generalizable constraint regime

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

A generalizable constraint regime is an arrangement of constraints that an agent could endorse as sustaining the viability, participatory agency and revisability of the shared worlds an action helps enact. Its trajectories must remain compossible: capable of continuing together without foreclosing one another’s viability. The formulation includes more-than-human milieus and preserves participants as co-authors rather than material for other projects.

Explanation

AB states the regime formulation within the World-Making Imperative. The question concerns the pattern an action helps stabilize, not whether all people could repeat the same act. Participation has substantive force: affected beings must retain viable possibilities and the capacity for the shared arrangement to be revised.

RB3 translates universalization into a test of shared constraint architecture and links it to autonomy as self-directed participation. Its negative formulation excludes plausible irreversible harm, entrenched domination and capture of judgment. A merely durable or efficient institution therefore does not qualify simply because it persists.

PB gives a related substantive imperative and a distinct formal admissibility construction. The mathematical presentation explicitly leaves ethical bindingness to ethical argument and acknowledges limits on composing local compatibility into a global result. The proposed entry keeps that model separate from the normative definition.

Scope and attribution

Retain the regime formulation as a proposed main entry, distinct from the universalizability test and from PB’s bounded formal construction.

AB — The Actual Book

The imperative requires viability, participation, revisability and compossibility.

Occurrence locators: 191; Glossary: 225.

PB — The Possible Book

The normative demand and formal admissibility model have different scope.

Occurrence locators: 106, 179, 180, 181.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

World-scaled universalization preserves co-authorship and binds the regime to explicit negative limits.

Occurrence locators: 258, 259, 321.