Before a community can work out how to run anything else, it has to say what its institutions are *for*, and that is what rights do. Rights spell out what a person must be able to count on in order to take part in political life as a full member, not merely survive inside it. The pillar's central political claim is that the right to life can be read more substantively than “do not kill me.” A life lived one illness or one missed paycheck from ruin may preserve biological survival while leaving agency severely constrained. On the chapter's participation-condition interpretation, food, shelter, healthcare, and an effective political voice are not optional welfare additions but conditions required for the right to life to be politically meaningful. This is a normative interpretation defended through fit to agency and subsistence, not a semantic truth settled by the modal proof alone. That is why rights come first: every other pillar is this same commitment worked out in one domain.

Rights articulate the foundation that the rest of the chapter is structured to maintain. A political community that does not articulate the rights its institutions are for cannot derive what those institutions must do; an institution that does not know what it is structured to protect cannot tell when it is failing.

The derivation runs at the readerly register before any framework apparatus has to do its work. The key to political life that lasts is to build a polity that people want to protect and invest in because it protects and invests in them. The wanting is not added from outside as duty, altruism, or solidarity; it is what each subject's wanting-to-be-well and not-wanting-to-be-harmed becomes once generalized across everyone who shares those wantings. A polity that protects everyone protects me. A polity that invests in everyone invests in me. A polity that protects and invests in me is one I have reason to support, to protect, and where it falls short, to change.

The principle first appears in three compressed faces (provision, protection, and reform), but those faces unfold into a fuller grammar. *Provision / investment*: the system builds, maintains, develops, equips, and cares for the people who live inside it. *Protection*: the system shields them from preventable harm, coercion, deprivation, predation, and arbitrary power. *Restraint / consent*: the system does not make people the objects of its projects without authorization; it respects refusal because the same respect is owed in return. *Recognition / voice*: the system hears people's reports, needs, fears, aspirations, and direction as evidence about what maintenance requires. *Repair / accountability*: the system answers injury, violation, negligence, corruption, and institutional failure by making the harmed party and the damaged relation answerable to repair. *Reform / learning*: the system changes when its pattern is wrong, because a system that does to anyone what I would refuse to have done to me is a system that could do it to me. *Contribution / stewardship*: the system gives people real ways to sustain what sustains them, through work, taxes, voting, care, maintenance, criticism, invention, public service, and local knowledge.

These are not new domains and not a second table of contents. They are dimensions of the same subsistence relation. Every domain in Chapter 9 contains all of them, though one or another becomes most visible depending on the material at issue. Environment has provision, protection, restraint, recognition, repair, reform, and stewardship; so do representation, community, education, healthcare, economy, defense, enforcement, and justice. The domains are the sites where subsistence becomes institutionally concrete. The faces are the recurring operations subsistence has to perform wherever it lands.

*Subsistence as equation, not account.* Subsistence (the Subsistence definition in §9) names this relation in noun form. The noun does not name an account that participants pay into and from which benefits are drawn down. It names the equation itself: *members invest in the political community because the political community invests in them, and the political community invests in members because members invest in it*. The reciprocity is the thing, and the noun *subsistence* is the chapter's name for the reciprocity at the political scale.

The principle operates at three scales of the same form. *Dyadic*: each subject's refusal is respected because the same respect is owed in return; this is what consent names, in the modern register that emerged once subjects' aversions and refusals were taken as load-bearing rather than as private preferences the surrounding social order could override. *Institutional*: organizations act only on what their participants authorize: informed consent in medicine, democratic legitimacy in politics, voluntary association in civil society. *Political*: a system that protects and invests in people is a system that people want to protect and invest in. The same reciprocity runs from two subjects across a table to a population of millions; what changes is scale, not structure.

