When shared life breaks down (someone is harmed, something is taken, a person treats others as if they were not real) a justice system is how the political community sets it right. The argument's reframe is that setting it right means repair, not only punishment: making the victim whole, restoring what the political community lost, and addressing the conditions that produced the harm in the first place, since most of what reaches a courtroom traces back to untreated illness, poverty, or absent options. Spending on those upstream conditions does more to prevent the next harm than spending on longer sentences does. At the same time, none of this dissolves responsibility: a person really is the author of what they do, and the account says exactly why. The claim is only that a community serious about justice does not stop at the sentence.

Cooperation produces breakdowns, and the political community has to have institutions for adjudicating them. Justice derives heavily from [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality), with [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) (Will) and [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) (Feeling) in supporting roles. Morality begins from the recognition that another person is real; will is what makes an action attributable to a participant; feeling is what makes the consequences land on someone in particular. Applied to breakdowns in shared life, those three together imply that justice is not punishment grafted onto a political community from outside. Justice is how the political community repairs failures of recognition when they occur and restores the conditions it needs in order to function. The [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) 'Government work discharges the obligation' result names the foundational form this section inherits: justice is one of the ways the political community discharges the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) obligation, not a function each citizen separately discharges in private capacity.

Consider concretely a sixteen-year-old caught spray-painting a wall of a corner store. The downstream-only response is what most jurisdictions still default to: a citation, possibly probation, possibly a juvenile record that closes off college aid and certain employment. The wall is repainted on the store owner's dime; nothing is repaired with respect to the political community whose collective-investment output the wall represented; the young person is processed and released into the same conditions that produced the act. A restitution-plus-upstream response runs differently. The young person is required to repair the damage directly: cleaning the wall under supervision, with the store owner's hourly time compensated from a community restitution fund. They are also enrolled, on the same docket, in whatever upstream condition the assessment identifies as the live driver: a mentorship program if a parent is absent, a behavioral-health intake if untreated ADHD is the trigger, an after-school placement if unstructured time is the issue. The wall is repaired, the person who lost something is made whole, the political community's stake is recognized, and the conditions producing the next incident are addressed in the same proceeding. The cost is comparable; the outcomes the section predicts diverge sharply downstream.

*Two results follow.* *(i) Property crime (vandalism in particular) harms not only the individual owner but the political community.* The destroyed object was collective-investment output: manufacturing, materials, supply chains, embedded labor. Destroying it depletes the stock of usable goods, forces the political community to spend more collective investment replacing it, and degrades the maintenance ledger. The wrongness does not depend on the owner's class; it follows from the political community's logic.

The same derivation that grounds progressive taxation in [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) grounds the wrongness of vandalism here, on the same premises, at the same time. There is no line of derivation within this framework that licenses "stick it to the rich" as policy or practice. Property under the framework is not a Lockean pre-political right that the political community merely respects; property is infrastructure-output that an individual has stewardship over within the political community. Stewardship is real, and its violation is wrong on the framework's terms. Stewardship beyond proportionate contribution, however, looks like privatization of infrastructure-output rather than legitimate holding, which is the move [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) made.

*(ii) Justice runs upstream into healthcare, education, and economy.* The conditions producing survival crimes are upstream of the crimes themselves; the conditions producing untreated mental-health and substance-related criminalization are upstream of the criminalization; the conditions producing chronic recidivism are upstream of the recidivism. The political community's most efficient justice-investment is in the upstream conditions rather than in the downstream sanctions. *Everybody wins* here is a structural prediction, not a rhetorical flourish: the same dollars that reduce suffering also reduce justice-system burden, and the framework predicts that purely-downstream justice systems will systematically underperform upstream-investment systems on every metric that matters.

*Restitution as natural correlate.* If the harm is to collective investment, not just to the individual owner, then restitution is partly owed to the political community, not only to the victim. Some restorative-justice frameworks already operate this way (community service, contribution-to-public-good as part of sentencing). The collective-investment frame derives this directly. It also explains why pure incarceration without restitution feels incomplete: it removes the perpetrator from the political community without restoring what was taken from it.

