Host-binding is the load-bearing ethical input, not a discharged precondition. The thesis says naming host and horizon is not a way of taking the question back; §V says physics does not pick which telic system should persist. Two host bindings can issue incompatible constraint sets, so ranking hosts is the ought the derivation assigned to physics.

§IV presents the four virtues as following from binary persistence, then notes that persist has become a quantity whose price is named in §VI. Either the virtues follow from persist-through-change and §VI only ranks viable states, or they follow from preferring more aliveness and were derived before that assumption was paid. The synthesis states both.

The thesis lists energy, boundary, information, correction, succession, and adaptive capacity as persistence requirements. The body spends four dilemmas. Succession is not a slot. Replacement of parts while the pattern persists can move while energy, boundary, information, and control are held fixed, so succession is either Boundary-over-time or a leftover coordinate; it cannot be both a thesis peer of energy and absent from the four-count.

The default-path remainder versus Prigogine-to-Friston is keeping the conditional through to an operational output. This page's output is four named capacities and a pointer. Without a persistence-conditional quantity for at least one virtue that can fail, Friston-as-description plus four labels matches what is here, and the Hume-bypass framing is doing the novelty work the operational claim was supposed to do.