*Popular positions.* *Platonic moral realism* — the view that obligations exist as stance-independent cosmic facts awaiting discovery in the way a law of motion awaits discovery (Shafer-Landau 2003) — has no place here. But the alternative is not deflation. Moral facts are as real as the Substance they concern. What the account denies is a register of obligations floating above the subjects; what it affirms is that morality is as real as the persistence, distinction, and exchange it consists in. The cosmic inventory is absent; the reality is not.

*Divine command as the foundation of morality* (Adams 1999; Quinn 1978) fails for a different reason. A command that licenses atrocity does not become persuasive by acquiring theological authorship. Believers themselves rely on prior aversions, sympathies, and judgments of proportionality in deciding which commands to affirm, reinterpret, or reject (cf. Maitzen 2009) — which means the intersubjective machinery, Substance registering Substance, remains in operation beneath the theology. Divine command does not ground morality on this account; the intersubjective machinery it is often taken to undergird is the ground, and the command operates as commentary on it. The failure sharpens against the compatibilist structure developed below (*Justice Follows*): responsibility, on the structural account, lives at the token-level contribution an agent makes to causal history. Divine command asks that agent to outsource exactly that contribution to an external authority. The command that licenses atrocity is not only morally wrong — it is self-undermining, asking the responsible agent to become unresponsible by deferral.

*Moral nihilism* (Joyce 2001; Garner 1994) is ruled out by the same facts that rule out the Platonist. Subjects genuinely persist. They are genuinely distinct. They genuinely meet across asymmetric exchange. Denying a cosmic moral register does not deny any of that. What is built on those conditions — practices, norms, codes — is answerable to real facts about outcomes, psychology, and social design. Some arrangements work better for creatures who persist, are distinct, and meet across exchange; others work worse. That difference is not a matter of taste.

One practical objection bridges the popular positions and the professional ones: the agent who grants that cruelty makes some worlds worse but asks what *reason* they have to participate. Self-interest rightly calculated and moral participation converge for any agent who remains exposed to the costs of defection. Anyone who helps build a society that benefits everyone is among the people who benefit. Over any reasonable time horizon, the self-interested agent and the moral agent choose the same action, because both depend on the conditions that let people live and cooperate together. Hobbes (1651), Hume (1740), and Gauthier (1986) saw parts of this convergence; the structural account explains it by noting that the person doing the calculation depends on the very conditions morality articulates. But the convergence is the on-ramp, not the ground, and it must not be asked to carry more than it can. For most agents it is decisive — pure egoism is not a rival framework but a miscalculation about one's own exposure. It does not reach the agent with asymmetric protection from the harms their defection produces — the tyrant, the structurally insulated elite — and the account does not pretend it does; §9 reaches the same limit of the insurance argument and declines to lean on self-interest to cover it. That agent is not a counterexample, because the obligation never rested on the payoff. His exemption is simply groundless: the feature that licenses his own stake — being a subject with the capacity to be averse to particular experiences and outcomes — is equally present in those he exempts himself from, so the only thing distinguishing his case is an indexical, and an indexical is not a ground ([§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)). What binds him is therefore not a calculation he can defeat but the recognized standing of the others whose conditions are still at stake ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) — expressed as the field's claim against any pair, the consent constraint the procedure below makes operational, and, where he acts on his exemption, the enforcement and restorative-justice institutions [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) and [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) develop. The floor binds every participant, and the one apparent exit does not open. Genuine exit would mean drawing nothing from the social and material conditions that sustain one's life — but a person who relies on language, legal protection, exchange, and the biosphere cannot meet that condition. What the insulated elite achieves is not exit but insulation: they draw on those conditions as fully as anyone while reducing only their own exposure to the harm caused when others lose them. That makes him the maximal free-rider, not an escapee, and the field's claim against him is strongest precisely where his felt stake is weakest. The floor is left only by leaving the field altogether, never by prospering within it.

*Meta-ethical challenges.* Four challenges press from different directions — debunking (Street 2006), queerness (Mackie 1977), the amoralist (Brink 1986), and the open question (Moore 1903) — but the responses share a common structure: because the account posits no stance-independent moral properties, each one either misses its target or is absorbed.

