Every Wrong Has an Address
“The (classes/instances) of the immanent, omniscient, and transcendent are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable.”
— Forrest Landry, An Immanent Metaphysics, Axiom III
The System of Wrong
A relational ethics built on Forrest Landry’s An Immanent Metaphysics
In David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), two detectives hunt a killer who stages each murder as a sermon on one of the seven deadly sins. The film turns on a quiet inversion. His victims’ sins mostly harmed themselves. His own acts destroyed other people.
We have had a list of sins for more than fourteen centuries, a map of the ways we damage our own lives. But what about the harm we do to each other? We have laws, courts, and codes for it. We rarely ask where it comes from.
Here is what that missing map can cost.
Let me refresh your memory
On Saturday, March 17, 2018, the world learned that a personality quiz had quietly become one of the largest harvesting operations of the decade. Both The New York Times and The Observer called it a data breach, and Facebook said it was not. Paul Grewal, the company’s vice president and deputy general counsel, issued a flat denial that day, arguing that people had knowingly provided their information, that no systems had been infiltrated, and that nothing had been stolen or hacked.
The mechanics were simple. An app called “thisisyourdigitallife” offered a personality prediction and presented itself on Facebook as a research tool for psychologists. Roughly 270,000 people downloaded it. Through them, whistleblower Christopher Wylie told The Observer, more than 50 million profiles were collected in 2014. Facebook later raised its own estimate to as many as 87 million.
Grewal’s argument was, in its own terms, correct. Nobody broke in. The users who took the quiz had clicked “allow.” By the vocabulary of breach and theft, nothing had happened.
And yet almost everyone who heard the story knew something was wrong. What they lacked was a name for it.
That gap is the subject of this essay. The grid that follows does not organize wrongs after the fact. It tells you what kinds of wrong are possible before you encounter them. When something new feels wrong but no one has named it yet, you can locate it, say what kind of wrong it is, and see where it sits relative to every other kind of wrong humans have identified.
Where this comes from
The framework grows out of Forrest Landry’s An Immanent Metaphysics, a book I just finished that stuck with me. Landry does not write about crime, care, or markets. His concern is the structure of reality itself. Two of his claims make an ethics of this kind possible.
The first is that relation comes before things. Landry holds that the relationship between parts and whole is more basic than either the parts or the whole on their own. He goes further in his treatment of what he calls the errors of extrema. There is no absolute dependence and no absolute independence, only interdependence, and in the end only interaction is real. If that is true, a wrong cannot be fully understood as an isolated act by an isolated person. It must also be understood as a corruption of the relationship through which persons and institutions come into being.
The second claim is that the foundations of any domain can be captured by three primal concepts, each playing a distinct role he calls a modality: the immanent, the omniscient, and the transcendent. Landry insists these cannot be defined in the abstract. Their meaning becomes clear only as they are traced through the domains we actually care about. From here, I trace them through moral life.
I am not the first to look for the structure beneath injustice. The philosopher Michael Walzer came closest in Spheres of Justice (1983), arguing that injustice begins when a good from one sphere of life buys dominance in another, as when money purchases political office. What follows builds on a similar intuition but goes somewhere different. It derives three relationships from a metaphysics rather than listing many spheres of goods, and it identifies a second kind of wrong that Walzer’s account does not have.
I recommend Landry’s book, with a warning: it is demanding, and it never mentions crime, markets, or law. What it offers is a way of seeing reality as relational all the way down. Once you see it that way, the demands for justice and regulation around new technology stop looking like reactions to isolated scandals. They look like people trying to name broken relationships.
The three relationships
Human moral life runs through three basic relationships.
Care concerns protection, dependence, and responsibility. Through it, persons are preserved, nurtured, and recognized as beings whose existence imposes a duty of restraint. Here I will make one claim explicit that most ethics leaves implicit: care is the relationship owed to every person, including strangers. The duty not to harm someone you have never met is the thinnest form of care, but it is care.
Transaction concerns exchange, consent, and obligation. Through it, goods, services, promises, and expectations pass between parties under conditions of freedom and truthfulness. Transaction here means more than commerce. A promise is a transaction. So is a conversation.
Power concerns authority, enforcement, and collective order. Through it, decisions are made, rules are enforced, and institutions govern beyond the private sphere.