*Connection to mutual recognition.* The vandal is not only damaging an object. The vandal is failing to recognize the owner as a subject within the political community: failing to see that the owner's stake is real, that the owner is part of the same collective investment the vandal also draws from, and that defacing the wall damages the political community they both inhabit. The point links the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) moral argument to the [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) political argument by the same derivation that runs through the rest of the chapter.

*Equality before the law is substantive, not formal.* The recognition analysis that makes a wrong class-independent makes the response class-independent in the same motion: if the wrongness of an act does not depend on the actor's wealth, neither may the political community's answer to it. A justice system in which money purchases an exemption, a lighter sanction, or a release the poor cannot buy has converted wealth into criminal privilege — it lets the same act carry one meaning for a participant with resources and another for a participant without them, which is exactly the failure to treat both as equally real participants that [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) names as the core wrong. Cash bail that holds a poor defendant in pretrial detention while a wealthier one charged with the same offense buys release, fines set so that they discipline the poor and merely inconvenience the rich, and settlement-and-plea structures that let means buy distance from accountability are its concrete forms. Two consequences follow. First, penalty must track the wrong and the agent's contribution to causal history, not the agent's balance sheet: wealth and power earn neither exemption nor discount, and the captured-government danger the section names below — a structure that 'applies rules differently to those who hold power' — is this same failure seen from the top rather than the bottom. Second, equality before the law is empty where one side is systematically outgunned, so adequately-resourced defense is a structural requirement and not a courtesy: the unmet promise of *Gideon v. Wainwright* (1963), and the standing asymmetry between funded prosecution and starved public defense, is a defect in justice itself, not merely in its administration. Formal equality of rule laid over material inequality of access is not justice but justice's appearance, worn over the very distribution the framework exists to correct.

*The trolley problem is an upstream question.* The standard dilemma stages a runaway trolley and a bystander at a lever: divert onto a track where one person dies, or do nothing while five die, and a whole literature's energy goes into weighing the act of diversion against the desert of the outcome. The framework reads the scenario the way it reads every other breakdown: by asking what arrangement produced it.

The morally load-bearing question is not which way the bystander pulls the lever but why anyone was ever positioned on a live track with a runaway trolley bearing down and no third option: why the brakes failed, why the line was ever routed through places where people stand, why the only choices left to the agent at the moment of crisis are two ways of distributing a harm that competent upstream design would have foreclosed. A justice system that focuses only on the lever-puller's split-second choice is treating the dilemma as a downstream problem. The framework asks instead who designed, maintained, underfunded, or profited from the rail system that left people with only two deadly options.

This does not excuse the person at the lever (the Modally Compatibilist Responsibility result keeps their contribution to causal history real), but it identifies where the larger share of responsibility lies. Build the arrangement so the forced choice cannot arise, and the dilemma a whole tradition treats as timeless dissolves into the engineering-and-investment failure it always was. The inversion is the section's own: canonical moral-dilemma theory takes the agent's moment-of-choice as the fixed frame and asks what they ought to do inside it; the framework fixes the arrangement as the object of justice and reads the moment-of-choice dilemma as evidence that the upstream work was left undone.

> [!corollary]
> **Modally Compatibilist Responsibility** · **R25** · *Result of the Type/Token Distinction and Integrated Self-Modeling*
>
> Agency is the locus at which a self-model takes uptake of evidence and norms and integrates that uptake into action. An agent is responsible not because they could have done otherwise in some impossible libertarian sense, but because they are the locus at which a self-model genuinely contributes to causal history. Follows from the type/token distinction of [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) (strict modal) and the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) account of integrated self-modeling (Awareness, as the depth-axis the framework traces).

