Conflict, Repair, and Non-Domination: The Political Ethics of Civilizational Healing

What happens when healing cannot be consensual? Political orders confront conflicts that deliberation cannot dissolve, privileges that depend on continued asymmetry, and injuries that cannot be ended without regulation, adjudication, redistribution, resistance, institutional restructuring, or other exercises of power. Yet the language of collective health has repeatedly enabled an opposite danger: authorities may classify dissent, difference, or human groups as pathology and present domination as treatment. This article names the resulting problem the healing–domination dilemma and develops a middle-range political ethic for navigating it. The argument begins with an Anti-Pathologization Principle: Civilizational Healing may diagnose injurious conduct, mechanisms, institutions, structures, power relations, and consequences, but never persons, populations, identities, cultures, religions, disabilities, or dissenting groups as diseases or contaminants whose removal constitutes treatment. A bounded historical analysis of eugenics and Nazi racial hygiene serves as a negative constitutional control, not an analogy against contemporary opponents. The article then distinguishes eight overlapping conflict dimensions—epistemic, interpretive, value, interest, rights, domination, historical-repair, and existential/security—and proposes a category-appropriate response principle. Equal moral standing does not make every claim normatively symmetrical; WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Article 5.3 shows how documented conflicts of interest can justify function-specific participation limits while persons retain rights and standing. Three overlapping governance regimes organize the analysis: legitimate contestation, protective constraint, and repair. Movement between them is disciplined by a twenty-question Legitimate Constraint Test and a Least-Dominating Effective Means Principle: among legitimate options reasonably capable of addressing the evidenced mechanism in time, choose the one imposing the least uncontrolled power, with due process, remedy, review, and termination. A Dual-Error Governance framework evaluates both under-constraint and over-constraint through severity, uncertainty, urgency, reversibility, and the distribution of error costs, without reducing them to a score or assuming symmetry. Repair is anchored in the five established forms of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/147—restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition—and cross-classified by consequential, relational, structural/generative, and regenerative depth. A seven-pathway Responsibility Architecture distinguishes causal, culpable, institutional, beneficiary, capacity, role, and civic responsibility without converting present obligation into inherited personal guilt. Structured comparisons involving Little Rock school desegregation, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Canadian residential-school settlement and TRC, WHO FCTC Article 5.3, Minamata disease, Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador, and eugenics/racial hygiene test the architecture. The cases show that constraint and repair are distinct functions; judgments and recommendations are not implementation; recognition procedures can themselves concentrate power; and neither forgiveness nor affective reconciliation may be demanded as the price of justice. The resulting political ethic seeks neither harmony nor therapeutic sovereignty, but non-dominating transformation capable of ending, repairing, and preventing avoidable injury while preserving equal standing and plural agency.