When people live together, they come to depend on the same handful of things: a roof, food, medical care, safety, a say in what happens to them, schooling, time, and a way to get around. This holds at every scale — a household, a town, a country, or a planet.

The chapter's central proposal is that maintaining those conditions for everyone need not be understood as charity or forced collectivism. Where individuals depend on shared institutions and remain exposed to their failure, they have reason to support their maintenance. The chapter develops a structural political interpretation of that dependence; its institutional consequences remain conditional on the empirical, experiential, and normative premises stated in the relevant sections.

*In the chapter's terms.* This chapter applies the framework built in earlier chapters to political life: how people organize themselves at scales larger than the family or neighborhood. Three terms recur throughout. *Recognition* is the act of acknowledging another person as a real subject whose conditions count: when a society recognizes the direction of its members, it takes their voice and felt experience as evidence the political community has to respond to. *Maximum possibility* is the governing political aim of the chapter: the function of shared political structure is to expand the field of live possibility available to its members, making it possible for more people to have more real possibilities open to them, without collapsing choice into survival-response. The conditions this requires (shelter, food, healthcare, safety, voice, education, time, mobility) are not earned by performing enough participation, and public institutions do not grant them as permission to participate. They are the conditions a political community must maintain so that formal rights become real alternatives rather than nominal permissions exercised under coercion. Liberty, on this account, is the political name for maximum possibility under necessities met. *Structural extraction* is the pattern of drawing benefit from the shared arrangement without contributing back in proportion, whether at institutional or individual scale; it is developed in full alongside the infrastructure terms later in the chapter. The standing claim is that individuals pursuing continuation and a wider field of live possibility may converge on shared maintenance without being collectivized into it. That convergence is neither automatic nor a deduction from bare self-interest: it depends on recognition of others' standing, accountable institutions, and empirical conditions that make cooperation durable.

*The inversion, from the other side.* This is the conclusion the book is named for, reached from the political end. Chapter 6 showed that greatness sought by negating the conditions of being (atemporal, aspatial, immaterial) collapses into nothing ([§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>)). Maximum possibility is that same greatness run the other way: not the subtraction of the conditions of being but their fullest maintenance, the widest field of live possibility a shared structure can hold open. What the tradition treated as an honorific owed to an evacuated God, this account locates in the standing a working polity achieves by maintaining those conditions.

> [!corollary]
> **Maximal Greatness** · **R21** · *Result of T6 and T7*
>
> Greatness sought by negating the conditions of being — atemporal, aspatial, immaterial — specifies the Null State and names no possibility-candidate at all ([§5.1.7](<5.1.7 Modal Ontological Argument.md>); [§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>)). Run the other way, the same superlative names the ceiling of the gradable dimension defined at [§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>): not a completed actuality possessed from the outset but a maintained standing — the fullest exercise of the conditions of being, the widest field of live possibility a subsistence can hold open. At the scale of a shared structure, that ceiling is maximum possibility, and the honorific the Anselmian tradition reserved for a maximally great being coherently names only this maintained maximum. Whether a given polity achieves that maintenance is a political and empirical question, developed across §[§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)–9.14, not part of this result.

*The trajectory and its data.* Chapter 8 developed conditional analytic phenomenology of a self-modeling life. This chapter asks what happens when people build a world together — civic life, rights, the polity, economy, education, healthcare, environment, law, and the conditions under which a political community sustains or undermines itself. Felt fear, safety, happiness, aversion, and belonging are important first-person data, but population measures of well-being, trust, fear, and political alienation are empirical indicators that require careful methodology, open reporting channels, and corroboration with other evidence. They inform political judgment; they do not automatically constitute a modal proof.

*The conditions of the evidential channel.* Felt-state evidence is reliable only when the reporting channel is open. Coercive suppression of speech, retaliation against dissent, and manipulative political advertising at coercive scale distort the felt baseline before it can be reported, and the channel closes. Free speech, freedom of association, freedom from retaliation, and protections against manipulative advertising at coercive scale are therefore not goods alongside the goods political life delivers; they are the conditions under which political theory's evidential channel stays open, and the structural argument for them runs through the conditions of the framework itself. The parallel institutional failure mode in religious institutions at the population level is named once in Chapter 7 (registration-tension); this chapter's concentration is the political instance.

