Rethinking Generative Capability Impairment: A Conditional Account of Harm

This position paper develops a conditional account of harm arising through impairment of a person's generative capability. The account begins from a specific evaluative object: the feasible and viable trajectories through which a person can initiate, sustain, direct, transform, transmit, recover, or branch a valued practice over a declared horizon. Amartya Sen's capability approach supplies the central evaluative ancestry. It directs attention from resources and achieved outputs toward real opportunities, conversion conditions, human diversity, well-being freedom, agency freedom, plural valuation, and public reasoning. The paper adds a horizon-indexed generative specialization and makes its attribution boundary explicit. Sen's framework supplies the evaluative space; the trajectory model and harm predicate are proposals developed here. The central account moves through four stages: capability contraction, material capability disadvantage, event-linked impairment, and domain-specific pro tanto harm. Each stage has an independent three-valued warrant. A complete profile retains every admitted counterfactual comparison and classifies the result as robust supported, robust rejected, baseline sensitive, or indeterminate. Duration, security, recovery probability, route-back cost, and foreclosed later branches enter the materiality assessment. A transferred conditional inclusion result establishes when a restriction contracts the reachable repertoire. Finite countermodels then establish four separations: equal achieved output can coexist with unequal capability; pro tanto harm can coexist with benefit; identical harm facts can accompany different wrongfulness statuses; and plausible comparisons can yield baseline sensitivity. The resulting account is person-centered, domain-specific, and revisable. Overall harm, injustice, exploitation, responsibility, remedy, and law remain successor inquiries with their own premises.