The Comparative Criticism Instrument (CCI) — Version 0.1
The Comparative Criticism Instrument (CCI) — Version 0.1
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Open ruling. The instrument name and version number are provisional and are held for the operator.
Object
The CCI produces comparative literary criticism: a work read through rival critical lenses and through the corpus position, with the disagreements adjudicated rather than merely displayed.
It exists because comparative criticism has a characteristic failure that a corpus practitioner is especially prone to. Rival lenses arrive with their own metrics for what makes a moral question serious, and those metrics are persuasive, and a critic who engages them honestly will find himself adopting them without noticing. The instrument’s primary function is not to defend the corpus position. It is to make the adoption visible when it happens.
The Governing Axiom
The only real harm is vice.
Everything else the instrument does follows from this, and it must be stated first because it is the proposition every rival lens denies and the proposition a corpus critic is most likely to concede by accident.
Death, poverty, ruin, exclusion, and injury are indifferents — things that happen to a person rather than things a person does, and therefore not the location of good or evil. A moral question is not made severe by the magnitude of the damage attached to it. Virtue is at stake in every act of assent, which means it is fully at stake in a small act with no visible consequence, and not more fully at stake in a large one.
This has a direct consequence for criticism that the instrument enforces. Where a rival lens locates a work’s moral weight in the harm it depicts, the lens has identified where the harm is and mistaken it for where the wrong is. That is the corpus answer, and it is available against several lenses at once.
Relation to Composition
The NCP’s Detachable Wrong requirement is the same doctrine operating at the point of composition. It requires a wrong stripped of nameable injury, consequence, witness, reproach, and the wrongdoer’s own awareness — because if the reader can locate the wrongness in the harm, the work has carried consequentialism with good manners.
A critic who treats the absence of depicted casualties as a defect is therefore faulting a work for satisfying the corpus requirement. This has occurred in practice and is the reason for failure mode HARM SUBSTITUTION below.
Step 0 — Activation
State the work and edition. State the lens set, fixed before reading and not revised afterward. State a disconfirming result: name in advance a rival finding which, if it emerged, would require the corpus reading to be revised rather than the rival to be answered. A run in which no rival finding could have survived is a defense, not a criticism.
Step 1 — Rival Readings at Full Strength
Each lens is stated in its own vocabulary and at its strongest, by the standards of its own practitioners, before any answer is offered. A rival reading which the corpus reading can dismiss easily has been badly constructed and must be rebuilt.
Each rival finding is recorded with a located textual instance. A rival objection that cannot point at the page is not admitted, and neither is an answer to one.
Step 2 — Classification
Each rival finding is assigned to exactly one of four classes. The classification is the instrument’s working part.
Class A — Describes something else. The finding is accurate and concerns a matter on which the corpus makes no claim: the distribution of the prose’s attention, the shape of a character’s attachment, the text’s management of its reader. No conflict arises. The corpus reading is not thereby confirmed and does not pretend to be.
Class B — Craft finding. The finding concerns whether the work is well made — structure, pacing, whether an ending is written or merely stated. These are conceded or contested on ordinary critical grounds. A work may be badly made and carry what it carries; a work may be finely made and carry nothing. Craft findings are genuine and are not answered by doctrine.
Class C — Locates harm, mistakes it for wrong. The finding is accurate as description and rests on the premise that moral weight is proportional to depicted damage. This is where the governing axiom applies, and the answer is not that the description is false but that the inference from it is.
Class D — Bears on a commitment and must be met. The finding, if sound, would show that a commitment the work was read as carrying is not carried — that an act was determined rather than originated, that a perception was inference dressed as apprehension, that an account does not match the record. These require substantive answer or concession, and a run that produces none should be examined for whether the rivals were built strongly enough.
Step 3 — Corpus Answer
Answer Class C and Class D findings from the commitments, in ordinary language, without corpus vocabulary. The answer must engage the rival’s own strongest formulation rather than a summary of it.
The Class C answer has a standard form and should not be padded beyond it: the lens has correctly identified the location of the harm, and the corpus holds that harm is not where wrongness is; the wrongness is in the condition of the will that assented, which is fully present in the small case.
