Harm as Contraction of Reachable Continuation: Reachability, Resistance, and the Structure of Moral Damage

Accounts of harm often begin with welfare, counterfactual comparison, or harmful events. Those approaches explain central cases while leaving a further question: what is damaged when an actual transition degrades the field through which a bearer can continue, before final deprivation and even where the bearer is not a person? I propose an account of harm as contraction of reachable continuation. An actual transition harms a bearer insofar as it nontrivially degrades a structurally significant continuation or enabling structure genuinely reachable from that bearer. The proposal makes the bearer-transition-continuation relation primary, rather than beginning with an overall welfare comparison or a list of functionings. It distinguishes possibility from field-relative reachability, temporal specification from contraction, and harm-tokens from transition profiles and overall verdicts. Contraction occurs through foreclosure, resistance thickening, or damage to continuation-generating structure. A locus diagnostic identifies historically integrated organizations without requiring self-sufficiency or metaphysical irreducibility. The normative bridge is explicit: qualifying damage to organized continuability constitutes pro tanto harm. The account explains familiar person-harm while extending to integrated non-person bearers without equating causal organization, moral status, and a claim to preservation. Version 1.2 preserves the central harm thesis and the corrected comparison with Sangmok Kim's Structural Ethics as Path Preservation. It strengthens the account of locushood, representation, repair, and component-relative harm, adds an objection concerning pain without lasting impairment, and corrects bibliographic details. This is a preprint, not a peer-reviewed publication.