For rights to obtain at the scale of a political community (articulating the conditions under which agency-bearing subjects can keep participating in shared political life) the framework derives a structural-necessity inventory. Each condition is necessary; their conjunction is what rights-architecture has to deliver to be rights-architecture rather than its formal shadow.

*Recognition channels.* Mutual recognition at population scale requires institutional channels through which subjects recognize one another as participating subjects rather than as objects to be administered. The political community has to maintain channels through which the standing of every participant is institutionally legible. Representation ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) takes up the institutional channel through which recognized direction operates.

*Protected domains.* For agency to be exercisable, the domains within which subjects act (body, attention, privacy, property, medical treatment, sexuality, representation, movement, speech) have to be protected against interference by other subjects and by the political community itself. Negative protection is real protection; the framework does not vacate the libertarian wing's central commitment.

*Enforcement architecture.* For protections to be substantive rather than nominal, the political community has to maintain enforcement mechanisms through which violations are recognized and addressed. Justice ([§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)) takes up what kind of enforcement architecture this requires; the structural-necessity condition is that some such architecture exists.

*Subsistence floor.* For the right to life to be substantive rather than formal, the political community has to deliver the conditions of life at the depth where life is actually maintained: food, shelter, healthcare, education, and the caregiving infrastructure that crosses them. Subsistence is not a separate positive right added on top; it is what the right to life requires when life is read at *bios* (lived life, life-as-mode-of-living) rather than *zoē* (bare biological substrate). The Aristotelian distinction (*Politics* I.2, 1252b30) (Agamben, Giorgio, 1998) is the relevant one. The padded-room intuition pumps it: a subject confined to a padded room with no exit has *zoē* (heartbeat, metabolism, minimal locomotion) and minimal negative liberty in the legal sense, yet lacks the capacity to exercise agential choice in any substantive way; the pre-theoretic intuition that this is "alive but not really living" tracks what the framework articulates. The right to life, properly understood, is already a right to agency; the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the same right made explicit at progressively articulated registers, not separate goods.

*Consent architecture.* Within protected domains, the rights-bearer has authority to modify the default rule governing what may happen there. Consent is the rights-bearer's act of specifying what may happen, by whom, under what conditions, and for how long. The structural-necessity condition is that consent 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. Consent does not erase the right: it exercises it; refusal leaves the default protection in force.

*Foundation-binding against intermediate authorities.* The participation conditions hold against any authority that could drop a person below them, including intermediate authorities internal to the political community (religious institutions, families, employers, communities). Intermediate authorities exercise legitimate authority within their respective domains; that authority does not extend to dropping a person below the participation threshold the rights-architecture is structured to maintain. Religious institutions may organize religious life and hold any beliefs they hold; they may not raise children in conditions that actively harm them. Families may organize family life as they choose; they may not deny food, shelter, education, or medical care on the basis of parental authority. Employers may organize work; they may not hold subsistence hostage to coercive conditions or extract below the substrate ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)). The condition preserves religious liberty, family autonomy, and associational life as personal exercises of liberty above the foundation; it precludes intermediate authorities from using their standing as a license to override the foundation of the people under their care.

Together, these six conditions are what rights-architecture at population scale structurally requires. Each condition is necessary; together they deliver substantive rights-architecture. Their conjunction is what the framework names when it says rights are participation conditions, and what [§9.1.3](<9.1.3 What is Predicted.md>) generates predictions against.


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← [9.1.1 What is Disputed](<9.1.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.1.3 What is Predicted](<9.1.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