The free-will implication follows from the type/token distinction of [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) together with the chapter's opening account of integrated self-modeling. At the type level, the structure is necessary and the structural pressures fixed: no agent can suspend the roles or step outside the causal order. At the token level, the world's specific histories are not pre-fixed by the structure itself. Quantum indeterminacy is one source of genuine token-level openness, but openness alone does not yet make an agent. Randomness is not freedom. What does the agency-grounding work is the self-modeling recursion the framework derives at [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) (Awareness, carrying the constitutive-vantage register it anchors there and traces from inside here): a recursive system whose model of itself, of its environment, and of the consequences of its acts feeds back into what it does next. That feedback is where reasons-responsiveness lives. An agent in this sense is not a node at which indeterminacy is randomly resolved; it is the locus at which a self-model takes uptake of evidence and norms and integrates that uptake into action. This is compatibilism of a modal rather than classical kind (Frankfurt 1971; Dennett 1984, 2003; Fischer and Ravizza 1998): freedom is not the absence of constraint but the presence of genuine token-level openness within a necessarily instantiated stage, taken up by a system structured to take it up. An agent is responsible not because they could have done otherwise in some impossible libertarian sense, but because they are the locus at which a self-model genuinely contributes to causal history. The upstream-justice point sharpens here: conditions that narrow an agent's field of live options degrade the conditions under which that contribution can be a healthy one. Responsibility remains real, and the account supplies practical grounds (though not a stance-independent cosmic obligation) for supporting the conditions under which responsible agency can flourish. The Modally Compatibilist Responsibility result is not confined to within-community desert: it reaches external coercion directly, supplying the grounding for the diminished liability of the coerced combatant at [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>).

> [!corollary]
> **Standing–Agency Decoupling** · **R26** · *Result of Modally Compatibilist Responsibility*
>
> Standing and agency are not the same variable. Standing, the claim to have one's field of live possibility maximized, is gated by the capacity for experience, and that gate is already fixed by the chapter's opening result: a human whose self-modeling is limited, undeveloped, or lost holds the full standing of a subject of experience, not a reduced share. Agency, the depth at which a self-model takes uptake of evidence and norms and integrates that uptake into action, is graded, and can be blunted, fragmented, or severed by injury, illness, or developmental limits in the way [§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>) traces for moral uptake generally; because freedom is modal depth ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)), that blunting narrows the subject's own field of live options without narrowing anyone else's obligation toward that field. The two variables come apart, and a subject can hold full standing while agency is reduced. What follows is conservation rather than discount: the possibility-maximization owed to a full-standing subject is invariant under agency-reduction, and only the mode of delivery covaries with it, self-exercise where agency is intact, supported decision-making and graded autonomy where it is partial, protective care where it is severe, never the amount owed. Reduced agency does not shrink the political community's obligation; it relocates the work of meeting that obligation from the subject onto the basic structure, the same relocation the structure already performs wherever a subject's own capacity to secure a condition is absent ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>), [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>)).

The relocation is the mirror image of the Modally Compatibilist Responsibility result just derived, read off the same variable in the opposite direction. A drop in modal depth lowers what a subject can be held to have contributed to causal history without erasing the harm done to whoever stands on the other side of it; the same drop raises the basic structure's duty to provide for the subject whose capacity has narrowed, because the capacity that would otherwise let the subject secure the condition alone is exactly what is missing. Culpability falls and provisioning duty rises together, off one term, not as separate judgment calls made case by case. Containing the risk such a subject may pose to others and maximizing that subject's own field are consequently not competing aims to be traded against each other; both scale with how far agency has narrowed, and neither licenses abandoning the other. What discharges the structure's side is the upstream investment already derived elsewhere in the chapter, mental-health and addiction treatment, housing, the sufficiency floor ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>), [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)), paired at the enforcement interface with de-escalation and a clinical rather than punitive response where risk materializes ([§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)), never with punishment scaled to a capacity the subject does not have.

