Envelopment Ethics: A Generativity-First Ethical Framework for AI and Technological Civilization

This paper proposes "Envelopment Ethics," a pioneering ethical framework for AI and technological civilization that shifts the moral foundation from static "states" to dynamic "generativity." > While contemporary AI ethics focuses on output-level constraints (fairness, bias, safety), Envelopment Ethics argues that these are "tertiary projections" of a deeper relational substrate. Building on the author’s previous work in theoretical physics ("It from Wave"), this paper introduces the "Autonomous Pain-Vortex Model." It formalizes ethical "good" as the preservation of the Basin of Attraction for meaning-production (Γ), fueled by the distributed micro-asymmetries ("pain") of individual actors rather than top-down containment. By integrating deontology and consequentialism into a higher-order generative ontology, the framework provides a robust defense against "meaning collapse" induced by over-optimization and friction removal in AI systems. This work offers a coherent philosophical and dynamical foundation for civilizational design in the AI era. This paper applies the Envelopment framework developed in “Envelopment over Unification” (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18244683) to ethics and AI governance. A policy-level application is provided in “The Civilization KPI Trap” (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18264106).