*Debunking.* Street's (2006) Darwinian Dilemma — that natural selection shaped evaluative attitudes for fitness rather than truth-tracking — poses a serious challenge to robust moral realism, though contested responses exist (Enoch 2011; Wielenberg 2014). It is not a threat here. The evolutionary shaping is conceded and turned into a resource: the capacities evolution produced reliably track the real structural features of social life because those features are what selected for the capacities. Evolution shaped us to register each other's exposure because registering it is what keeps social Substance alive long enough to persist.

*Queerness.* Mackie (1977) argued that moral properties, if they existed, would be metaphysically sui generis — intrinsically motivating, categorically prescriptive, utterly unlike anything else in the natural world — and that the best explanation of their persistent strangeness is that there are no such properties. This is the most developed case against moral realism, and it does not reach an account that posits no stance-independent moral properties. What occupies the room Mackie empties is not a property but a practice — and the practice does not need to be metaphysically queer to be genuinely binding. Mackie's argument lands on the Platonist property its target assumed realism required; the account here locates the binding force elsewhere, in a practice among mutually exposed subjects, which the queerness argument does not rule out. The modal account makes that practice answerable to the conditions of mutual exposure rather than to a stance-independent property.

*The amoralist.* Brink (1986) pressed the separability of moral judgment and moral motivation: a person can sincerely judge an action wrong and feel no inclination whatsoever to refrain. The amoralist is not confused about the content of the judgment. The judgment simply lacks motivational force. This is conceded at the individual level and follows directly from the alignment reading above. Motivational indifference does not refute a norm; it presupposes one. The amoralist is only recognizable as an amoralist because the norm is real. A position intelligible only as *standing outside* a norm presupposes that norm — in the same way that a counterfeit is intelligible only against genuine currency. The pressures of Substance meeting Substance generate the norms; whether a given individual is moved by them is a fact about that individual's uptake, not about the norms — and the individual's legibility as *unmoved* is the norm showing through the failure to move.

*The open question.* G. E. Moore (1903) observed that for any natural property N — pleasure, fitness, social utility — it remains intelligible to ask *but is N good?* If goodness were identical to a natural property, the question would close as trivially as *is water H₂O?* The openness is real. It persists because prescribing is not describing, even when what is prescribed tracks what is described. The gap between *is* and *ought* is not evidence of a separate moral reality. It is the distance between registering a pressure and responding to it.

The post-Moorean sharpening confirms rather than threatens this reading. Horgan and Timmons (1991) imagined a Moral Twin Earth where 'good' tracks a different natural property — and showed that our moral terms would still diverge from theirs, because moral concepts are not rigidly fixed to any single natural kind. Moral vocabulary is not a label for a natural property. It is a tool for coordinating responses among subjects who can wound and be wounded. The Twin Earth intuition holds — and points exactly where this account already stands.

*Realist revivals.* These press from different directions; the responses converge: what each revival invokes can be carried by the medium itself, without stance-independent properties.

*Indispensability.* Enoch (2010, 2011) presses from the opposite direction. Where Mackie and Street challenge the existence of moral properties, Enoch argues that robust moral realism is explanatorily indispensable — that the best explanation of our taking the normative seriously, of the striking coincidence between our moral beliefs and what we have reason to do, is that there are stance-independent normative truths. The coincidence is real; his explanation is not required. We take the normative seriously because exposure is real, because the consequences of ignoring it are severe, and because the capacities that register it were selected for reliability in tracking the conditions that matter. Convergence between moral belief and reason to act is evidence that norm-construction within the field of mutually exposed subjects works, not evidence of a moral reality beyond us. This is not evolutionary debunking recast: evolution shaped the capacities that register the exposure, but what those capacities register — persistence, distinction, asymmetric exchange among mutually exposed subjects — is a structural feature of the medium itself, not a contingent feature of our lineage, so any subject capable of modeling others would track the same content for the same structural reason.

