Epistemic-Ethical Fusion Principle

Canonical definition

The principle that, because the Decision Hub selects action on integrated Belief, the accuracy of that Belief governs the quality of the resulting action whatever the Belief concerns, so that epistemic competence, the calibration of Belief to evidence across the board, is a load-bearing civic value rather than a specialist concern, and epistemology and ethics do not merely bear on each other but fuse: acting on a miscalibrated Belief means optimising against a false model of one's actual situation, so that the epistemic failure and the ethical failure are one failure and the miscalibration is itself the origin of the harm. The principle is general in scope: motivational Source-misattribution is its sharpest instance, but it holds equally for Beliefs about causation of felt deficit (scapegoat attribution), for Beliefs held against a decohered Referent (Referent Abandonment), and for Beliefs about future outcomes (expectation calibration). It follows that improving a population's Belief accuracy is not preliminary to ethical improvement but constitutive of it. Epistemic Status: Framework-Specific Principle. Synthesis of the Referent Primacy Principle (Belief held against an established Referent is simply wrong), the Structural Determination Principle (intent and sincerity are irrelevant to harm), and the Relational Subcriticality Principle (system stability and individual well-being are one object). No new axioms required.