Triadic Moral Dynamics and the Structural Limits of Authority: A Model of Moral Misclassification, Legitimacy Inertia, and Institutional Failure

Human institutions repeatedly generate outcomes widely regarded as unjust—wrongful punishment, procedural rigidity, and escalation under stress—even in the absence of overt malice. Existing explanations typically invoke bias, corruption, or ideological conflict but do not account for the persistence and cross-domain convergence of these failures. This paper proposes a structural account. We model moral interaction as intrinsically triadic, with agents simultaneously occupying roles of imposition, reception, and response. Institutional systems, however, require singular role classification to enable coordination and action. Under conditions of imperfect information and finite legitimacy resources, this reduction induces systematic moral misclassification. We formalize (i) a triadic state representation of moral interaction, (ii) a collapse operator mapping triadic states to singular classifications, and (iii) a legitimacy constraint governing institutional correction capacity. We show that repeated classification under uncertainty produces persistent misclassification and that institutions transition from error correction to self-preservation when legitimacy resources fall below a threshold. The result is a general mechanism for institutional rigidity and failure. The framework yields testable implications and motivates reversible, triad-preserving institutional designs as a means of mitigating structural injustice.