Wherever two or more subjects share conditions (a household, a family, a community, a city) they are already doing the work this chapter names. They are working out the rules under which they coordinate, share costs, resolve conflicts, and maintain what they depend on together. A family has its own rules. A neighborhood has its own rules. Any group of subjects in sustained contact will develop them, formally or not, because shared conditions require it. Shared organization is not something that begins at the scale of the state and works downward. It is what shared life structurally requires, at every scale from two subjects outward. The nation-state is not where this activity originates. It is where it becomes formal. Morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) was grounded in shared vulnerability, intersubjective recognition, and the cooperation those produce. This chapter develops what follows once the subjects who must coordinate number not in twos but in millions, and the shared structure between them is no longer face-to-face exchange but institutions, laws, economies, and inherited practices.

*The levers, in two senses.* Chapter 8 closed on the levers of the ought — the several grips by which a compulsion comes to bind a subject at all ([§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)), ordered not by dignity but by reach, by how much of the field a subject has come to register. This chapter takes up levers of a second kind. Its institutions — rights, belonging, representation, information, environment, agriculture, economy, housing, education, healthcare, defense, enforcement, and justice — are the practical means by which a political community maintains the conditions its members share. The two kinds of levers are connected. When shelter, safety, health, and standing are secure, people have enough room to recognize others' needs as well as their own. Chapter 8 identifies that widening moral reach within an individual subject; this chapter asks how public institutions can sustain the conditions that make that widening possible across a population. Political maintenance is therefore moral cultivation at scale.

> [!corollary]
> **Epistemic Floor** · **R22** · *Result of Modal Freedom*
>
> The conditions of participation do more than prevent suffering. They create the interval in which a person can attend, compare reasons, refuse coercive terms, learn from correction, and form a direction that is genuinely their own. A person pressed against hunger, untreated illness, insecure shelter, threat, or unanswerable power may retain formal rights while losing the practical distance those rights require. Maintaining the floor therefore protects not only welfare but the conditions of informed consent, democratic judgment, and moral agency themselves. The political floor functions as the infrastructure that makes freedom cognitively and practically real, not as a benefit tacked on after freedom is secured.

A well-run arrangement may become more broadly endorsable when members experience safety, belonging, and room to act. This is an empirical and political prediction, not a necessary psychological law: institutions can secure material conditions while still failing to earn trust, and members can reasonably disagree about whether an arrangement serves them. Felt safety, belonging, and room to live are evidence to be interpreted through open reporting channels and corroborating indicators, not automatic validation of any policy.

*The same result, from the side of what remains to claim.* Once the participation conditions are held and each subject's liberty runs to the point where it would begin to corrode another's, the set of rights compatible with everyone holding that same set is complete in kind. Any right one could add would have to license what the conditions and the harm-bound already exclude: the corrosion of another subject against its own registered aversion. A further right, at that boundary, could only be a right to infringe, and the claim to it is unstable in the way [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) makes precise, since it trades on the very standing it would deny to whomever it is exercised against. The completeness is schematic rather than enumerative. What is closed is the kind: every legitimate right is either a participation condition or a liberty bounded by non-interference. What stays open is the list — the conditions extend as the capacities that ground them extend ([§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>), [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)), and a contested boundary or an allocation among competing claims is settled through recognition ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) rather than fixed here. The claim rests on what being a subject under shared conditions requires, never on what a member feels owed: felt desert reaches positional goods whose satisfaction would require another's subordination, which the schema reads as one more right to infringe rather than a right it can honor.

The derivation is short. Once a person participates in civic life, participation is not selective: the institutions a person helps sustain are the same institutions that shape that person's life. Those two facts close the argument before the social philosophy begins.

The first fact is from Chapter 2. Time, Space, and Substance are necessary — not contingent features of this universe but the structural ground of any Reality. No person steps outside succession, distinction, or persistence. Nature is shared. What happens in it reaches everyone who participates in the shared structure built within it.