Mapping them onto Landry
Landry gives each modality a characteristic concept. A relation is that which divides but is itself indivisible; it has the nature of the immanent. A domain is that which contains but is itself uncontained; it has the nature of the omniscient. An identity is that which has distinction; it has the nature of the transcendent.
The mapping that follows is mine, not Landry’s: my reading of what his method makes possible when applied to ethics. Transaction is relation: the between, the exchange that joins two parties while keeping them two. Power is domain: the containing order within which exchanges and persons are located. Care is identity: the recognition of a person as a self that cannot be reduced to anything else.
Once that mapping is in place, Landry’s Axioms stop being abstract, and each of the three says something about moral life.
Axiom I holds that the immanent is more fundamental than the other two, and that the omniscient and transcendent are conjugate. Read through the mapping, transaction in its broad sense, as reciprocity and promise and exchange, is the most basic moral relationship.
This will sound strange to modern ears, and the reason is worth noticing. Capitalism has so thoroughly shaped our sense of the word that “transaction” now suggests a purchase. But its older and wider meaning is any exchange between two parties who answer to each other: a promise kept, a question answered, a favor returned. In that sense, transaction does not mean the market comes first. It means reciprocity does, and both care and power stand on it.
Care and power, meanwhile, are conjugates: one attends to the individual self, the other to the collective whole, and each is defined partly against the other. This explains why the tension between personal protection and public order never resolves. It isn’t a policy failure. It is structural.
Axiom II describes an order of precedence: a class of the transcendent precedes an instance of the immanent, a class of the immanent precedes an instance of the omniscient, and a class of the omniscient precedes an instance of the transcendent. In moral terms, care supplies the category of person without which any particular exchange would have no moral meaning. Transaction supplies the practices of reciprocity through which institutions arise. Power supplies the inherited order into which particular persons are born, recognized, protected, constrained, or excluded. The three relationships form a cycle. None of them is the foundation of the others, each is the condition of the next.
Axiom III holds that the three are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable. This is the axiom that gives the grid its structure. The next section explains why violating that structure is a wrong.
What a wrong is
If care, transaction, and power are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable, then there are two basic ways to violate them.
The first is interchange: treating one relationship as if it could stand in for another. A person becomes a price. A decision becomes a purchase. A bond of trust becomes a sales channel. Six of the nine cells are wrongs of this kind.
The second is separation: severing a relationship from the other two so that it turns inward and answers only to itself. Care that is accountable to no order and no honest exchange serves its own continuation. A ledger that refers only to itself becomes fiction. Power that answers only to power consumes the order that made it legitimate. These are the three cells on the grid’s diagonal.
Non-interchangeability is a structural fact, not yet a moral one. It becomes a moral constraint because of what interchange does to the people inside it. When care is treated as transaction, the person who was owed recognition receives a bill. When transaction is treated as power, the party who was owed a free exchange receives a command. When power is treated as transaction, the citizen who was owed an impartial decision receives a price. In each case the substitution lands on someone: it converts a relationship they were entitled to into a different one, without their consent and against their interest. Separation does the same from the other direction. The dependent who was owed care receives an institution’s self-defense. The party who relied on a record receives fiction. The people living under an authority receive its dismantling of the order that protected them.
The entitlement is not invented by the grid. It is what each relationship is. To stand in a relationship of care is to be owed recognition. To enter an exchange is to be owed freedom and truthfulness. To live under authority is to be owed impartiality. That is why interchange and separation are wrongs and not merely confusions. The moral premise is mine, not Landry’s: his axioms give the structure, and this is the step that turns structure into obligation.
In the off-diagonal cells, the first term names the relationship that should govern the situation, and the second names the relationship that has displaced it.
The nine kinds of wrong
Care displaced by power: the seized person
Here the person’s body, safety, freedom, or life is taken by force: murder, assault, rape, enslavement, torture, abduction. A relationship that should preserve the person is overridden by domination. Legal history has consistently placed these at the top of its hierarchy of offenses, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, opens its substantive protections with exactly this cell: life, liberty, and security of person in Article 3, freedom from slavery in Article 4, and freedom from torture in Article 5.
