What if every ethical framework is missing the same thing? Eight dimensions. Nine cases. One framework. Across every inhabited continent, ethical traditions have tracked the ways human beings and their institutions can be damaged. Buddhist philosophy mapped the structure of suffering. Confucian ethics specified the obligations that hold relationships together. Ubuntu grounded personhood in community. The M?ori concept of whakapapa extended moral concern to land, ancestors, and more-than-human kin. Each tradition saw something the others missed. Modern Western ethics compressed this inheritance into single axes: maximise welfare, respect autonomy, cultivate virtue. Each axis illuminates part of the moral landscape. None illuminates all of it. The compression is the problem. This book identifies eight dimensions along which harm occurs and tests each against a diagnostic standard that selects for observability, independence, and cross-cultural convergence. It develops a structured method for reasoning within the resulting multi-dimensional space, and applies that method to nine cases whose trajectories reveal what single-axis analysis misses: the rejection at Vienna, Henrietta Lacks, the Pentagon Papers, the Aral Sea, the Amazon, smallpox eradication, animal agriculture, social media, and artificial intelligence. The framework does not resolve metaethics. It does not produce an algorithm. What it offers is structure within which moral judgment can proceed on the full problem. Its central finding: every decision is a harm profile, not a harm score.
