Operational Ethics Under Non-Violation: Retention as a Governance Condition for Long-Horizon Systems

This work presents a governance-first ethical framework for studying persistence and collapse in artificial and physical systems under conditions of minimal intervention. Rather than addressing intelligence, agency, or semantic interpretation, the framework formalizes retention as an operational property observable only after the withdrawal of external driving forces. The methodology integrates non-violation as experimental infrastructure, defining axioms, observation constraints, collapse criteria, and reproducibility conditions for long-horizon systems. Ethical restraint is treated not as a normative overlay, but as a prerequisite for epistemic validity when studying post-driven regimes. The framework is complementary to existing scientific models and is intended for applications in long-term system governance, AI oversight, and the study of persistence-dominated physical regimes.