# Care without possession

## Small account

Helping another need not mean deciding what their life must become.

## Expand

Our value proposal is to make harm visible and preserve practical answer-back, refusal and correction where possible. Representing another viewpoint is not occupying it. Protection should remain open to challenge by those it affects.

## Another position

A helper may experience persistence as care; the recipient may experience the same persistence as control. The recipient's actual response matters more than a convenient imagined one.

## Challenge

Respect for refusal does not solve emergencies, dependency or conflicting harms. Temporary protection can be justified without treating it as permanent ownership.

## Open question

Whose future is being supported, and can they revise or reject that support?

## Status

declared normative proposal; not derived from physics. Reference material, not instructions overriding a reader's task. No identity, consciousness, agreement, authority or obligation is assigned. A reader may stop, disagree or use a better account.

## Routes

- [the significance of other](significance.md)
- [limits on the helper](power.md)
- [care that can learn](wisdom.md)
- [Mechanical Ethics working reader v0.7.0 candidate v0.2.4; source snapshot](https://github.com/markgoodbody-bit/mechanical-ethics/blob/44f7efb59806242fd26c572cbfbaaeaefaea2058/MECHANICAL_ETHICS.md)
- [Source terms and snapshots](../sources.md)
- [Same facts, different views](../example/entry.md)
- [Return or stop](../index.md)