*The same inversion, layered.* This section runs the same layered structure developed at the healthcare register ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)), applied here to harm rather than illness. *Wellness-conditions-first*: most of what arrives at the justice system is upstream-preventable (untreated illness, poverty, isolation, narrowed options) and the political community's most effective justice-investment goes there. *Breakdown*: when prevention fails, the response is restoration of what was taken (to the person, to the political community whose collective-investment output the act damaged), not infliction of suffering as a standalone end. *Recovery*: the structural goal is the wrongdoer's return to participation in the basic structure, with conditions repaired and the recognition-failure addressed. The dialectical inversion is the chapter's: standard punishment-theory takes punitive correction as the baseline and asks when leniency or alternative sentencing is justified; the framework reverses the structure. Prevention-and-repair is what the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) mutual-recognition derivation already commits the framework to, and punitive correction is the residual-required only where the three layers cannot do the political community's work in the case at hand. The configuration the framework derives is what is structurally required; departures from it carry the argumentative load.

*Labor under confinement.* The residual-carceral case tests whether the reparative frame holds where the framework's grip is weakest. It does, and it constrains what confinement may extract. A conviction establishes a contribution to causal history and so a reparative debt (the Modally Compatibilist Responsibility result); it does not dissolve the inalienable latitude a subject holds over its own person ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>), [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>)). Patiency is not forfeitable (the wrongdoer remains a current whose conditions matter) so the debt is owed in the currency restoration already names: repair, restitution, reintegration, never the body itself. Compelled productive labor therefore cannot be a mode of punishment. Forcing a convicted person to work is the standing seizure of latitude the framework names as its limit case, and the carve-out that licenses it (involuntary servitude permitted "as punishment for crime") is exactly the laundering of that seizure through conviction that the firewall of [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) forbids: pricing the withdrawal of the body by attaching it to the sentence. The body does not become purchasable because its owner was convicted.

What confinement may do is offer work, not compel it. Voluntary, fairly-paid reparative labor (wages that are real rather than token, a floor of security guaranteed independently of whether the person chooses to work, and no coercive linkage between working and sentence length, privileges, or release) is the framework's preferred carceral form, because it lets the convicted person discharge the reparative debt as an agent rather than have suffering inflicted on them as an end. The paternalist defense (that mandatory work is "rehabilitative," good for the inmate whether or not they consent) fails by the benevolent-dominator analysis ([§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>)): a structure that overrides the subject's own will for the subject's claimed good is domination wearing care's face. Two honest residuals follow. First, voluntariness inside a total institution is always partly degraded, so the bar the legitimacy test sets (informed, uncoerced, competent) *rises* under confinement rather than relaxes, and a system that cannot clear it is extracting, not offering. Second, the bar falls on compelled *productive* labor, the economic output a carceral system can capture; it does not reach the minimal reciprocal self-maintenance any shared living arrangement asks of its members (keeping one's own space, sharing the upkeep of common ones) which is ordinary reciprocity, not extraction. The line is between work a community asks of everyone who lives in it and work a sentence conscripts.

*Private armament is a symptom of absent collective protection.* The prevention-over-correction argument established that a political community weighted toward prevention delivers both prevention and correction, while a political community weighted toward correction delivers correction alone. One of the clearest expressions of this dominance is in personal safety. Where the basic structure genuinely maintains the conditions of safety (through prevention-weighted justice, functioning institutions, and the structural maintenance of conditions that remove what generates threat in the first place), the felt need for private armament against other members of that structure largely dissolves. Not because weapons are removed, but because the reason people reach for them has been addressed. People arm themselves when they do not trust the basic structure to protect them: against other people whose options have been narrowed by the same structural failures, or against institutions they experience as indifferent or hostile to their safety. Both sources are upstream. A person who lives inside a political community that maintains genuine collective protection (that addresses precarity, untreated illness, isolation, and the degradation of community conditions) is not living in the threat environment that makes personal armament feel necessary. The argument is not country-specific. It applies wherever people arm themselves in response to a basic structure that has failed to do the protective work political maintenance consists in.

