From Vicarious Protection to Temporary Control: AGovernance Framework for Externally CompensatedPain-Protective Function

Protective technology may one day remove extreme pain that may impair decision-making while externally compensating the protective function that pain supplies. Existing work has explored protective sensing and signaling; this paper asks what governs the point at which such compensation assumes temporary control over a subject’s action. It proposes a conditional governance framework with an episodic layer (Entry, defined by four jointly necessary conditions, then Exit and Restoration of control) and a systemic layer (consent, revocation, soft lock, cooling-off, independent review and capacity-sensitive review). Two architecture-level conditions follow: non-substitutive elimination and non-repurposable architecture; a further, conditional risk concerns whether the compensating system itself could be a subject of suffering. A historical stress test addresses institutional incentive, and a boundary extension addresses continuous compensation. The account is derived, not tested; its main open variable is open-domain bodily-risk judgment. **Declaration of AI Assistance** Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) were used for drafting text, literature retrieval, simulated review, and consistency checks. The author is responsible for the paper’s content. Sources, quotations, and factual claims suggested by AI tools were checked against available primary or publisher records; where a source could not be verified, the corresponding claim was removed or narrowed, and a number of AI-suggested sources were excluded after checking.