The second fact is from [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>). Each subject pursues its own continuation by structural necessity — not as a preference they happen to have but as what being alive consists in. That pursuit does not stop at the skin. A person lives inside a society, an economy, a set of inherited institutions. Those are the social structure at the scale at which a person actually operates. The conditions of the social structure are conditions of that person's continuation, whether they attend to them or not.

Together these close a long-running misdescription of political obligation. The question has usually been framed as: why should anyone contribute to a society that benefits others? The framing assumes contributor and beneficiary are different people. They are not. A society that protects everyone protects the subjects who built it. A society that helps everyone is one its builders are helped by. The beneficiary population and the builder population are the same population, and the social structure is the same social structure. There is no vantage point outside the society from which a person contributes to it without living in it.

> [!theorem]
> **Mutual Sustenance** · **T10** · *Theorem 10*
>
> Subjects cannot escape dependence on shared conditions while they live within them. Where their continuation remains exposed to those conditions, they have reason to sustain them together. Mutual sustenance is the warranted response to that interdependence, not its inevitable outcome: durable convergence requires institutions that preserve recognition, representation, and cooperation without domination. For a subject whose immediate exposure has lapsed, any continuing obligation rests on recognized standing and political judgment, not on self-interest alone ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)). This is a Chapter 9 structural-political identification built from [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>), not a fresh modal theorem. ([§2.8.5](<2.8.5 Necessity of Nature.md>), [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>))

> [!definition]
> **Convergent Individualism** · *Definition*
>
> Maximally individual subjects, pursuing their continuation maximally individualistically, arriving at the same shared maintenance not despite their individualism but because of it.

The same non-competition appears in the account of liberty. Maximum liberty means the widest real range of action across the population, not the maximum freedom of one person considered alone. One person's freedom to accumulate does not outweigh another person's freedom to remain alive, because survival is a precondition of any later choice. The argument therefore maintains the conditions that make liberty real — rather than treating liberty as a stock to be divided among competing people. That preserves the separateness of persons while recognizing that each person's freedom depends on shared conditions.

The Mutual Sustenance theorem runs against four contemporary positions whose leading defenders are worth naming before the chapter walks its domains.

Rawlsian contractualism (Rawls, *A Theory of Justice* 1971; *Political Liberalism* 1993) reads convergence on shared maintenance as the outcome of a procedural justification: principles that would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, by parties whose particular identities and conceptions of the good are bracketed for the choice but recovered after it. The framework grants what the Rawlsian tradition gets right: the original-position device delivers impartiality without smuggling in a comprehensive doctrine, and is the most developed contemporary articulation of justification-that-runs-without-metaphysics. Where it parts from Rawls is on what does the binding work. On the Rawlsian reading, principles bind because they would have been chosen procedurally; on the framework's reading, the structural conditions bind whether ratified procedurally or not, and procedural ratification (developed at [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) is how the binding gets expressed politically rather than what generates it.

Public-choice contractualism (Buchanan and Tullock, *The Calculus of Consent* 1962) reads convergence on shared maintenance as the outcome of a constitutional bargain among self-interested rational agents, secured through agreement rather than structural necessity. The framework grants what the contractualist tradition gets right: convergence runs through individual self-interest, not against it. Where it parts from contractualism is on what does the binding work. On the contractualist reading, the bargain binds and a subject who could exit the bargain is no longer bound; on the framework's reading, self-continuation under shared conditions binds, and there is no exit from shared conditions for a subject living inside them.

The contractualist is owed a second reply, this one about motive rather than logic. The pull a person feels to keep the shared structure going tracks how exposed they are to its failure right now: it is strongest when the threat is close and fades as the threat recedes. So a structure that succeeds in making its members safe lets that immediate motive weaken just as it begins to work. By itself this is no problem for the contractualist, because self-interest need not be short-sighted: a person who knows their safety can be lost (that position, health, and fortune all change) still has a standing reason to keep the structure up, as insurance against the situations they might yet find themselves in, and that reason reaches almost everyone, because almost no one's security is guaranteed for good. What it does not reach is the case the insurance argument has always left open ([§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>)): the person whose safety really is secure, or who simply discounts the futures the insurance is meant to cover. For that person neither the felt pull nor the insurance calculation binds, and a society that leaned on self-interest alone would, in the limit, have to keep its members a little endangered to keep them contributing. The framework does not take that approach. For that remaining case, what sustains the structure across those it has already made safe is not their own residual risk but the recognized standing of the others whose conditions are still at stake ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)), and, like any moral response, it is cultivated rather than drawn out of danger ([§8.12.3](<8.12.3 What is Predicted.md>)). Threat-based maintenance weakens exactly as it succeeds; maintenance built on recognized standing does not.