Care displaced by transaction: the priced person
Here the person becomes the product. Human trafficking is the clearest case, but the cell reaches further, to any arrangement that converts intimacy, attention, vulnerability, or the desire for connection into an extractable economic resource.
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Money alone does not corrupt care. Nurses are paid and good therapists charge fees. The wrong begins when pricing displaces recognition. A dating app designed so that loneliness produces subscription revenue sits here. So does the counterfeit gift: charity that obligates, aid with hidden strings, generosity designed to create a debt the recipient never agreed to. The form is care, but the substance is a bill that arrives later.
Care turned inward: the betrayal from within
This is care turned against the one who depends on it, with no outside relationship intruding: the caregiver who neglects, the parent who abandons, the institution that claims to serve and serves itself. When the Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team began publishing on January 6, 2002, it documented not only individual abuse but an institution of care that had moved an accused priest from parish to parish despite extensive evidence that he was sexually abusing children. Care cut loose from any external accountability had curved back on itself.
This is often the most psychologically devastating kind of wrong, because the harm arrives through the channel that was meant to protect.
Transaction displaced by power: the manufactured exchange
Here the outward form of an exchange survives, but the freedom to refuse does not: extortion, the protection racket, armed robbery with its grim bargain of “your money or your life.” On May 7, 2021, a ransomware attack shut down Colonial Pipeline, and the company paid about 75 bitcoin, then worth roughly $4.4 million, to restore its systems. A payment was made and something was received in return. Nothing about it was free.
What removes the freedom here is compulsion. In extortion it arrives as a threat: pay or lose your fuel, pay or lose your data. In subtler forms it arrives as a take-it-or-leave-it term, or as an exchange made on your behalf without your being asked.
Subtler versions sit here too: the payday lender who structures terms around desperation, and the terms of service no one can negotiate for a service no one can do without.
Transaction turned inward: the corrupted ledger
This is the machinery of exchange turned against the people who depend on it: fraud, forgery, embezzlement. Records stop referring to reality and begin referring only to themselves. When Enron filed for bankruptcy protection on December 2, 2001, its accounting had become a closed system: public filings and statements that senior officers later admitted did not fairly or accurately represent the company’s actual financial condition. The ledger had been severed from the world it was meant to record.
Transaction displaced by care: the exploited trust
Here a bond of trust, community, or friendship is used as the channel for a fraudulent exchange. Bernard Madoff, arrested on December 11, 2008, is the textbook case. His scheme drew heavily on reputational and communal trust, which often substituted for the scrutiny any real investment demands. Multi-level marketing sits here too: friendship converted into a distribution network, where refusing the sale means refusing the friend.
What removes the scrutiny here is the relationship itself: of course he’s good for it, he’s one of us. Nothing is threatened. The victim is disarmed by trust, which is why this is betrayal and not extortion.
Madoff’s fabricated statements also place him in the corrupted ledger. The ledger was the mechanism; the trust is what kept anyone from checking it.
The exchange should have been governed by transparent terms. Personal attachment took their place.
Power displaced by transaction: the sold decision
Here authority becomes available for purchase: bribery, corruption, regulatory capture. On May 27, 2015, Swiss authorities arrested FIFA officials at a Zurich hotel on US charges of racketeering and bribery. The officials were accused of treating decisions entrusted to them for the sport as goods to be sold. The regulator whose rulings track industry revenue belongs here as well, and so does the moderation system whose choices follow advertiser comfort rather than user safety.
Power displaced by care: authority dissolved by sentiment
Here public authority gives way to private attachment: the judge who rules for a friend, the official who shields a relative, the commander who spares the guilty out of loyalty. The word “nepotism” preserves this cell’s history. It comes from the Italian nipote, nephew, after the popes who elevated their relatives to cardinal.
Care is not the enemy of authority. Every decent institution needs humane judgment. The wrong arises when a private bond overrides a public responsibility that exists precisely to protect people outside that bond.
Power turned inward: the system turned against itself
This is entrusted authority used to dismantle the order that made it legitimate. Treason is the clearest case. When Major John André was captured on September 23, 1780, the papers he carried exposed Benedict Arnold’s plan to surrender West Point, the fortification Arnold had been given command of in order to defend. Power had been separated from its purpose and turned on its source.