The connection to Chapter 8 is not a loose analogy, but its register must remain explicit. Knowledge, reasoning, meaning, will, and morality are Chapter 8 identifications defended by fit to the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) account, not fresh strict deductions from the modal proof. Chapter 9 carries those conditional experiential and normative claims into political theory; where a political conclusion depends on them, it inherits their conditional status. Reasoning supplies the constraint-following form; knowledge supplies the representation that can be shared and corrected; meaning supplies direction; will supplies agency moving through live alternatives; morality supplies mutual recognition, consent, non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy, and justice. Subsistence is what that structure becomes when the subjects who must foster, refrain, authorize, repair, and learn together are no longer two subjects in a single exchange but millions of subjects living inside the same inherited institutions.

*The principle's place in the literature.* Rawls's original position (*A Theory of Justice* (Rawls, John, 1971)) reaches universalizability through a veil of ignorance that suppresses agents' actual identities so the worst-off case carries weight in their deliberation. The framework converges with Rawls on universalizability and on grounding political commitments in something each agent has reason to endorse. Where it parts is on the veil: the principle runs through *actual modal exposure to the same system* rather than through *counterfactual ignorance about which person one is*. The agent does not have to imagine not knowing who they are; they only have to notice that what the system does to anyone is what the system is willing to do, and that they share the system. Scanlon's contractualism (*What We Owe to Each Other* (Scanlon, T. M., 1998)) reaches the same symmetry through what no one could reasonably reject; the framework grants the symmetry and parts on grounding it in structural co-exposure rather than in idealized reasonable rejection. Habermas's discourse ethics (*Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action* (Habermas, Jürgen, (1983) 1990)) reaches it through ideal speech; the framework grants the universalization and parts on the same point. The three counterfactual moves (veil, reasonable rejection, ideal speech) do work the framework derives more parsimoniously from actual shared conditions. The parsimony claim deserves explicit defense rather than assertion. The counterfactual moves do criterion-supplying work: they generate the standpoint against which actual discourses, contracts, and arrangements can be measured for distortion, coercion, hierarchy, and exclusion. The framework's reply is that actual modal exposure to shared conditions supplies the criterion-supplying function the counterfactuals were performing: the criterion against which an actual arrangement falls short is what the arrangement would have to look like to maintain the participation conditions of every subject inside it, and that criterion is derivable from the structural conditions of §9 root without counterfactual scaffolding. Where the structural conditions are themselves indeterminate at the standpoint-supplying register, the counterfactual scaffolds remain available as auxiliary moves rather than competing arguments; the framework's parsimony claim is therefore narrower than 'the counterfactuals are eliminated' and broader than 'the counterfactuals are necessary.'

Hume's account of justice (*Treatise of Human Nature* III (Hume, David, (1739–1740) 2000)) as the artificial virtue that emerges among agents with limited generosity, moderate scarcity, and mutual interdependence is the principle's closest ancestor at the foundational level. The convergence is on deriving institutional commitments from interest under shared conditions. The parting is on positive provision: Hume thought positive duties could not be made determinate enough to be requirements of justice, and the principle's *provision* face commits to positive provision. The framework's reply is that the body and the conditions of agency give positive duties the determinacy Hume thought they lacked; what *life* requires when read at *bios* rather than *zoē* (the derivation that follows below) is determinate in a way Hume's eighteenth-century examples could not yet make visible.

