PhronesisHypermoralism — the chronic pattern of compulsive moral judgment of others, organizing one's identity around being more ethical than other people, producing an adversarial relationship with the world and progressive moral isolation — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_HM in the landscape of grounded moral engagement. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as grounded moral engagement: the capacity to hold genuine values and act from them without requiring others' moral failures to confirm one's own worth, remaining genuinely troubled by wrongdoing without making others' inadequacy the foundation of one's identity.
W_HM is rigorously distinguished from appropriate moral concern, legitimate ethical critique, healthy moral convictions, and constructive accountability. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: moral identity via contrast (the hypermoralist's ethical selfhood is maintained not through positive action from values but through contrast with others who fall short; D(ξ) is generated by moral ambiguity or by others behaving well), judgment amplification loop (each act of moral judgment releases a satisfaction signal reinforcing the pattern; increasingly fine-grained moral failures must be identified to maintain the same signal), and moral isolation (hypermoralism progressively alienates others who experience the hypermoralist as condemning, confirming the view that one is surrounded by morally inadequate people).
The Moral Poverty Paradox is central: hypermoralism reliably produces moral impoverishment — the hypermoralist, organized around judging rather than acting from values, becomes less genuinely ethical over time while feeling more morally righteous. Nine formal propositions characterize the grounded moral engagement ground state, the moral-superiority wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the moral poverty paradox, developmental roots in environments requiring moral performance for love, and return paths through ACT values-action therapy, IFS inner critic work, and graduated tolerance of moral complexity.