*Non-ontological realism.* Parfit (2011) presses a more sophisticated version of the realist line. His reasons-fundamentalism takes reasons rather than obligations as the normative primitive, and his *non-ontological* realism holds that there are truths about what agents have reason to do without reasons being entities in a Platonic register — a move that concedes Mackie's queerness worry at the level of ontology while preserving the mind-independence of normative truths. The present account converges on the diagnosis and diverges on the location: reasons are real because exposure is real, and the non-ontological register Parfit needs is the intersubjective field this argument has already specified. Parfit's *Double Error* argument (2011, vol. 2) presses that a non-realist must hold both that suffering does not really matter and that this first error itself does not matter — a *reductio* by the obvious fact that some things (suffering, injustice, the waste of a life) genuinely do. The modal account does not incur the double error, because it does not deny that things matter; it relocates what their mattering consists in. Suffering matters because the subject it happens to genuinely persists, is genuinely distinct, and is genuinely reached across an exchange that cannot be undone — the same conditions that make the subject a subject at all. The mattering is neither imported from a stance-independent register nor projected; it is what the constitutive facts of mutual exposure amount to, read from inside the field. The *reductio* does not land: the *nihilist* non-realism Parfit targets is not what the structural account defends. Reasons retain their grip because the conditions under which subjects can persist, distinguish, and exchange are necessarily instantiated wherever a medium with T, S, and Φ obtains. His Convergence Argument — that Kantian, consequentialist, and Scanlonian contractualist traditions converge on the same principles — is further evidence: distinct frameworks converge because the underlying subject matter is the same field of mutually exposed subjects, articulated through different entry points.

*Reduction.* Railton's (1986) reduced moral naturalism identifies moral goodness with what a fully informed, ideally rational version of an agent would want the agent to want — a natural property picked out by its causal-explanatory role the way *water* is identified with H₂O. Moral knowledge is then a posteriori, and the Moorean open question reflects semantic access to the property rather than a metaphysical gap between *is* and *ought*. The present account shares Railton's naturalism and his rejection of Moorean skepticism; it differs on the property assignment. The natural fact morality tracks is not what an idealized agent would want but the constitutive relation among mutually exposed subjects that any such agent's wanting would itself be responding to — the idealization pushes the grounding question back one step without changing what eventually grounds it.

*Homeostatic cluster.* Boyd's (1988) homeostatic property-cluster account sharpens Cornell realism in a different direction: moral kinds, like many natural kinds, are identified not by a single essential property but by clusters of properties that co-occur because homeostatic mechanisms causally sustain the co-occurrence. *Goodness* or *justice* picks out such a cluster the way *species* picks out co-occurring morphological, behavioral, and reproductive traits held together by ecological mechanisms. The present account converges with Boyd on the homeostatic structure and the causal sustaining, and locates the homeostasis precisely: the cluster of moral features — harm, care, fairness, trust, proportion — co-occurs because the same structural conditions (persistence, distinction, asymmetric exchange among mutually exposed subjects) sustain all of them together. Boyd's account identifies the right pattern; the modal argument identifies what holds the pattern in place.

*The third factor.* Wielenberg's (2014) *robust ethics* defends non-natural moral realism without God: moral facts are stance-independent and non-natural but require no theistic backup, and the coincidence between evolutionarily shaped moral beliefs and such facts is handled by a *third-factor* explanation — a common cause that makes belief and fact co-vary without either tracking the other directly. The present account shares Wielenberg's atheism and converges on the third-factor diagnosis at the level of structure. What plays the role of Wielenberg's common cause, on the present account, is the medium itself — the field of mutually exposed subjects — rather than a separate non-natural fact: belief and fact co-vary because both are shaped by the same structural conditions among mutually exposed subjects. Where the accounts part company is on the non-naturalness. Wielenberg treats the moral facts as *sui generis*; the modal account treats them as facts about a natural structure — the field of mutually exposed subjects — that does not reduce to any lower-level description but is not for that reason non-natural. The *sui generis* posit was doing the work of keeping moral facts from collapsing into arbitrary social construction; the structural necessity of T, S, and Φ does that work without leaving the natural order.

*Nearby relatives.* A different challenge must also be answered: not that the account is wrong, but that it is not new. Four established positions occupy nearby territory.