Honneth's recognition theory (*The Struggle for Recognition* (Honneth, Axel, 1995)) grounds institutional life in struggles for mutual recognition; the framework converges on the recognition-foundation and parts by deriving the institutional shadow from generalized self-interest rather than from recognition struggles directly. Iris Marion Young's structural-injustice work (*Responsibility for Justice* (Young, Iris Marion, 2011)) reaches the framework's *reform* face on independent grounds: participation in a structural system generates responsibility for the system's outputs. The framework grants Young's social-connection model what it claims and parts only on grounding: the reform face here runs through self-interested generalization rather than through identification with the harmed party. Hirschman's *Exit, Voice, and Loyalty* (Hirschman, Albert O., 1970) names the dynamics the *wanting* clause describes: loyalty as the wanting that compounds under sustained reciprocity, voice as its expression under stress, exit as what happens when reciprocity fails irrecoverably. The principle's claim is that the conditions under which loyalty is structurally available are the conditions of mutual investment the chapter develops; voice and exit are the responses when those conditions fail. Mill's harm principle (*On Liberty* (Mill, John Stuart, 1859)) is the dyadic-scale analogue of the framework's reciprocity, and the modern consent-as-foundational-category development (from Locke's *Second Treatise* (Locke, John, (1689) 1988) through Beauchamp and Childress's *Principles of Biomedical Ethics* (Beauchamp, Tom L.; Childress, James F., 1979)) operationalizes the dyadic scale in medical, legal, and political institutions. Pettit's non-domination (*Republicanism* (Pettit, Philip, 1997)), already cited in §9, gives the *protection* and *reform* faces their republican formulation; the framework converges very closely on Pettit and adds the structural derivation Pettit assumes rather than gives.

The principle's contribution is the synthesis. Universalizability is Kantian; generalized self-interest is Hobbesian-Humean; mutual vulnerability is Hobbesian; non-domination is Pettit's; capabilities-as-precondition is Sen's, Nussbaum's, and Shue's; recognition-as-institutional-grounding is Honneth's; reform-from-structural-exposure is Young's; loyalty-from-reciprocity is Hirschman's; consent-as-foundational is Mill's, Locke's, and the modern biomedical-ethics tradition's. What the framework offers is holding these together in one derivation, running across these recurring faces and at three scales, where the existing literature has held them apart. One role-distinction the synthesis depends on has to be marked, since the partings above all locate the framework's ground in co-exposure or generalized self-interest: that language names what *binds and scales* the obligations, not what *confers the standing* they answer to. The standing is settled upstream: that another subject's conditions matter, and so are something an arrangement can fail to maintain, is a fact about that subject, holding whether or not anyone's self-interest registers it ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)); this is why §9 root extends rights by capacity rather than by exposure. Generalized self-interest is the motive that sustains the structure and carries the obligation past the subjects whose exposure happens to be felt; capacity is the ground that makes the obligation owed at all. Where the chapter grounds an institutional commitment in self-interest, it names the binder a polity runs on, not a relocation of standing into the wanting: the order [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) already fixed in placing the wanting downstream of the fact rather than constitutive of it.

Rights derives from [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality) and from the [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>), [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>), and [§8.4.4](<8.4.4 What is Confirmed.md>) agency analyses, combined with the §9 chapter opener's account of mutual exposure among people who share conditions. Three results follow. Rights articulate the conditions under which agency-bearing subjects can keep participating in the political community. The right to life, properly articulated, is already a right to agency. And the right to life, read at the depth where life actually subsists, already includes a right to subsistence as a precondition, not as a separate positive addition.

The Inversion runs the same direction the rest of Chapter 9 runs: the rights tradition reached for protected existence and located the right at the formal register of non-interference; the argument articulates the same commitment where existence is actually maintained or undermined.

Consider concretely a parent working two part-time jobs with no health insurance and no paid sick leave. The legal right to life is intact: no one is threatening to kill them. The right to liberty is intact: no one is detaining them. But a serious diagnosis makes treatment impossible without medical bankruptcy; a flu makes work impossible without rent becoming impossible; a child's emergency forces a choice between earning and caretaking. The rights are formally present and substantively absent. The argument's claim is not that the legal rights are wrong but that they are incomplete: a right to life that leaves a parent in this position has been articulated at the wrong register, naming the formal protection while leaving the conditions of life to luck. Add accessible healthcare, paid sick leave, and stable housing, and the parent now has what the right to life was always meant to name. The legal form has not changed. What changed is whether the right has substantive content where life is actually maintained. The failure-mode the case describes is statistically unevenly distributed: uninsured rates, scheduling-precarity exposure, medical-bankruptcy rates, and eviction rates all stratify along race and gender lines, and the participation-conditions denial therefore lands disproportionately on populations the substantive-rights commitment is disproportionately owed (developed at [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)).