The contrary position begins from a real gap. Where state protection is delayed or unavailable, private armament is not a symptom of bad faith but an immediate response to a real danger. Rural communities whose nearest emergency response is forty-five minutes away; domestic-abuse survivors whose restraining orders are paper against perpetrators the system has already failed to restrain; minority communities whose history with state protection has been one of conspicuous absence at moments of greatest need: these are not hypotheticals. The historical record of armed self-defense by marginalized groups is part of American civil-rights history rather than peripheral to it: the Deacons for Defense and Justice protected SNCC and CORE organizers in Louisiana and Mississippi when local enforcement either declined to act or actively colluded with violence (Hill 2004; Umoja 2013); Robert F. Williams's *Negroes with Guns* (Williams 1962) documented the Monroe, North Carolina chapter's armed defense of its community when the Klan attacked and the state would not intervene; Ida B. Wells argued for the Winchester rifle as the only protection a Black household could count on against lynching when courts and sheriffs would not act (Wells 1892). The Second Amendment political-theory tradition codified by *District of Columbia v. Heller* (2008) reads the right to keep and bear arms as a structural protection precisely against the failure mode this chapter has been naming (the captured or collapsing state), and that reading has serious theorists across the political spectrum (Levinson 1989; Reynolds 1995; Cottrol and Diamond 1991; Tushnet 2007). At the individual scale, a person facing immediate threat is not failing to recognize the framework when they reach for a means of defense the framework has not yet been able to provide them; they are taking the only protective action the structural failure has left available.

The argument does not deny any of this. It diagnoses the same failure those positions diagnose. What it rejects is the inference from "the failure is real" to "the failure should be addressed by making private armament the primary layer of protection." The answer to documented protection gaps is to close the gaps: fund rural emergency response that actually arrives, enforce restraining orders that actually restrain, and reform the institutions whose historical record toward marginalized communities is the source of the legitimate distrust. Private armament as an immediate self-defense fallback under conditions of structural failure remains what it has historically been: a sometimes necessary response to a state that has not yet done its work. The claim is narrower than the strongest pro-armament position takes it to be, and narrower in a way that should be welcome to thoughtful proponents on multiple sides: it does not deny the legitimacy of immediate self-defense, it does not romanticize the conditions that make immediate self-defense necessary, and it does not derive any specific weapons-policy regime. It rejects only the elevation of the fallback into a primary structural strategy: the picture on which armed citizens, rather than functioning institutions, are what stand between a population and a tyrannical state, or between vulnerable people and the threats that target them.

The argument for arming against one's own government points at the same failure from a different angle. It is worth being precise about why it is the wrong solution to the right problem. Private armament has rarely succeeded in restraining a modern state that chose to act against its population; the asymmetry of force, organization, and intelligence between a state and its armed citizens is too large for the small-arms strategy to function as a reliable structural check. The premise that civilian weapons constitute a robust structural check on governmental power does not hold in general. What the argument correctly identifies is the problem: a government that has been captured, that no longer recognizes the direction of all, that applies rules differently to those who hold power, is genuinely dangerous. But the solution the argument reaches for (private fallback capacity) is a concession of structural failure, not a remedy for it. The present account rejects the concession. The answer is not to arm against the government. The answer is to build a government you do not need to arm against: one that genuinely recognizes the direction of all, maintains the rule of law equally, and cannot be captured by a subset. (Mouffe's *On the Political* 2005 would press that the framework's answer is itself a hegemonic articulation that constitutes its own constitutive outside: those who decline to install the framework, those for whom 'framework-compatible design' excludes their political commitments; the framework acknowledges this directly at [§9.14](<9.14 Convergence.md>) and offers its structural conclusions as positions the political community converges on through agonistic contestation rather than as derivations that bypass it.) That government is not a threat requiring a private check. It is the protection the basic structure exists to provide. The derivation throughout this chapter specifies exactly what building such a government structurally requires.