*Constructivism.* Korsgaard's (1996) constructivism grounds normativity in the reflective endorsement of practical identities — the agent who asks *what should I do?* is already committed to norms by the act of asking. Schroeder (2007) and Boghossian (2006) have pressed constitutivism from different angles: Schroeder questions whether reflective endorsement yields genuinely normative reasons rather than merely hypothetical ones, and Boghossian challenges the constructivist family for conflating the conditions under which norms are taken up with the norms themselves. The present account shares constructivism's anti-realism but differs at the foundation — it grounds the conditions of normativity in the necessary structure of the medium (T/S/Φ), not in the reflective capacity of the individual agent. Constructivism needs a reflector; this account needs only vulnerable subjects in a shared field. The Schroeder/Boghossian worries do not reach here because the normative pressure is not generated by the agent's endorsement but by the constitutive conditions of mutual exposure the endorsement responds to.

*Contractualism.* Scanlon's (1998) contractualism grounds morality in principles no one could reasonably reject. The overlap is real — both locate normativity in what agents owe each other under conditions of mutual exposure. The difference is that this account derives the conditions of mutual exposure from the necessary structure of the medium rather than from a prior commitment to reasonableness.

*Expressivism.* Blackburn's (1993, 1998) quasi-realism — the project of earning the right to realist-sounding moral talk from expressivist foundations — and Gibbard's (1990, 2003) expressivism share the denial that moral claims are descriptions of stance-independent facts. The resemblance is genuine. What distinguishes this account is its claim that the conditions under which moral life is possible — subjects persisting, distinct, and meeting across asymmetric exchange, within a necessarily instantiated medium — are themselves structurally necessary. Expressivism offers no such structural necessity. This account is not expressivism with a metaphysical garnish. The structural necessity of the conditions is what makes the expressions non-arbitrary.

*Neo-sentimentalism.* D'Arms and Jacobson's (2000) neo-sentimentalism analyzes moral concepts through fitting sentiments — an action is *wrong* when guilt would be the fitting response, *admirable* when admiration would be — and their moralistic-fallacy argument distinguishes a sentiment's *fittingness* to its object from the separate question of whether having the sentiment would be good. The overlap with the present account is substantial: both ground moral life in sentiments that register features of exchange among subjects — empathy, indignation, guilt, aversion — and refuse to treat those sentiments as projections. The difference is where the binding force comes from. On neo-sentimentalism, a moral judgment binds by tracking fittingness, a relation that invites the further question *what makes a sentiment fitting?*. The structural account supplies the answer: sentiments fit the features they register because the features are real constitutive facts about mutually exposed subjects, and the sentiments were selected to track them reliably. The moralistic fallacy D'Arms and Jacobson diagnose is what happens when evaluation of having a sentiment overrides the sentiment's answerability to its object — a severance of uptake from the structural conditions the sentiment evolved to register.

Once rival metaphysics are cleared, the question turns practical.

One convergence has already been staged here — the empirical record finding the conditions the structural account predicts — but there is a second convergence the chapter has not yet named, and it carries a different kind of evidential weight. Parfit (2011) argued that Kantian, contractualist, and consequentialist ethics, built on incompatible foundations and developed largely independently, were "climbing the same mountain on different sides," and that their convergence is itself evidence about the moral terrain rather than a coincidence of three projects happening to err in the same direction. The structural account predicts exactly this convergence and explains its source. Each of the three traditions tracks one face of the structural relation: Kant's universalizability is the impartial rule that binds across the field of subjects whether or not the simulation fires; contractualism is the reciprocity-among-mutually-exposed-subjects condition the dyadic structure already encodes; consequentialism is the aggregation over felt-best branches across the field of affected subjects. None of the three is the whole picture, and each is recoverable as one face of the structural account when read alongside the others. That three frameworks with incompatible metaphysical commitments preserved distinct true components of one structure is the convergence Parfit identified; the structural account is what the convergence has been converging *toward* — the metaphysics in which each face is recovered without remainder and the conflicts among the three frameworks dissolve into the question of which face is being foregrounded.