> [!corollary]
> **Wanting Downstream** · **R23** · *Result of the Convergence Theorem*
>
> Where the subsistence conditions for life-as-agency have not been met and a person wants to end their life as a result, the wanting is not autonomous valuation of living-versus-not-living but the unmet subsistence obligation showing up downstream; provision of an exit cannot substitute for fulfillment of the obligation the right to life already required. Follows from the Convergence Theorem (§9) and the subsistence-as-precondition result established in this section.

The result bears on end-of-life policy and on the chapter's later commitments ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) Economy, [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>) Housing, [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) Education, [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) Healthcare). Where a person wants to end their life because they cannot get housing, food, work, or care, the wanting is not autonomous valuation of living-versus-not-living: it is the unmet subsistence obligation showing up downstream. The society that failed to meet that obligation does not then discharge its relation to the person by providing an exit from the conditions it was already required to have prevented; provision of an exit cannot substitute for fulfillment of the obligation itself. The wanting in such a case indicts the institutional arrangement, not the person inside it. *Preserved*: access for the population whose wanting is genuinely autonomous (intractable suffering, terminal illness, conditions the subsistence obligation did not require the society to forestall). *Precluded*: the substitution of provision-of-exit for the subsistence floor the right to life already required. The diagnostic is structural: where the rate at which people seek to end their lives rises in a population, the first place the political community is obligated to look is the subsistence conditions producing that rise, not the patient-by-patient assessment of autonomous wanting. Housing, food, livelihood, healthcare, education, and the caregiving infrastructure that crosses them are not separate welfare additions but what the right to life already requires to be substantive: what makes the wanting-to-live a real option rather than the default of having no alternative.

> [!corollary]
> **Government Work** · **R24** · *Result of the Right to Life as Agency*
>
> The structural function of government work is the discharge of the right-to-life obligation in its two parts: maintaining the conditions of life (Economy [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>), Housing [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>), Education [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>), Healthcare [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)) and protecting life from threat (Defense [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>), Enforcement [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>), Justice [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)). Government functions that do not trace to this foundation either serve a downstream subordinate role or are extraneous to what government work structurally is. Follows from the right-to-life-as-agency result and the subsistence-as-precondition result established in this section.

The obligation is not a posture; it is delivered through work, and the work is done by people acting on behalf of the political community: civil servants, public educators, public-system clinicians, public-works infrastructure workers, enforcement officers, judicial officers, military personnel, elected representatives, and the administrative staff that supports them. The structural function of government work, foundationally, is the discharge of the right-to-life obligation in its two parts: maintaining the conditions of life (the categorical commitments [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) Economy, [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>) Housing, [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) Education, and [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) Healthcare unpack) and protecting life from threat (the categorical commitments [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) Defense, [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) Enforcement, and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) Justice unpack). Government functions that do not trace to this foundation either serve a downstream subordinate role or are extraneous to what government work structurally is. The result bears on civil-service hiring, training, evaluation, and professional formation; on the recognition-bearing identity of public-service work ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)); and on the installer identity [§9.15](<9.15 Installation.md>) unpacks, where the people installing the framework are continuous with the people whose work it is to deliver what the framework derives. The structural-correctness of obligation-discharge (what the framework derives) and the legitimacy of specific institutional implementations (how this particular legislature, civil service, or judiciary discharges it) are distinct registers: structural correctness is supplied by the derivation; legitimacy is supplied by affected parties' ratification through the recognition mechanism ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)). The Habermas-tradition distinction between facticity and validity (*Between Facts and Norms* (Habermas, Jürgen, (1992) 1996)) names this directly.