Libertarian rights-as-side-constraints (Nozick, *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* 1974) reads the structure as constrained by inviolable individual rights that cannot be overridden for any aggregate good. The framework grants the side-constraint reading what it asks for at the foundational level: no aggregate gain licenses the conscription of separate lives into projects that are not theirs. Where it parts from Nozick is on whether the maintenance of subsistence and participation conditions counts as conscription. The framework derives that maintaining those conditions is what the right to life articulates when taken at the depth where life actually subsists ([§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)), not an additional positive duty competing with the negative right.

Communitarian critique (Sandel, *Liberalism and the Limits of Justice* 1982; MacIntyre, *After Virtue* 1981) presses from the opposite direction: that liberal frameworks, including this one's universalist register, abstract away from the constitutive communities subjects actually belong to. The framework grants that subjects are constituted in part by the communities they live within, and political theory that strips this away misdescribes its subject. Where it parts from the strong communitarian reading is on whether the participation conditions can be community-respecting without being community-relative. The *Integration without assimilation* commitment below answers directly: the conditions are met within whatever institutional form a community's life calls for, not by dissolving constitutive community into a universalist procedure.

> [!definition]
> **Subsistence**
>
> Run intransitively, the verb to subsist names what each subject does individually: continue to exist. Run transitively, the verb names what subjects do to each other: act on one another to keep one another in being. The noun-form names what the activity makes: a subsistence, the singular kind of collective entity a community or a commonwealth names, at the broader scale this chapter is concerned with.

The chapter's identification, on which the rest of §9 proceeds, is that *humanity can be understood as a subsistence*: a political relation in which members maintain conditions they share. Where Mutual Sustenance names the proposed mechanism, the Subsistence definition names the political form that mechanism would constitute. This is a Chapter 9 identification and political theory, not a result mechanically entailed by the modal proof; it is defended through the chapter’s account of shared exposure, recognition, and institutional maintenance.

Nature is a subsistence too: its parts keep each other going through cause and effect, no mind required. Humanity is a subsistence agentially: the same structure, re-run through subjects who pursue it rather than merely instantiate it. Subsistence as identified here is the universe's pattern appearing again at the level of subjects who pursue it deliberately — no human invention.

The theorem is not a claim about societal perfection. The framework does not derive a society without conflict, scarcity, or hard tradeoffs, and it does not promise one. What it derives is structural coherence: the shape a society has when it has stopped producing its own pathologies as outputs of how it is arranged. Extraction, vandalism, alienation, polarization, and legitimacy collapse are not accidents that better policy could clean up around the edges of current arrangements; they are outputs of how those arrangements are structured. The framework derives the structural conditions under which those outputs stop being self-generated. Above what the structure requires, an enormous amount remains underdetermined: economic schedules, electoral specifics, institutional designs, cultural variation. The framework picks none of those. Convergent individualism is the threshold below which a society is structurally degrading rather than maintaining itself: the point at which the structure stops fighting itself, not the point at which everyone agrees.

From this, three things follow.

*Prevention dominates correction.* A society that prevents harm delivers both prevention and correction: correction remains available as backup when prevention fails. A society that only corrects delivers correction alone. Any subject capable of being harmed, or capable of causing harm (which is everyone in the social structure) is better served by the first arrangement, because it contains the second's outputs and adds the avoided harms. The preference is not humanitarian. It follows from mutual exposure among people who share the same structure and cannot selectively inhabit only the parts that benefit them.