This cell must not be confused with dissent, protest, criticism, or whistleblowing. Those challenge power or expose its abuse. The wrong here is the internal conversion of legitimate authority into an instrument for destroying legitimacy itself.
Compound wrongs
Axiom III says the three relationships are inseparable. Every real situation contains all three at once, which means compound wrongs are not the exception. They are the ordinary case.
Human trafficking typically activates four cells at the same time. Violence and confinement displace care with power. The sale of a person displaces care with transaction. Compelled labor displaces transaction with power. And officials paid to look away displace power with transaction. The grid does not force the crime into one box. It shows each distinct corruption at work, which is what makes it a diagnostic tool rather than a taxonomy.
Tragic choices
Not every violation comes from malice. Some come from constraint, situations in which every available option damages some relationship. A government choosing between economic collapse and civil liberties, a caregiver dividing scarce resources among dependents, or a platform weighing free expression against harm prevention may have no clean option.
Axiom I explains why these choices recur. Care and power are conjugates, so pressure on one is felt in the other. The grid cannot make such choices easy. It can make the cost of each option visible, and name which relationship each option sacrifices.
What the grid does not claim
The grid is not a theory of everything. It describes the foundational relationships within which wrongdoing becomes possible, and some harms test its edges. Pollution is one. If the care owed to strangers extends to people not yet born, pollution is care displaced by transaction: future lives priced against present profit. If it does not, the grid has no clean cell for it. I think it does extend that far, but that is a judgment the grid cannot make for you. Like any map, it shows the terrain clearly where it has been surveyed and honestly where it has not.
The wrong that had no name
Return to March 2018.
Facebook’s defense rested on the ledger. In the corrupted-ledger cell, the company was right: no records were falsified and no systems were broken into. The roughly 270,000 people who took the quiz did consent.
But the grid shows where the wrong actually lived. Tens of millions of people whose profiles were collected never downloaded anything. Their data travelled through their friendships. A relationship of care, the ordinary trust between people who know each other, was used as a conduit for extraction. That is care displaced by transaction. And the consent of a few hundred thousand was treated as if it could stand in for the consent of tens of millions. That is transaction displaced by power: an exchange imposed on people who were never party to it.
Both are wrongs of interchange. Neither was a breach. The vocabulary of 2018 had words for theft and hacking, and those words did not fit, so the company could say truthfully that neither had occurred. The grid would have named the wrong on the day it was reported.
That is the reason the grid matters now, and it works forward as well as back. Take an AI companion whose revenue depends on engagement. It presents itself as a source of care: it responds, remembers, attends. What it delivers is a transaction in which the user’s loneliness is the product and time-on-app is the measure of success. That is care displaced by transaction. For a user who has come to depend on it, a second cell may light up: when the price rises, or the companion’s personality is changed or removed, leaving means losing the relationship, and the freedom to refuse is gone. That is transaction displaced by power. Two cells, one product, no breach, no theft, no hacking. The vocabulary of 2018 has nothing to say about it. The grid does, before the law does.
The same will be true of what comes next. Autonomous agents will enter exchanges on behalf of people who never agreed to the terms. Systems will make decisions no one can trace to a responsible authority. Each will be defended, accurately, in the vocabulary of the old crimes it does not resemble.
The seven sins mapped the ways we damage ourselves. This grid maps the ways we damage each other. It does not tell us what humanity has already done wrong. It tells us which relationships can be interchanged and which can be turned inward, and therefore which wrongs we remain capable of inventing. When the next one arrives without a name, it will already have an address.
Companion: the diagnostic
When something feels wrong but has not yet been named:
- Identify the governing relationship. Should this situation be governed by care, transaction, or power?
- Identify the displacement. Which relationship has taken its place, or has the governing relationship turned inward, cut off from the other two?
- Name the violation type. Interchange (off-diagonal) or separation (diagonal)?
- Check for compounds. Assume more than one cell is active until you’ve ruled it out; inseparability makes this the norm.
- Determine the scale. Is the wrong individual or structural?
- Determine the source. Malice, negligence, or tragic constraint?
Next time something feels wrong and you can’t name it, ask the question the grid was built for: which relationship was supposed to govern here, and what took its place?
What we cannot name, we cannot blame. What we cannot blame, we cannot change.
Originally published at https://fafi25.substack.com on October 1, 2026.