*Scope of the derivation.* The derivation fixes the obligation and the categorical scope of what it covers. It does not fix the level of provision that discharges the obligation in any given context: that is the work of welfare-economics measurement, capabilities-approach assessment (operationalized in Nussbaum's central-capabilities list, *Women and Human Development* (Nussbaum, Martha C., 2000), ch. 1: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses–imagination–thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over environment), public-health infrastructure analysis, and the political-deliberative procedures that translate categorical commitments into concrete provision standards. Raworth's *Doughnut Economics* (Raworth, Kate, 2017) is the most operationally developed of these frameworks: it combines a social foundation derived from the UN Sustainable Development Goals with an ecological ceiling derived from planetary-boundaries science ([§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>)), and it is in city-level implementation in Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Portland, and Glasgow as of writing. The argument hands those questions to the discourses equipped to answer them. The categorical commitment is what the structural derivation establishes; the operational calculation is what the institutional work delivers.

*Three results.* *Rights as participation conditions.* Morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) grounds the moral framework in the mutual recognition of subjects who persist, occupy distinct positions, and can be reached across asymmetric exchange. Rights at the political scale articulate the conditions under which such mutual recognition can continue across the population: the institutional protections that keep subjects able to keep meeting one another as recognized subjects. A rights-violation, correspondingly, is the political-scale instance of what [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) defines a wrong to be: an arrangement corroding a subject against its own registered aversion, treating that subject's stake in what befalls it as though it carried no claim. A right is not a metaphysical possession the subject brings to the political community from outside. It is what mutual recognition at population scale requires when written as institutional commitment. The framework converges on the participation-condition reading reached on independent grounds in the capabilities tradition (Sen, Amartya, 1992); (Sen, Amartya, 1999); (Nussbaum, Martha C., 2000); (Nussbaum, Martha C., 2006), Shue's basic-rights argument (Shue, Henry, 1980), the social-rights tradition Marshall (Marshall, T. H., 1950) historically describes, and the republican-citizenship tradition (Pettit, Philip, 1997).

*The right to life is already a right to agency.* Jefferson's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," derived from Locke's "life, liberty, and property" (Locke, John, (1689) 1988), II, §6, names one underlying commitment at progressively explicit registers: protection of the subject's agency. The historical contradiction the bios/zoē derivation makes legible deserves naming directly: Locke's Carolina-proprietorship and Royal African Company investments, and Jefferson's lifetime enslaving, are the canonical instance of the participation-conditions framework being articulated in language while the framework's articulators denied those conditions to specific populations through the legal apparatus they constructed. The bios/zoē move is exactly the depth at which the contradiction becomes legible. Mills's *The Racial Contract* (Mills, Charles W., 1997) develops the canonical analytic engagement with this articulation-vs-application gap. The relevant distinction is between *bios* (lived life, life-as-mode-of-living) and *zoē* (bare biological substrate). A subject can be biologically alive and legally unconfined while still lacking the real conditions for agential choice. The right to life, properly understood, therefore protects life-as-agency, not mere biological continuation.

*The foundation of liberty.* In classical philosophical vocabulary, the foundation of liberty is the set of conditions under which life-as-agency is exercisable rather than reduced to bare biological continuation. The foundation is not held at a minimum and stepped over toward whatever is supposed to come next; it is *maximized*, because the conditions that make life-as-agency possible just are the conditions that make liberty real. They are not stacked, with liberty above and the foundation below. They are the same condition seen from different angles, and the deepest happiness and the truest liberty turn out to name the same thing. The Jeffersonian formula gets half of this right and half of it wrong. The half right: life and liberty are foundational, and political institutions exist to maintain them. The half wrong: the *pursuit of happiness* framing makes happiness the destination of pursuit rather than the substantive content of what is foundationally secured. The classical sense the formulation drew on — Aristotle's *eudaimonia* (*Nicomachean Ethics* I.7, 1098a16) — is not a destination at all but the activity of well-functioning life, which is what *bios* names when its pursuit-capacity is intact. The argument restores this sense: the foundation just is the conditions of life-with-pursuit-capacity-intact, which is what the older eudaimonic tradition meant by happiness. What is *pursued from* the foundation is whatever directions a subject recognizes as their own: meaning, contribution, relationship, knowledge, work, art, family, whatever the subject lives toward. Pursuit happens *from* the foundation, not *toward* it. The compressed form: the foundation is happiness, the foundation is liberty, and the truest happiness is the truest liberty; ambition, on this account, is structurally available to everyone, because everyone is already on the foundation that ambition requires.