*Maximum possibility requires its conditions.* Morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) was grounded in the exchange among subjects who persist, occupy distinct positions, and can be reached across asymmetric exchange. Political life is that same exchange at scale: the construction of conditions under which such subjects can keep meeting. A society that allows its members to fall below the conditions required for that kind of participation is degrading the basic structure of society, not maintaining it. Shelter, food, healthcare, safety: these are not goods the society distributes as charity to the unfortunate. They are the conditions under which a person remains the kind of subject political life consists in. A society that withholds them from some of its members is undermining the thing it is supposed to maintain.

The pandemic made this structure visible. Many did not demand an abstract maximum of possibility; they wanted their own possibilities to remain fully open: movement, consumption, work routines, schooling arrangements, leisure, convenience. But that openness was preserved, where it was preserved, by narrowing the possibilities of others. Essential workers were asked to keep the world available while their own room for refusal, safety, time, and exposure contracted. The political problem was not merely unequal risk. It was an unequal distribution of possibility: one group’s open field of choice was maintained through another group’s enforced necessity.

The necessities the framework names (shelter, food, healthcare, safety, voice, education, time, mobility) converge with the central capabilities Nussbaum has developed (*Women and Human Development* 2000, *Frontiers of Justice* 2006): both lists pick out conditions whose absence reduces a subject below the threshold of participation rather than ranking goods to be distributed. The framework's categorical commitments hand operationalization to an existing toolkit: the Human Development Index and its inequality-adjusted variant (UNDP), the Doughnut Economics social foundation (Raworth 2017), the OECD Better Life Index, and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness framework develop the threshold-specification work the framework leaves underdetermined. Convergence with the capabilities approach is structural rather than terminological: the chapter runs its derivation in self-continuation vocabulary while the capabilities tradition runs its in flourishing vocabulary; both lines of argument pick out the same threshold.

The historical record presses this further. Where the framework's conditions have been systematically withdrawn from particular populations across institutional generations (through chattel slavery, treaty-violation dispossession, segregation, redlining, mass incarceration, environmental racism in toxic-facility siting, reproductive coercion, and the other instruments by which prior arrangements were structured) the structural argument names what is owed without leaving the derivation. The prior system was wrong; that diagnosis is what the framework's existence performs. Installation of the conditions the chapter develops therefore reaches first to those whom the prior system harmed by design, not as a reparative supplement bolted onto a derivation that arrived first but as the same derivation in the only honest order. Maximum possibility now, applied to populations structurally denied it across generations, is not the same demand as maximum possibility for populations structurally given it. Demands are asymmetric because histories are asymmetric, and the framework's universalism either acknowledges this asymmetry inside the derivation or functions as ideology: the point Mills makes against ideal-theory contractualism (*The Racial Contract* 1997, *Black Rights/White Wrongs* 2017) and Táíwò develops constructively for the framework's institutional question (*Reconsidering Reparations* 2022).

The argument leaves the mechanism to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>). Naming the debt is what the structural derivation does; the recognition mechanism of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) develops how the polity continuously ratifies the form of payment, including the institutional acknowledgment-acts and restitution procedures the conditions-derivation entails but does not itself prescribe.

*Direction must come from all.* If the society being maintained is the society everyone inhabits, then the direction of its maintenance (what political theorists call self-determination) must come from everyone whose conditions are at stake. Any arrangement that allows some to direct the maintenance on behalf of others (substituting a subset's preferred conditions for the conditions of the whole) is not maintaining the basic structure of society. It is maintaining the subset's position within it. The argument here is not about fairness as an independent value. It is about what the basic structure of society structurally requires.

The three derivations support a substantive political conception of freedom. Freedom is not merely government standing back: poverty, illness, unsafe housing, or unaccountable private power can leave little real room to choose. On the framework's interpretation, freedom includes the range of live options civic institutions help secure: material conditions for agency, a public voice, and equal legal standing. This is a contested political conception, defended here through its relation to participation conditions, rather than a conclusion mechanically entailed by the modal proof.

**The floor is anti-coercion architecture.** Housing, food, healthcare, safety, communication, care, and protected standing do more than improve welfare. They create enough room for refusal, consent, contract, political speech, and long-horizon choice to be credible. When saying no means losing shelter, medicine, legal standing, or bodily safety, formal permission to refuse overstates the person's actual liberty. Maintaining the floor does not determine what anyone must choose; it protects the conditions under which the choice can belong to them.