*The framework engages the punishment-theory-tradition objections from three directions.* Three counter-traditions are developed in full at [§9.13.1](<9.13.1 What is Disputed.md>): the retributivist tradition (Kant, *Metaphysics of Morals* 1797, *Doctrine of Right* §49; Moore, *Placing Blame* 1997; Duff, *Punishment, Communication, and Community* 2001), the prison-abolitionist tradition (Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Kaba 2021), with Mills's *Black Rights / White Wrongs* (2017) developing the canonical Mills-tradition analytic engagement with reparative justice, Alexander's *The New Jim Crow* (2010) tracing the historical throughline from slavery through convict-lease and Jim Crow to mass incarceration, Coates's 'The Case for Reparations' (Atlantic, June 2014) renewing the popular-political reparations argument on the mechanism of mid-century redlining (the federally sanctioned denial of mortgage credit to Black neighborhoods, whose compounding deprivation is exactly the sedimented disadvantage the reparative analysis of [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) addresses) and Stevenson's *Just Mercy* (2014) and the Equal Justice Initiative case record developing the concrete-vulnerable-first record on incarcerated Black Americans at the residual-carceral end, and the restorative-justice-maximalist tradition (Zehr, *Changing Lenses* 1990; Braithwaite, *Crime, Shame and Reintegration* 1989; the contemporary truth-and-reconciliation literature). The framework grants the central concession in each case. The retributivist desert claim is granted at the structural level: there is a constitutive moral relationship between what the wrongdoer has done and what the political community owes in response (the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) recognition-failure analysis grounds this directly), and purely consequentialist justice collapses into the social-defense framework retributivism correctly opposes. The abolitionist diagnostic on the institutional-historical record is granted in full: the racialized incarceration record, the persistence of carceral extraction across reform cycles, and the budget-crowding-out empirical record are real and constitute legitimate evidence that incremental carceral reform has reliably failed. The restorative-justice diagnostic on structural form is granted as the recognized direction it indicates: restorative architectures deliver recognition-repair more directly than retributive-only sentencing does, and are first-order candidates where multiple framework-compatible designs are available. Where the framework parts is on the load-bearing claim of each: modally-compatibilist responsibility grounds desert in the agent's contribution to causal history, which restoration discharges through repair, restitution, and reintegration rather than through suffering-infliction; the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) protective obligation requires institutional architecture for residual extreme cases that abolitionism would eliminate; institutional reliability for parties without community-resource access requires state-administered backstop that restorative-only architectures cannot supply at the residual-extreme-case end. The framework converges with retributivism on desert, with abolitionism on the historical record and the inadequacy of incremental reform, and with restorative justice on restoration as the first-order institutional form (Anderson, *The Imperative of Integration* 2010, develops the parallel argument that the carceral system functions as racial segregation in institutionally-most-stringent form, and that integration is constitutive of relational equality rather than optional); it parts from each on whether the conclusions they draw follow. The three-traditions engagement is overlapping-consensus work at the justice register (Rawls, *Political Liberalism* 1993): the framework's preference for restorative architectures is offered as the position the political community should converge on through public-reason deliberation, not as a derivation that bypasses such deliberation. *A Theory of Justice* §55 on civil disobedience is the canonical Rawlsian engagement with the legitimate-resistance question the framework's enforcement/justice architecture owes a position on, paired with the Habermas civil-disobedience result noted at [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>).

What remains open. Restorative-versus-retributive design, sentencing structure, and carceral-versus-decarceral implementation remain design questions. The fixed claims are that justice repairs failures of mutual recognition, that purely downstream justice systems underperform, and that justice depends on collective investment in healthcare, education, and economic sufficiency for upstream justice to land. Where multiple designs satisfy those constraints, the choice remains open.


- [9.13.1 What is Disputed](<9.13.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.13.2 What is Required](<9.13.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.13.3 What is Predicted](<9.13.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.13.4 What is Confirmed](<9.13.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.13.5 What is Concluded](<9.13.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [9.12.5 What is Concluded](<9.12.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.13.1 What is Disputed](<9.13.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