*The foundation has no underside.* Because the foundation is maximized rather than held at a minimum, it is not a line some members clear and others fall beneath. A threshold has a below; a foundation does not. To be a member of the political community is already to stand on it, and there is no register at which a person drops out of the conditions of agency into some lower place the arrangement keeps available but empty, because that place is not a place. A polity organized around maximum possibility cannot contain such a register, and not as a matter of humanitarian preference: the person who has fallen below the conditions of life-as-agency is precisely the person whose field of live possibility has collapsed into the survival-response the chapter's governing aim exists to prevent (§9). A trapdoor in the floor is therefore not a gap in an otherwise sound structure; it is the one feature a structure aimed at maximum possibility is defined against, because it is the single point at which the field the whole arrangement exists to widen goes to zero. The no-place-to-fall result is the negative face of maximum possibility exactly as subsistence-as-precondition is its positive face: to maximize the field of live possibility for every member just is to hold that there be no register at which that field is foreclosed for any of them. Liberty is the political name for the field that opens above the foundation; the foundation is the floor that has no underside. There was never anything beneath the floor to begin with: no lower place a person was falling into, only the withdrawal of conditions that shared life already consists in. And those conditions are not manufactured by the arrangement and then rationed; the ground is already there. Holding it everywhere therefore takes nothing from anyone (the point §9 makes in calling the chapter's work recognition rather than redistribution) and there is no reason for living on the foundation to be hard. Where it is hard, the difficulty is gratuitous rather than necessary, and it need not be anyone's doing: a floor can be left hard to stand on through neglect, inertia, or inherited structure that no one authored, as readily as through design. The point is not only that no one should make it hard; it is that there is no reason for it to be hard at all, because there is no scarcity of ground that would require keeping anyone off it. When the floor is held everywhere, what remains is the field: open, and open to everyone standing on it, because there is no longer anywhere to fall.

*The foundation is not conditioned on participation.* The same structure that denies the floor an underside denies it a gate. If to be a member is already to stand on the foundation, then standing on it is not something a member earns by participating (the non-participating member is standing on it already, which the no-underside result has foreclosed) nor something a member forfeits by participating, which would make the foundation a holding a member could be made to choose against their own exercise of capacity. The conditionality runs in neither direction: the foundation is owed by membership rather than by performance, and it is not withdrawn when a member performs. This is the maximized-not-minimal logic read on the participation axis rather than the depth axis. A floor that is lowered as a member earns is not a floor but a ceiling wearing a floor's name, and an arrangement that makes a member trade the conditions of agency against the exercise of agency reintroduces the trapdoor at the very register where capacity was supposed to be drawn out. The worked case is developed at [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>): accessibility owed by membership rather than earned by demonstrated desert, and the earnings-cap benefit designs that withdraw the floor as capacity is exercised, which the present result names as the participation-axis form of the trapdoor the foundation is defined against.

*Consent as right modifier.* Consent is the subject's authority to modify the default rule governing a protected domain. A right establishes that a domain is protected: body, attention, privacy, property, medical treatment, sexuality, representation, movement, speech. Consent is the rights-bearer's act of specifying what may happen within that domain, by whom, under what conditions, and for how long. It does not erase the right; it exercises the right. Refusal leaves the default protection in force. Consent changes the permitted relation only to the extent the competent subject has authorized it. This is why consent must be informed, voluntary, competent, specific, and revocable: without those conditions, the purported modification is not the subject's rule for what may happen to them, but another party's rule imposed through the grammar of permission. This paragraph gives consent at its technical-rights register; it also operates at the dyadic-scale register the section's opening principle named, where each subject's refusal is respected because the same respect is owed in return. The two registers are the same structure at different scales, and they fail in the same way: when the form of authorization is satisfied while the substance of free refusal has been undermined by structural conditions the subsistence floor was required to maintain, the consent has the grammar of permission without the substance the participation conditions require.