The intergenerational reach of the framework — duties carrying across generations, conditions one subject's choices set for subjects not yet in existence — raises Parfit's non-identity problem (1984), and the chapter should mark the hand-off rather than absorb it. The persons our present choices affect across generational distance are, in many cases, persons whose very existence those choices determine, so the wrong done by setting their conditions poorly cannot be cashed out as harm to *them* against a counterfactual in which they exist better off — there is no such counterfactual; either they exist under these conditions or different people exist instead. The structural account carries the problem cleanly to §9, where institutional reciprocity scaled past face-to-face exchange is developed in detail, but it can say what the structural register adds before handing off: the duty does not need a determinate future patient to bind, because what reciprocity rules out is the setting of conditions a subject would not authorize for any of the subjects it might bring into them. Person-affecting accounting is one register the structural relation operates in; an impersonal register that ranks possible fields of subjects by the conditions of exposure they would constitute is another. Both track what the structural fact already requires; the non-identity case is where the chapter must say so explicitly, and §9 must work it through.

The framework should mark, alongside the non-identity hand-off, two further Parfitian distinctions it has been operating with implicitly. First, what one subject owes another is not the same as what one subject has reason to want for itself or others impersonally — Scanlon and Parfit's "what we owe to each other" and Parfit's "what matters" track different operations on the moral field, and the chapter should keep them apart rather than let one swallow the other. Second, what carries the moral relation forward across time is not the strict identity of the patient but the psychological continuity [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) located as the substrate of the self-modeling current — what makes future-directed duties bind to *this* future subject is not that the subject is "the same person" in any further sense but that the continuity [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) names suffices to make the relation hold. Person-affecting and impersonal registers, what-we-owe and what-matters, identity and continuity: the structural account does not need to elect one member of each pair as fundamental — it needs to mark that the pairs are real and that the chapter operates on the second member of each. That is the position [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) already takes about identity and the position [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) takes for cross-generational meaning; ratifying it here ties the three sites together.

The policy turn [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) makes can be stated with the structure the chapter has already developed. The moral field has a real better/worse gradient relative to the subjects in it — not an objective₁ ought written into a value-neutral world, but an objective₂ better holding across all subjects that must persist, reach, and stand in an interrelation. That gradient is layered, and the order is lexical: necessities met first, because a current that cannot persist is not present to value anything at all; possibility maximized second, because once persistence is secured what subjects owe each other is the field of further possibility their exchanges hold open — the same field the fostering identification ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) named, now scaled into the political maximand §9 develops as *maximum possibility*; structural conflict minimized third, not as an independent goal but as the multi-subject form possibility-maximization takes when many subjects share one field. The stacking matters because it forecloses the *peace-of-the-grave* objection — a regime that minimizes conflict by destroying possibility fails the first two tiers before the third applies — and it sorts the standing question of where to draw the line between conflicts a moral agent is responsible *for* and conflicts the configuration is responsible for. Conflicts generated by an arrangement, largely occupant-independent, and dissolved by changing the arrangement rather than the agent are structural; poverty is the paradigm — a foreclosed possibility-field — and "minimize structural conflict" and "maximize possibility" name one operation in that domain rather than two. Responsibility is not eliminated by the structural reading; it is relocated upstream, to those with power over the arrangement, and moved earlier in time — to design and foresight — where it sits heavier, not lighter, than blame allocated downstream to the agents the arrangement produced.

One further structural fact bears on the policy turn, and it is the deepest tie between the metaethic and the politics the chapter is in a position to make. The cooperative ought the structural account develops binds rationally because it follows constitutively from what an agent is — but it binds *as motivation* only for agents able to reason past the immediate horizon, and the empirical record on scarcity-cognition (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013) is that precarity itself collapses the planning horizon: an agent with no secured floor cannot afford long-horizon reasoning, and the agent the cooperative argument needs to move is exactly the one precarity has unmade. Securing the floor is therefore not only a tier-one moral target inside the stack; it is the enabling condition of moral rationality itself. The political face this licenses can be stated as a single principle — *converge on the floor, truly individual above it*: collective convergence at the level of necessities, genuine individuation in the possibility-field above. The principle does not oppose individualism to the collective floor; it inverts the usual framing by treating the floor as constitutive of authentic individuality rather than as the price individualism pays — an agent whose floor can drop out is not freely individual, because its choices are dictated by necessity and its horizon has already collapsed. The structural account makes the floor's location non-arbitrary: the floor sits at the level of security at which an agent becomes a free long-horizon reasoner, and the *truly* in *truly individual* is what the keystone licenses. Specific institutional mechanisms — a guaranteed material baseline, progressive financing of the conditions the baseline requires, structural prevention of the rent-seeking that would dismantle it — are how the principle gets honored in one possible regime; the structural account names the principle and the constraints it must satisfy, and leaves the mechanism design to the policy literatures §9 engages.