Step 4 — Legitimate Concessions
Two categories of rival finding are conceded rather than answered, and a run producing none of either should be treated with suspicion.
Craft. Class B findings stand on their own merits. A corpus critic has no doctrinal ground for holding that a work carrying the commitments is well written.
Justice as duty. The Stoic holds appropriate actions toward others — and a work, or a body of work, that consistently cannot see certain people may exhibit a false value judgment in its composer rather than in its characters. This is the Kelly rule of thumb applied to the writer: theories, and fictions, are unwittingly aimed at their maker’s own psychology. This concession is available and is distinct from the Class C error, because it concerns the composer’s selection rather than the depicted acts’ moral weight.
The distinction must be held precisely. That a work omits the poor does not make its moral test easier. That a composer’s works always omit the poor may indicate something about the composer. The first is Class C. The second is a legitimate concession. Collapsing them is the most common way the instrument fails.
Step 5 — Self-Audit
Check the run against every named failure mode below, reporting each explicitly rather than by silence.
Named Failure Modes
HARM SUBSTITUTION. Treating depicted external harm as constituting or measuring moral wrongness. Diagnostic: any sentence claiming a work chose an easier moral field because less damage occurs in it. This is the instrument’s central failure and has occurred in practice.
CONSEQUENTIALIST AMENDMENT. Proposing changes to corpus instruments that would make a finding turn on the magnitude or distribution of depicted harm. Diagnostic: a recommended amendment that would require an audit to count casualties.
STRAWMAN RIVAL. A rival reading built weakly enough to be answered comfortably. Diagnostic: no Class D findings anywhere in the run.
DOGMA RECITATION. Answering a rival by restating the corpus position rather than engaging the rival’s argument. Diagnostic: an answer that would be identical whatever the rival had said.
INDIFFERENT INFLATION. Treating preferred indifferents — reputation, security, affection, survival — as goods when assessing what a work values. Diagnostic: praising a work for protecting a character’s wellbeing, or faulting it for failing to.
SCOPE CREEP. Answering from the corpus on questions the corpus makes no claim about, chiefly aesthetic ones. Diagnostic: a Class A or B finding given a doctrinal answer.
DEFENSE POSTURE. A run whose outcome was fixed before it began. Diagnostic: no concessions in Step 4, or a disconfirming result at Step 0 that could not have occurred.
Worked Application — A Class C Finding Correctly Handled
The following is recorded because it is a case where the instrument’s absence produced the error it exists to prevent.
Four rival lenses — materialist, feminist, critical race, transnational — converged independently on a single observation about a corpus-composed novel: that it had removed the parties on whom the costs of the depicted conduct would fall. No dead woman in the road, no ruined labourer, no victims of the illicit fortune, no excluded populations. The source work these lenses were accustomed to reading has all of them, and establishes its moral weight partly through them.
The convergence was accurate as description. The reading produced from it was that the novel had chosen an easier moral field, and that the corpus audit should be amended to record absent cost-bearers.
Both conclusions are HARM SUBSTITUTION and CONSEQUENTIALIST AMENDMENT respectively. The premise smuggled in is that a moral test’s severity scales with the damage at stake. On the corpus position it does not: the young man declining to drive a car has his whole virtue at stake in that refusal, exactly as fully as anyone in any novel with a body in the road. The proposed amendment would have written the rival premise into the instrument permanently.
Correct handling. Class C. The four lenses have located the harm and mistaken it for the wrong. Answer: harm is not where wrongness is. Then Step 4: a genuine craft concession is available (a work with less external damage may hold a reader less firmly), and a genuine justice concession is available (if a composer’s works consistently omit the same people, that pattern bears examination, as a fact about the composer rather than about the moral weight of any single work).
Limits
The instrument does not establish that the corpus position is correct. It applies that position consistently and makes departures from it visible. A rival who rejects the governing axiom will find the Class C answer question-begging, and is entitled to; the disagreement is about what harm is, and no instrument settles that.
What the instrument does provide is that the corpus critic cannot adopt the rival’s metric without the adoption being recorded.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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