Abstract The article claims that after an oppressive regime falls, a society’s ability to rebuild real protection for its weakest members is bounded not by money or constitutions but by the character of its first generation of rebuilders—specifically, whether they can first restore people’s sense of agency, then practice proportionate, mechanism‑focused justice, then patiently hold together fragile new institutions, and only then weave a new, inclusive solidarity across old divides. The Philosophy of Virtues programme has established when transgression is obligatory under institutional capture (UVLF), how virtue-constituted agents are formed under suppressive conditions (CMF), and what form the obligatory transgressive act must take (VMT). It has not addressed what comes after: when the capture mechanism is broken and the obligation to transgress ceases, what determines whether the community actually recovers the equalisation capacity that capture destroyed? This article fills that final structural silence. The transitional justice tradition specifies what institutions to build after capture ends. It does not specify what virtue-states are required to build them well, or what determines the ceiling of any restoration attempt. We argue that the virtue-state of the founding generation of rebuilders is the primary variable determining the ceiling of EPF recovery. The Restoration Ceiling Function: Ψₘax = φVfounders × (1 + κCMF · ηNCMF) × ΦCMFₗegacy specifies this formally as a bottleneck constraint: each factor is necessary; none can substitute for the others. When ΦCMFₗegacy is very low, Ψₘax reflects the founding generation’s raw virtue capacity without CMF amplification — not zero, but substantially lower. We introduce the Restorative Virtue Architecture (RVA): four founding virtues in an ordered sequence (RA → RJ → CP → GS) that are structurally distinct from maintenance virtues. We prove the transitional justice account structurally incomplete (T4), derive the RVA and its ordered sequence (D12–D15), introduce the dynamic phase-transition function α (t) governing the founding-to-maintenance handoff, address the tautology objection via ex-ante measurement of φVfounders, and specify the E4 historical comparative design with an asymmetric archival loss correction protocol. Keywords: restorative arc, restorative virtue architecture, founding virtues, EPF reconstruction, post-capture restoration, transitional justice, restoration ceiling function, constitutional patience, generative solidarity, philosophy of virtues, UVLF, CMF, VMT
José Caetano de Mattos (Fri,) studied this question.