This is freedom as modal freedom ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)) at social scale. A person is not freer when public institutions withdraw and leave them with poverty, illness, unsafe housing, or unaccountable private power. A person is freer when civic institutions maintain the conditions under which more live alternatives can be considered, compared, and acted on. Those failures do not merely make life harder; they collapse modal distance and force action nearer to reaction. Political maintenance expands freedom by reopening the interval between impulse and act.

The most developed contemporary articulations of the freedom-from-government view are worth naming before the rejection lands. Hayek (*The Constitution of Liberty* 1960) reads the rule of law's most demanding form as the one that limits coercive scope to the protection of a domain of independent action. The supporting argument is that no central planner can hold the dispersed knowledge centralized direction would require. Berlin ('Two Concepts of Liberty' 1958) takes negative liberty seriously precisely because positive-liberty framings have historically licensed coercion in the name of a truer self the coerced person is alleged to be moving toward; MacCallum (1967) reformulates freedom triadically (a subject is free from constraints to do something) as the grammar neither pure-negative nor pure-positive accounts fully captured. The framework grants each its central concession: dispersed knowledge cannot be centralized without loss (Hayek); the rhetoric of a higher self has licensed coercion (Berlin); the triadic structure is the right grammar (MacCallum). Where it parts from the negative-liberty tradition is at the structural premise. The tradition locates the threat to freedom in the shared structure itself, and the protection of freedom in the structure's withdrawal. The framework derives that the shared structure cannot withdraw: the conditions of life-as-agency hold whether the political community maintains them or not, and a community that withdraws from maintaining them does not return its members to a prior state of liberty but reduces the modal freedom available to them; the constraints from which freedom is to be exercised do not vanish, they change identity from political to material. Pettit's republican freedom (*Republicanism* 1997) reaches the same diagnosis on independent grounds: freedom is non-domination, and domination by an unaccountable concentration of private power is no improvement over domination by an unaccountable concentration of state power. Anderson presses the same point at the scale liberal rights-talk most often leaves invisible (*Private Government* 2017): the workplace, the household, and informal command are themselves sites of governance, and an unaccountable private hierarchy dominates those under it no less for being private rather than public. The freedom the three derivations establish is therefore standing, not shares: the equal-application requirement binds private command as it binds public office, and the conditions under which a worker, a tenant, or a household member is free from unaccountable direction are part of what the shared structure has to maintain rather than a matter settled by formal ownership (developed at [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>), [§9.12.1](<9.12.1 What is Disputed.md>), and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)).

This is why the liberal tradition's framing of freedom as freedom-from-government misidentifies the threat. The threat to freedom is not public life as such. It is public institutions failing: the conditions of maximum possibility are not maintained, direction is captured by a subset, or rules are applied unequally. When institutions fail in these ways, freedom erodes because the conditions that make it possible have been degraded. The answer is institutions that work better, not institutional withdrawal. A person living with reliable healthcare, housing, legal equality, public voice, and protection from domination has more genuine freedom of action than a person whose formal rights exist only on paper. Freedom is real when the conditions for exercising it are real.

A complementary-support argument reaches similar conclusions on a thinner basis. Hart's minimum-content argument (*The Concept of Law* 1961) derives from a handful of near-universal facts about creatures like us (vulnerability, approximate equality, limited altruism) that any functioning legal system will contain certain content: prohibitions on violence, some form of property, some form of promise-keeping. Shklar's 'The Liberalism of Fear' (1989) builds politics around preventing the intolerable rather than realizing a positive vision. The cross-cultural convergence of legal systems on prohibiting murder, assault, theft, and fraud at the helpless is the empirical record this tradition documents. The framework's structural conditions overlap with what this thinner argument gives on the protections side; the framework adds the provision side: the conditions the polity has to maintain rather than merely refrain from violating. An opponent who rejects the positive derivation still has to reckon with the harm-aversion convergence the framework's conclusions also reach.

The argument is offered as a way to see political arrangements clearly, not as a verdict on any particular economic system. Capitalism is one arrangement the argument examines, not what the argument is against.

