Ethical Individuation in Legal Corpora: A Conceptual and Operational Framework for Provision-Level Analysis

Every normative provision instantiates an ethical orientation toward the subject upon whom it bears. This article constructs a conceptual and operational framework for registering that orientation at provision level. Drawing on conceptual framework analysis (Jabareen 2009), it builds the scalar-dialectical architecture of four minimal ethical distinctions (D1–D4), ranging from the other as body to be controlled (D1) to the other as end whose vulnerability constitutes a normative reason (D4). Following Krippendorff’s specification of decision schemes, it operationalises the distinctions into conjunctive criteria-sets, parallel evaluation with primary attribution, disambiguation rules, and a recording format designed for inter-coder reliability testing. A gap analysis demonstrates that no existing framework in jurisprudence or applied ethics occupies this conceptual space. A micro-pilot with two coders and twenty provisions from two corpora reports Krippendorff’s α (ordinal) = 0.904 [95% CI: 0.713, 0.985], providing proof-of-concept evidence of communicable classification. The framework enables internal ethical critique of legal corpora and provides applied ethics with a provision-level instrument that existing consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-ethical theories do not supply.