*A right to life that a subject must fight the arrangement to actualize is hollow at its foundation.* A formal right to life that leaves a person without secured access to food, shelter, healthcare, and the material conditions of bodily continuation preserves the legal form while undermining the right's substance. The right to life, taken at the depth where life actually subsists, already includes subsistence as the precondition for the agency the right protects. The later sections spell out the operational architecture: Adequate Living Cost in [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>), the housing floor in [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>), the healthcare floor in [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>), the educational foundation in [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>), and the caregiving infrastructure crossing them. Adequate Living Cost is the non-domination floor in Pettit's (Pettit, Philip, 1997); (Pettit, Philip, 2012) sense (the income level below which a worker cannot effectively refuse exploitative terms), not a distributive threshold; the framework's subsistence-as-precondition is its correlate of Rawls's difference principle (*A Theory of Justice* (Rawls, John, 1971)), reached through participation-conditions derivation rather than the original-position procedure. The same upstream-of-distribution structure meets Walzer's *Spheres of Justice* (Walzer, Michael, 1983) objection to single-principle distribution: the participation-conditions logic is not a master distributive principle competing with the sphere-specific ones Walzer defends but a floor beneath all of them, so the distinct principles proper to distinct goods (medical care, office, recognition, security) remain intact in the field the foundation opens above itself. The framework fixes only that no sphere may distribute its good so as to run a member below the conditions of agency; how each good distributes once the floor is held is left to the sphere, and to the recognition mechanism of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>).

The structural reason the negative/positive rights distinction has felt foundational deserves naming explicitly. The modal field on which moral cognition operates ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) is asymmetrically weighted (stored aversive possibilities carry more affective mass than stored appetitive ones at equivalent magnitude), and the rights tradition inherits this calibration. Negative rights (against being killed, tortured, enslaved, confined arbitrarily) track the field's most heavily weighted branches; positive rights (to healthcare, education, housing) track less affectively dense branches even when their substantive importance is comparable. The asymmetry is real and is doing work the structural account does not deny. What the structural account does deny is the inference, common to the libertarian wing, that the asymmetry licenses treating positive rights as a categorically different kind of moral claim. Subsistence shows up on the negative side of the asymmetry once *life* is read at *bios* rather than *zoē*: a person without healthcare, food, shelter, or stable conditions of bodily continuation is not currently in possession of the life the negative right to life was protecting. The aversion-asymmetry then runs in the framework's favor rather than against it: where the substantive content of *life* includes the conditions of life-as-agency, withholding those conditions registers on the same heavily-weighted aversive side that *do not kill* and *do not torture* register on. The framework keeps the asymmetry while correcting where it falls.