*Three further commitments follow.*

*Integration without assimilation.* The framework specifies the conditions any arrangement must meet for its members to remain the kind of subjects political life consists in: the conditions of maximum possibility, directional recognition, equal application of rules. It does not specify the institutional forms through which those conditions get met. A community can satisfy them through whatever institutional form its life calls for: parliamentary, federated, consensus-based, council-organized, customary, religious in surface idiom but participation-respecting in substance. Integration is the relation a community has to the framework when its institutional form meets the structural conditions; it is not assimilation, because what the community brings of itself (language, custom, governance idiom, accumulated practice) is preserved rather than dissolved. The plurality of forms this produces is not a concession the framework makes to difference. It is the resource the framework relies on for its own improvement: each integrated arrangement is a partial experiment whose successes and failures feed the wider question of how the participation conditions can best be met. Cross-arrangement learning (practitioners noticing what works in their context, theorists refining what communities have built) is how the framework gets better over time. Monoculture shuts that learning down. Integration runs across scales as well as across governance idioms: the participation conditions hold at the household, workplace, firm, and landlord-tenant register too, anywhere standing relations are organized (developed at [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)). What counts as an integrated arrangement is determined by whether its structural relations at every scale meet the conditions, not only by whether its top-level governance idiom does.

*Outward-scaling at positive sum.* The polity is built to extend, not to wall off. The structural reason is that the polity is positive-sum at participation. Each additional recognized direction increases the fidelity of the aggregation rather than diluting it ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)). Each additional member scales the collective-investment pool that the political community's infrastructure draws on ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)). Each additional cognitive and lived-experience perspective surfaces more of the recognition-relevant knowledge about where the institutions are failing ([§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>)). Each additional member adds capacity rather than burden. The polity's outward direction is therefore not a moral commitment imported from outside; it is the structurally rational direction given how the polity gains capacity. Forced migration (the displacement that happens when people have to leave because the basic participation conditions are not held where they live) dissolves as those conditions get met where people already are. Migration that remains is ordinary movement among arrangements that all meet the same conditions, not escape from places where the conditions are absent. Free movement becomes structurally available because borders no longer mark the line between where the basic conditions are met and where they are not.

*Universal rights extend by capacity.* Moral standing is not a species boundary. What gives a being moral standing across [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>), [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>), and [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) is its capacity for the kinds of experience the moral framework tracks: suffering, self-modeling, the modeling of futures, mutual recognition. Where that capacity is present, standing is present; where it is absent, standing is absent; where it is partial, standing is partial with it. Rights are universal in scope (every being capable of experience the framework can reach is inside its protection) and graded in content: a mammal's rights are not a fish's are not an insect's are not a bacterium's, because the relevant capacities differ. This handles the human case (full set), the non-human-animal case (set scaled by capacity, per the empirical record [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) walks through), and the future case (any being capable of experience that future research identifies — biological, computational, otherwise — gets standing by the same logic). The human case needs one clarification, since it is where the capacity criterion is most often pressed. The variable that fixes whether a being has standing at all is the capacity for experience, paradigmatically the capacity to suffer, not the sophistication of its self-modeling; self-modeling depth and future-modeling grade the content of particular rights once standing is in place, but they are not the gate of standing itself. So a human whose self-modeling is limited, undeveloped, or lost (the severely cognitively disabled person, the infant, the person in advanced dementia) holds the full standing of a subject of experience rather than a reduced share, and the full human set is fixed by experiential subjecthood, not by a passed cognitive test.

That the standing survives the loss is not merely asserted here; it follows from the registration-and-reach distinction of Chapter 8. Memory sustains the *reach* of a person's modal field, not the registration that makes them a subject at all, so advanced dementia narrows the field while leaving intact the experiential subjecthood that gates standing. This is where the framework converges with the capabilities approach rather than parting from it: its refusal of a cognitive criterion for moral standing (Nussbaum, *Frontiers of Justice* 2006) is built precisely to reach these cases, and the framework reaches them on the same ground, because the standing-gate is the capacity for experience while self-modeling depth does its grading only above that gate (the boundary-case scope developed at [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)). The framework does not carve at the species boundary because the species boundary is not where the morally relevant variable changes.

