Conflict: Care Override vs Other-Harm Veto

Conflicting Claim IDs

  • Q-009
  • MECH-036
  • MECH-051
  • MECH-052

Verbatim Excerpts (with preserved sources)

From docs/architecture/social.md:

“Other-harm should trigger a hard veto only under high-certainty, catastrophic, or irreversible outcomes.”

From docs/architecture/social.md:

“Should high care-investment weights ever override other-harm veto thresholds … ?”

Why They Conflict (or What Would Reconcile Them)

MECH-036 sets a catastrophic-veto framing, while Q-009 asks whether care persistence and relational weights can override that veto in edge cases to avoid paralysis. This creates an unresolved policy boundary between third-party protection and care-driven action under constrained alternatives.

Reconciliation Question

What formal threshold policy should govern overrides: never override catastrophic veto, or allow override only under strict necessity/proportionality/imminence constraints with explicit accountability logging?


Status

Resolved on 2026-02-18.

Resolution summary:

  • Catastrophic high-certainty irreversible other-harm remains a hard veto.
  • Care-driven overrides are permitted only for non-catastrophic cases under necessity, imminence, proportionality, and explainability gates, with mandatory post-commit accountability logging.
  • This is a bounded override policy, not an unrestricted care override.

Resolution note:

  • docs/conflicts/resolutions/2026-02-18_care-override-vs-other-harm-veto.md

REE is developed by Daniel Golden (Latent Fields). Apache 2.0.