AIM Framework glossary
Practical Redirect
Canonical definition
Practical Redirect is the mandated procedural move, on completion of the scapegoat diagnostics whatever they return, to shift institutional and individual attention from "who to punish" toward "what would actually reduce A-harm, restore I, or damp M in this system," requiring that proposals for action be recast in terms of structural levers (A-floors, I-domains, visibility governance, M-management) rather than person-focused vengeance or exclusion. The question is asked in every case; what the diagnostics settle is the answer. Where the Presumption Against Scapegoating holds, the answer is structural and the question turns attention away from the target, which is what the name records. Where the Presumption is rebutted and the target is established as the gate on the Object, the question returns the tractable action that recovers it, and the retributive surplus is excluded not by a further rule but because it answers nothing the question asked. The redirect is absolute in both cases: where the Presumption is rebutted, it concedes the authorship the Three-Test Battery established and declines desert, the claim that the author is owed a cost beyond repair. The answer is a structural lever in every case, never a person, and which lever is fixed by substrate under the Eliminative Structure of Crime. The Three-Test Battery's outcome adds a limb rather than changing the kind: provision to the aggrieved and to the field around the author is live either way under Cascading Support, and where an agent is tractable the question also asks what would prevent recurrence, which Cascading Consequences answers on the levers that loaded the stake, floor-preserving throughout. Where the Three-Test Battery has passed, the choice between pressing for punishment and turning to repair is the harmed Individual's, because the design target for a justice system is a state that declines the role of punisher, so a retribution the harmed Individual chooses is a retribution the harmed Individual performs.
Explanation
The Practical Redirect is the "what now?" once you accept that your first impulse to blame and punish a person is probably a Confabulation. Instead of arguing endlessly about whether "they deserve it," the redirect demands a different question: "Which changes to A-floors, I-domains, visibility structures, or M-channels would actually prevent this pattern from recurring and repair the harm?" This reframes policy and conflict conversations: from "who is at fault?" to "which levers can move A, I, and M in the right direction?" In practice, this means prioritising measures like strengthening social insurance, creating low-theatre dispute resolution, adjusting observability in high-M markets, or redesigning institutional incentives, and explicitly deprioritising measures whose main effect is to satisfy status-driven appetites for personalising blame. The redirect is not soft on harm; it is hard on ineffective remedies. It enforces consistency with the Core Principles by insisting that when harms are structurally produced, remedies must be structurally targeted. This holds even when you are right about who did it. The redirect never asks you to pretend they didn't; it asks what would repair the harm, and punishment is not on that list. Nobody will punish them for you, and if you punish them yourself, you become the one who harmed.
Epistemic status
Proposed Intervention.
Derivation
Chapter 11, Sections 11.18 and 11.22; Chapter 16, Section 16.9; Appendix A, Section A.5.1.