The most developed contemporary opposition to the subsistence-as-precondition reading runs through Nozick (*Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (Robert Nozick, 1974)) and Hayek (*The Constitution of Liberty* (Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960)). Nozick reads rights as side constraints that cannot be overridden for any aggregate good, and reads positive welfare rights as a category mistake: there are no claims a person has on others' productive labor that the structure of rights properly articulated recognizes. Hayek reads social rights as analytically incoherent (*Law, Legislation and Liberty*, vol. 2, *The Mirage of Social Justice* (Hayek, Friedrich A., 1976)): a right requires a specifiable duty-bearer against whom the right is held, and 'society' is not such a duty-bearer; the move from negative civil rights to positive social rights is a category shift rights-language is not built to absorb. The framework grants each its central concession: separate lives are not instruments of others' projects (Nozick); a duty without a specifiable duty-bearer is not yet a right (Hayek). Where it parts from them is on what subsistence is. On the side-constraints reading, providing subsistence is an additional positive duty competing with negative protections, and the framework's claim would be that the right to life had been expanded into something it isn't. On the framework's reading, subsistence is not an additional duty layered onto the right to life; it is what the right to life articulates once life is read at *bios* rather than *zoē*. The duty-bearer Hayek's analysis requires is not society as an undifferentiated whole but the institutional structure the political community already maintains (legislature, executive, judiciary, administrative agencies, civil-service workforce); the *Government work discharges the obligation* result above named these specifically. The disagreement is over what *life* in *the right to life* means, not over whether positive welfare rights have been smuggled in under a different name. Nozick's separateness-of-persons constraint is preserved at the layer where it does its work: the framework aggregates the conditions under which liberty is actual rather than aggregating liberty across persons, so what the side-constraints reading sees as an interpersonal trade-off is, on the structural reading, the maintenance of conditions upstream of the trade-off rather than a transaction within it.

*The foundation binds against intermediate authorities.* Rights as participation conditions hold across all registers at which a person could be dropped below the conditions of agency, including registers internal to the political community. Religious institutions, families, employers, communities, and other intermediate authorities exercise legitimate authority within their respective domains, but that authority does not extend to dropping a person below the participation threshold. A religious institution may organize the religious life of its adherents and may hold any beliefs it holds; it may not raise children in conditions that actively harm them: medical neglect rationalized by doctrine, denial of education, sexual or physical abuse sheltered by institutional standing, indoctrination that closes off the [§8.4.4](<8.4.4 What is Confirmed.md>) capacity-for-analysis the participation conditions presuppose. A family may organize its life as it chooses; it may not deny food, shelter, education, or medical care, or expose a child to abuse, on the basis of parental authority. An employer may organize work; it may not hold subsistence hostage to coercive conditions or extract below the substrate ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)). The result preserves religious liberty, family autonomy, and associational life as personal exercises of liberty above the foundation: what subjects recognize as their own to pursue, including as faith, tradition, custom, and shared practice. It precludes intermediate authorities from using their standing as a license to override the foundation of the people under their care. This is the same direction the *bios*/*zoē* derivation runs above: a subject reduced to mere biological persistence by an intermediate authority is no more in possession of life-as-agency than a subject so reduced by the political community itself. The result extends across all registers at which intermediate-authority standing has historically been used to withhold the foundation. At the household register: marriages whose legal form is satisfied while the substance of equal participation has been denied (forced marriage, marital-rape exemptions where they exist, domestic-violence sheltered by family authority) are violations of the result in the same form as the child-protection cases above (Anderson's *Private Government* (Anderson, Elizabeth, 2017) develops the workplace-authority register, which the result covers symmetrically, developed at [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)). At the racialized-substate register: policing, schools, redlining, and neighborhood-level enforcement disparities have operated with state-aligned standing as registers at which the foundation has historically been withheld from specific populations (developed at [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)). The result names these as instances of the same structural failure, not as separate political questions.

The relocation parts ways with the rights tradition's libertarian wing (Nozick, Hayek) and converges with its participation-conditions wing (Roosevelt, the UDHR drafters, Marshall, Shue). The negative rights the tradition foregrounds remain protected. The argument adds that the positive conditions under which negative rights are exercisable already sit inside what the participation-conditions wing articulated, and that treating those conditions as supplementary welfare obscures the unity its deepest formulations already saw.


- [9.1.1 What is Disputed](<9.1.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.1.2 What is Required](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.1.3 What is Predicted](<9.1.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.1.4 What is Confirmed](<9.1.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.1.5 What is Concluded](<9.1.5 What is Concluded.md>)


---

← [9. Maximum Possibility](<9. Maximum Possibility.md>) | [9.1.1 What is Disputed](<9.1.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
