The Cost Creation System: Opportunity Redirection, Persistent Contestability, and the Long-Horizon Constraint of Predatory Behavior

Moral systems commonly attempt to reduce harmful behavior by proving that goodness is right, teaching shared values, and punishing violations after they occur. These mechanisms remain necessary but are structurally incomplete because some actors do not accept the moral premises used to restrain them, and some harmful strategies operate through legal ambiguity rather than clear criminal violation. This paper proposes the Cost Creation System: an institutional and social architecture that makes predatory action generate persistent, adaptive, and cumulative burdens while simultaneously revealing superior non-predatory uses of the actor’s abilities… [full abstract as in document] Note (v0.3): This draft names two unresolved open problems explicitly (Section 17): the stability of containment mechanisms against actors powerful enough to capture them, and the gap between stated willingness in vignette-based measures and actual predatory behavior. Both are flagged as open rather than resolved.