Contemporary ethical discourse increasingly functions as a terminal authority in adjudicating scientific, technological, political, and civilizational decisions. This paper argues that such a role exceeds the structural capacity of ethical justification. The central claim is not normative but structural: ethical judgment presupposes the sustainability of the systems within which it operates and therefore cannot serve as a final adjudicative criterion for long-run, complex systems. By demonstrating the logical dependence of ethical justification on structural sustainability, understood as the capacity of a system to maintain operational continuity through feedback, error detection, and adaptive revision over time, the paper establishes a priority ordering in which sustainability precedes ethics in the hierarchy of adjudicative criteria. Ethics is thereby repositioned from a civilizational “supreme court” to a conditional regulatory layer operating within the structural constraints that make moral judgment possible.
Wangius (Sun,) studied this question.