The Structural Imperative Against Harmful Self-Interest: Group Stability, Boundary Work, and the Priority of Anti-Predatory Norms

This preprint presents a substantially revised and article-length development of themes first introduced in Benefit–Harm Structures of Groups and History: A Non-Metaphysical Behavioral Semantic Framework for Collective Dynamics (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17722363). Whereas the earlier preprint developed a broader framework for collective dynamics, group structure, norms, conflict, and historical change, the present manuscript narrows the focus to a more specific social-theoretical problem: why durable groups recurrently assign high normative priority to the suppression of internal harmful self-interest, and why complex societies nevertheless continue to reproduce such harm in disguised forms. The article argues that stable groups depend on the coupling of two analytically distinct but interdependent structures: a material cooperation structure and a psychological identification structure. Internal harmful self-interest is structurally central because it damages both at once. Its suppression is therefore interpreted not primarily as the expression of prior moral consensus, but as a recurrent requirement of group persistence under conditions of protected membership and sustained interdependence. The manuscript further explains the coexistence of prohibition and disguised reproduction through three mechanisms: boundary reclassification, procedural legitimation, and justificatory recoding. Compared with the earlier broader preprint, this manuscript offers a tighter conceptual scope, a clearer article-level argument, a more explicit distinction between objective harm and recognized harm, and a more sustained dialogue with major theoretical traditions including Durkheim, cooperation theory, Luhmann, Lamont and Molnár, and Bourdieu. It should therefore be read as a distinct and substantially reworked manuscript within the same broader research program rather than as a simple reposting of the earlier preprint. Within that broader program, related preprints include Three Axioms of Benefit–Harm Seeking: A Non-Metaphysical Behavioral Semantic Framework for the Humanities and Social Sciences (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17703759), Philosophy as Metatheory: A Methodological Framework for the Systematic Deconstruction of the Humanities Based on the Three Behavioral Axioms (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17748797), and Orthodox Marxism as a Test Case: A Behavioral-Semantic Reconstruction Based on the Three Axioms of Benefit–Harm Seeking (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17774078).