consumes time, while the status quo may entrench the very burden under dispute.

Where time forces a choice and no option ranks, selection passes to fair procedure under Standing Answerability. The institution must account for burdens imposed while a matter is pending. Uncertainty about the claim roster or gravity remains in the result, and Risk governs probability; an actor may not resolve uncertainty by adopting whichever description best serves its preferred option.

A comparison battery

Case: Compare a technician being electrocuted by equipment whose shutdown ends a broadcast delighting millions; rescuers able to save five people or one from the same peril; and a health budget able to prevent one death or two hundred cases of paraplegia.

Verdict: The broadcast is stopped because the spectators' claims fall below the relevance band. The five are selected under the defended counting rule, while the equal-chances rival remains coherent. The death-versus-paraplegia case occupies the open cell and is not decided by the framework.

Machinery: Silencing excludes weak provision claims at any multiplier without constructing a total. Counting applies only among claims of the same order and counts distinct holders rather than summed welfare. Where lesser claims remain inside the graver claim's relevance band, a public, contestable, pre-committed rule must remain expressible to the losing holder; the framework does not supply that rule.

Cost: The final case is where a complete comparison method would provide an exchange principle, and this discipline does not. Band placement remains public, contestable judgment rather than a metric delivered by the theory.

Limits

No interpersonal metric fixes the relevance band.
The graver-versus-more-numerous open cell lacks an exchange principle.
Counting same-order claims is defended rather than derived; the equal-chances rival remains coherent.
Foreclosure-minimization is a defended default, not a consequence of uncertainty itself. Status-quo deference is its named rival.
The discipline constrains judgments. It does not supply the empirical knowledge needed to describe options or forecast their effects.

Six-Stage Pipeline · Conflicts Among Standing Parties · The Holder's Good · Adequate Justification · Possession · Risk · Necessity · Open Questions