*Practical output.* The four duties derived earlier in this section — non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy, justice — are not independent rules to balance but aspects of a single move: act on the other subject's own readings rather than the actor's projection. The procedure that follows enumerates the epistemic conditions under which that move is made. Where a subject expresses what they want done, and where consent is informed, voluntary, and competent, the action authorized is licensed. These three conditions are not a checklist appended to the procedure but the single test of legitimacy any arrangement must pass: an exchange is licensed only so far as its parties are informed, uncoerced, and competent, and where an arrangement is illegitimate the wrong lies in the failed condition — the deception, the coercion, the incapacity — not in the content of what was done. This is why the floor is load-bearing here and not only in the policy turn: *voluntary* is exactly what a secured floor makes possible and precarity removes, so the condition that converts survival-driven compliance into free choice is the same one the procedure's middle term names. Where a subject expresses what they do not want done, the action refused is forbidden, with the override that a subject's authorization cannot license serious non-consensual harm to a third party — the field's claim against the pair. Where the actor does not know what the subject wants or refuses, the action waits on inquiry; projection is what consent is meant to displace, and proceeding without inquiry is the structural form of paternalism. Where the subject cannot respond — incapacity, unconsciousness, immediate crisis — the actor maintains non-corrosion as the default and works toward conditions under which authorization can resume; consent's failure to be available is not consent's revocation. The four cases yield a single negative guarantee: no subject has anything intentionally done to them they have not authorized, except where the field requires it to protect another subject who has not.

What that guarantee protects, beneath the vocabulary of consent and harm, is each subject's capacity to generate and direct its own possibility. So the measure of a violation is not the welfare it costs but the possibility it forecloses against the will the subject could form. A benevolent dominator who provides for a subject in every material respect while enclosing what that subject may become commits the paradigm wrong: welfare left intact does not redeem a possibility-field seized. Domination is therefore not exhausted by inflicted suffering or direct command. It consists in acquiring unanswerable control over the possibilities another subject may realistically pursue. This carries the chapter's name forward into the politics — the wrong at the individual scale and the maximand at the political scale (§9, *maximum possibility*) are one currency, and foreclosing a subject's possibility against its formable will is what, scaled across a shared field, the political order exists to prevent. Measuring against the will the subject *could* form, rather than the will it happens to hold, also disarms the contented-captive objection: an enclosure that reaches into the will itself and quiets all protest is the most complete violation, not the absence of one.

This fixes the one limit consent cannot cross, and fixes it structurally rather than by hand. Consent can license almost anything — binding commitments, vows, lifelong arrangements — because a commitment is an exercise of the capacity to author one's possibility, not a surrender of it. What consent cannot reach is the arrangement whose content is the *effective* destruction of that capacity: to consent away the standing power to revise and exit one's commitments is to use present authorship to extinguish the feature that licenses authorship at all — the egoist's groundless self-exemption turned inward. Inalienability is therefore not an added axiom but the consent constraint applied to its own precondition.

The deeper reason is temporal. Consent reaches into the future — it authorizes what is going to happen, pinned to a particular arrangement of time, place, and act — but it reaches forward as a *standing* authorization, the live approval of the subject whose act it is, not a token transferred out of them. What licenses an act at the moment it occurs is therefore that it is still authorized at that moment; a past consent cannot govern a present act any more than yesterday's appetite can be eaten today. So consent carries forward as a default that holds unless withdrawn, never as a lock immune to its own withdrawal — and an arrangement purporting to bind a subject after their consent had lapsed would not be their authorization governing the act at all, but their earlier self overriding their present one. Revocability is not a permission added on top of consent; it is what consent, being the live state of the one whose act it is, already is.

