Can Ethics Follow from Entropy?
Entropy describes physical conditions and processes. Moral instruction requires an additional philosophical premise. The gap between description and prescription is the is-ought problem. DCI addresses it openly by separating its descriptive claims about change and consequence from the ethical commitments that enter when agency is given normative standing.
This page explains DCI terminology in ordinary language. Canonical formulations remain in the DCI corpus.
The is-ought gap
Physical facts describe conditions and processes. Moral preference enters through philosophical commitments concerning agency, standing, responsibility, and consequence. Harmful acts can leave durable residue alongside acts of care, so persistence alone leaves ethical legitimacy unresolved.
DCI therefore keeps its ethics separate from thermodynamic proof. Entropy belongs to the descriptive architecture. Ethics begins when the doctrine asks how agency should meet other agency within shared conditions.
DCI's normative bridge
The bridge is Recursive Agency. Once agency has standing as a basis for authorship, consent, refusal, responsibility, and meaningful participation, present action must be considered in relation to the agency-bearing conditions it helps produce.
This principle directs attention toward whether participation preserves sufficient conditions for perception, choice, refusal, correction, recovery, revision, and future participation. It also requires bounded recursion, because finite participants have limited knowledge and limited reach.
What this claim does
Recursive Agency supplies an explicit philosophical premise. The normative commitment can be examined, challenged, revised, and tested against consequence. DCI's ethical argument therefore depends upon how well that premise survives scrutiny.
Canonical sources
Read The Work Remembers Cruelty Too, then compare Recursive Agency in the Doctrinal Lexicon.