OBLIGATORY TRANSGRESSIVE VIRTUOUS ACTION: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of What Justice Requires

Abstract The Unified Virtue-Legitimacy Framework established that transgression is morally obligatory for virtue-constituted agents when the Injustice Threshold Function is crossed. It left open the question that is both theoretically prior and practically urgent: once the obligation to transgress is established, what form must the transgressive act take? The tradition’s silence on this question is not peripheral. Within every canonical resistance community the UVLF calibrates, virtue-constituted agents disagreed about transgressive form under confirmed institutional capture, and the framework confirms both sides as obligated but cannot adjudicate which form was right. This article argues that practical wisdom — phronesis — understood as the capacity for correct perception of what a situation morally requires in its full particularity, generates four formal constraints on obligatory transgressive action. We call this the Virtue-Theoretic Morphology of Transgression (VMT). The four constraints are: Proportionality (the act must be band-bounded to the specific mechanism of injustice — neither under- nor over-scaled), Targeting (directed at the mechanism of capture, not at persons incidental to it), Timing (at the moment of maximum leverage on the continuous capture trajectory), and Sequencing (preserving the maximum option-value for subsequent virtuous action). We prove that the agent-discretion account is structurally incomplete (Theorem T3), derive each constraint from the internal logic of phronesis and justice (D8–D11), correct the leverage function to operate on the continuous capture trajectory rather than on the indicator function, and derive the Vice-Constituted Resistance Prediction (C3). Trans-historical calibration covers six canonical cases. Cross-domain invariance holds in four domains including AI alignment. Keywords: morphology of transgression, phronesis, virtue ethics, political obligation, proportionality, targeting, timing, sequencing, VMT, ADA, UVLF, civil disobedience, just resistance, kairos, philosophy of virtues, Alguilas-AI