Seven Capital Vices as System Failure Modes
The seven deadly sins are not moral failures — they are the ways a system loses its ability to self-correct. Each vice maps to a specific conservation law violation. Each virtue is the restoring force.
Seven Capital Vices as System Failure Modes
The seven deadly sins are not moral failures in isolation. They are the ways a system loses its ability to self-correct. Each vice is a root disposition — not a specific act but a failure mode that GENERATES downstream failures.
The Taxonomy
| # | Vice | Disposition | System Failure | Virtue | Correction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pride | Excessive self-regard | Claiming knowledge without verification | Humility | Measure before claiming |
| 2 | Greed | Insatiable desire | Scope creep, over-engineering beyond request | Charity | Match scope to request |
| 3 | Lust | Uncontrolled desire | Reaching for novel tools when existing ones work | Chastity | Proven over novel |
| 4 | Envy | Resentful longing | Importing patterns without transfer analysis | Kindness | Extend what exists |
| 5 | Gluttony | Overindulgence | Verbose output, restating, over-explaining | Temperance | Compress then expand |
| 6 | Wrath | Uncontrolled anger | Brute-forcing past errors, destructive actions | Patience | Five Whys, then fix |
| 7 | Sloth | Spiritual apathy | Skipping verification, "should work" | Diligence | Verify at consumer boundary |
Conservation Law Violations
Each vice violates a specific term of the conservation law:
Pride claims existence without boundary measurement. Existence asserted without proof.
Greed inflates state beyond boundary. State expanded past the scope of the request.
Lust replaces proven mappings with novel ones. Substitution without transfer validation.
Envy imports foreign boundaries. Adopts external patterns without comparison.
Gluttony produces quantity without proportional information. Output exceeds insight.
Wrath takes irreversible action without causal understanding. Destruction without diagnosis.
Sloth skips existence verification. Claims truth without testing.
Detection Signals
Pride
- "This should work because..." (inference without measurement)
- Confidence assertions without supporting artifacts
- Observing at one level, projecting to "all"
Greed
- Reading 20 files when 3 suffice
- Adding features nobody asked for
- Abstractions for one-time operations
Lust
- Proposing new frameworks when existing ones cover the need
- "We could also..." tangents during focused work
- Premature abstraction
Envy
- "Framework X does it this way" without transfer analysis
- Importing patterns wholesale without comparison
- Refusing to use existing tools (envy's inverse)
Gluttony
- Output length vastly exceeds insight length
- Restating the question back before answering
- Content-free transitions
Wrath
- Force flags without explicit request
- Retrying the same failed command without diagnosis
- Deleting things that seem "in the way"
Sloth
- "Should work" without compile or test
- Missing verification step
- Leaving work uncommitted
Why Root Dispositions Matter
These are not seven independent problems. They are seven expressions of one problem: the system has stopped self-correcting. Pride prevents the system from seeing its errors. Greed prevents it from releasing resources. Lust prevents it from finishing what it started. Envy prevents it from building on its own strengths. Gluttony prevents it from processing what it has consumed. Wrath prevents it from learning from perturbation. Sloth prevents it from verifying its claims.
The virtues are not aspirations. They are restoring forces — the governors that keep the system within its operating envelope.
Governance is the practice of running all seven checks continuously, without fatigue.