AIM Framework glossary
Harm
Canonical definition
Harm is interference with an Individual’s motivational system that: 1. Damages appetitive satisfaction (A-harm); 2. Crowds out intrinsic engagement (I-harm); or 3. Weaponises mimetic dynamics against them (M-harm); thereby degrading the Individual’s capacity for Freedom as AIM defines it.
Explanation
A-harm is about bodies and basic safety: deprivation, injury, and credible threats that keep people in chronic need or fear. I-harm is about meaning and agency: environments that strip autonomy, block competence, destroy relationships, or make sustained engagement with valued pursuits impossible. M-harm is about status and belonging: shaming, scapegoating, exclusion, and reputation attacks that turn social life itself into a weapon. M-Harm is a real coercive and normative category of Harm; it is not a Cost of a Belief or decoherence ledger entry. M phenomenology is real and behaviourally efficacious, but it is not a true world deficit. When Status contests export maintenance Cost, the Cost-Provenance Test records the A-domain and I-domain losses that result, not the Status displacement itself (Cost of a Belief; Salience-Deficit Conflation Principle; Phenomenological Reality Principle). These harms often co-occur (wrongful imprisonment, for example, typically inflicts all three) and each type calls for different remedies: resources and safety for A, context redesign for I, and visibility and community repair for M. A-Harm is interference with an Individual's Appetitive satisfaction through deprivation, injury, or credible threats that damage bodily security, basic safety, or access to physiological necessities. A-harm is about bodies and basic safety: being deprived of food, water, shelter, or medical care; suffering physical injury, pain or death; or living under credible threats that keep people in chronic need or fear. This includes starvation, homelessness, untreated illness, physical violence, and conditions that prevent the body from maintaining basic physiological balance. A-harm remedies focus on restoring resources and safety-securing food, housing, healthcare, and protection from physical danger. I-Harm is interference with an Individual's intrinsic motivation and self-endorsed projects through environments that strip autonomy, block competence development, destroy meaningful relationships, or make sustained engagement with valued pursuits impossible. I-harm is about meaning and agency: being forced into purely instrumental roles with no room for self-direction, having one's skills and talents systematically wasted or suppressed, losing the relationships that give life meaning, or being trapped in conditions where no intrinsically valued activity can take root or survive. This includes totalizing surveillance, soul-crushing work with no autonomy, educational systems that kill curiosity, and institutional designs that treat humans purely as means to the ends of others’ goals. I-harm remedies focus on context redesign-creating protected space, time, and resources for autonomy, competence development, and meaningful relationships. M-harm is interference with an Individual's social standing and belonging through shaming, scapegoating, exclusion, reputation attacks, or weaponized visibility that turns social life itself into a source of suffering. M-harm is about status and belonging: being turned into a public spectacle or permanent scapegoat, having one's reputation systematically destroyed, being excluded from community and social participation, or being forced into toxic status competitions where losing means losing basic Respect. This includes public humiliation campaigns, cancel culture, institutional shaming, predatory status games, and visibility systems designed to rank and expose people in ways that weaponize social comparison. M-harm remedies focus on visibility and community repair-restoring some floor of respect, creating alternatives to toxic status arenas, and bounding harmful mimetic amplification.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct (normative).