Inalienability turns on effective foreclosure, not formal: a commitment merely costly to leave remains revisable, but one engineered toward inescapability — debt bondage, a ruinous exit penalty — destroys revisability as surely as a chain. And because commitments are often joint, the protected core is unilateral *exit*, not unilateral *amendment*: each subject always retains departure, while none may force a shared arrangement to reshape around them or conscript another into it. Exit preserves the door, not freedom from what was set in motion behind it — the responsibility an agent bears for its contribution to causal history ([§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)) survives the departure.

Two distinct relations are doing the work here, and keeping them apart dissolves what would otherwise look like a single tangled obligation. Consent governs what may be *done to* a subject going forward — its body, its presence, its participation — and that authorization is the live, revocable state just described. Responsibility governs what a subject *owes for what it has already set in motion* — the contribution to causal history that [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) locates — and that is backward-looking, so withdrawing consent ends the authorization without erasing the responsibility. The two divide along a structural seam: consent attaches to the inalienable latitude a subject has over its own person; responsibility attaches to the external, substitutable performances a subject's choices produce in the shared world. What sorts a case is whether the thing relied upon can be made good by substitution without reaching the promisor's body. Where it can — goods, payment, the product of labor — withdrawal is permitted but carries *reparative* responsibility for the reliance it induced: bounded by what repair requires, tracking the withdrawing subject's actual contribution to the other's loss, never a penalty added to make leaving irrational. Where it cannot — where the only thing that would satisfy the reliance is the subject's own body or intimate participation — no reliance interest can attach at all, because to price the withdrawal would be to price the body, the standing seizure of latitude the framework names as its limit case ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) — and a conviction does not dissolve it, the point [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) carries into the carceral case. A bodily commitment is therefore never specifically enforceable and never carries a withdrawal penalty; what was exchanged for it, if anything, settles on the external track as a return, while the body itself stays beyond the reach of the debt. This is why a personal-service promise yields damages but never compelled performance, and why one may always leave an intimate arrangement at no charge to the leaving while remaining answerable for the external entanglements — shared property, created dependents — the arrangement produced.

One loss this leaves deliberately unrepaired: where what the other wanted was itself the freely-given participation now withdrawn, no substitution can restore it, and the framework declines to try, since the only available remedy would be to commodify the inalienable. That loss is borne, not transferred; bearing it is the price of keeping the body beyond purchase, and the account marks it as a cost it accepts rather than a gap it has closed.

The procedure is the structural account in operational form, not a metaphysical addition to it. Its terms — *consent*, *authorization*, *third party*, *capacity* — are the standard vocabulary moral and political philosophy already use. What the structural account adds is grounding: consent is the operational form of autonomy because subjects have privileged access to their own conditions that no external observer can match; Mill's harm principle follows because freedom and the limits on it both rest on the metaphysics of distinct subjects in shared exchange; justice extends to the field because subjects exchange inside conditions that either sustain or starve continued participation. The vocabulary was right. The grounding is what was missing.

Morality read as constitutive relation among mutually exposed subjects in a necessarily instantiated medium converges with what every serious meta-ethical position was tracking: Platonist robustness without the Platonic property, divine-command weight without the external lawgiver, Mackie's queerness diagnosis without the eliminative conclusion, Parfit's *reductio* deflected because the structural account does not deny mattering, Railton's idealization grounded one step down, Boyd's homeostatic cluster located in the conditions that hold it, Wielenberg's *sui generis* result returned to the natural order, Korsgaard's constructed normativity floored in what the constructor does not invent, Scanlon's reasonableness grounded in the structure reasonableness was already responding to, Blackburn's quasi-realism earned by structural necessity rather than projection, the neo-sentimentalist's fittingness explained by what the sentiments track. The four duties — non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy, justice — are aspects of one move at the operational layer: act on the other subject's own readings rather than on your projection of them. The register in which subjects carry to each other what propositions cannot is taken up at [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>).


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← [8.12.4 What is Confirmed](<8.12.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.13 Art](<8.13 Art.md>) →
