Stress-test an ethic with one hard question.

Take unrestricted extraction seriously: grow by draining a host while remaining dependent on that host. In a closed system with no fresh hosts, no adequate regeneration, and a long enough horizon, generalizing that strategy destroys its own precondition. This is a conditional ecological argument, not a theorem about every market, organism, or society.

Now test the cooperative alternative: prefer moves that preserve or expand both the actor's capacity and the relevant whole's capacity. Generalization does not guarantee success—coordination failures and externalities remain—but the rule does not require a permanent class of nonparticipants to function. That difference is why Emergentism chooses it as a default and keeps testing its consequences.

Credit where it is due: the universalization test is Immanuel Kant's — the categorical imperative, 1785, not ours. We derived no new moral logic. Our contribution is a proposed correspondence between that test and a capacity-and-dependency audit. The correspondence is useful if it clarifies real choices; it is not evidence merely because two vocabularies rhyme.

And one more honesty, the most important on this page. The test can expose whether a rule depends on others refusing it; it does not, by itself, force you to care. No amount of is purchases an ought without a normative bridge. Emergentism therefore takes cooperation as a revisable vow. A vow is not a theorem, and we say so.