These three commitments — integrative pluralism, outward-looking cooperation, and capacity-sensitive rights — are the framework's current political proposals derived from its participation-condition interpretation. They remain contestable through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) and revisable in light of empirical evidence, political disagreement, and boundary-case inquiry. The universal register names a proposed floor of standing; its operational content remains open to welfare science, public deliberation, and further ethical argument.

Those arguments establish *what political arrangements have to do* without prescribing *how, exactly, particular domains must be arranged*. It does not derive specific institutional designs. It derives the constraints any acceptable design has to satisfy. Where several designs satisfy those constraints, the choice remains open. Where a design violates them, the argument precludes it.

*Three terms run across the chapter.* *Infrastructure* names the standing thing: the **hard infrastructure** (roads, utilities, hospitals, ports, broadband), **soft infrastructure** (legal system, regulatory bodies, public health, scientific commons, market-making institutions), and **cooperative infrastructure** (trust, norms, accumulated knowledge, trained workforce, predictable rule-of-law environment) that any productive activity already presupposes.

*Collective investment* names the contributory relation: the ongoing labor of building, maintaining, and renewing infrastructure, including the labor of parenting, teaching, training apprentices, paying taxes, voting, maintaining trust, and keeping promises.

*Structural extraction* names the pattern of drawing dividends from collective investment without proportionate contribution, whether that pattern runs at institutional scale (regulatory capture, sanctioned disproportion, tax-avoidance structures) or individual scale (fraud, gaming, false claims). What extraction names is not a distributive failure (one party getting more than its share) but a standing failure: one party drawing from the shared arrangement while exempting itself from accountability to the others. The pattern is symmetric across scales by construction; the framework treats institutional and individual extraction as one structural form, not as opposed political camps. Upstream failures of the participation conditions can themselves take the form of systematic narrowing (populations subjected to withdrawal of the conditions across institutional generations), which [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) develops directly.

The order the domains come in follows the order in which the structure surfaces, each one handing off to the next — it is not arbitrary. It runs from foundation to base, then through how the community registers and mediates direction, how it sustains and feeds and provides for its members, how it defends and polices and adjudicates itself, and finally how the whole pattern converges and gets installed. Here is roughly where each piece sits.

The first four set up how the political community recognizes and connects the people in it. *Rights* is the foundation, the participation conditions every other domain exists to maintain. *Belonging* is the face-to-face base of mutual recognition, supplying the members whose conditions every later domain answers to. *Representation* is how the community recognizes direction at all, the constitutive thesis that runs through the base of [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>). And *Information* is the mediation layer that scales that base and the direction-recognition of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) across the whole population, with the conditions mediation has to preserve if it is to carry recognition rather than consume it.

The next six are what actually keep people alive and provided for. *Environment* sustains the biophysical foundation across the time horizon that makes the arrangement intelligible at all. *Agriculture* feeds the citizens and extends the polity's reach to the animals and ecological systems it depends on. *Economy* distributes the material outputs that direction calls for. *Housing* secures the shelter floor that stability and participation both depend on. *Education* develops the citizens' capacities to engage. *Healthcare* maintains the citizens whose lives the whole arrangement is for.

Three more protect the arrangement and repair it when it breaks. *Defense* guards it against external threats to its existence. *Enforcement* prevents coercion inside it and de-escalates the moments where coercion would otherwise materialize. *Justice* adjudicates the breakdowns when they happen.

The last two step back from the individual domains. *Convergence* names how the per-domain reforms interlock as one structural pattern rather than a stack of independent fixes, and *Installation* names how the structure actually gets put in place: incrementally, locally, with measurement and revision. The order is the order in which the derivations land, not a ranking of importance.

*Two charity-of-engagement notes set up the chapter's tone.* First: this chapter does not take from anyone. The structural argument the chapter implements is one the political community already runs on; making it explicit is an act of recognition, not redistribution.

Second: where the framework's implications appear hard on particular institutions or actors, the hardness is structural, not factional. The same logic that constrains corporate extraction constrains individual fraud; the same logic that constrains the wealthy constrains those who would destroy what the wealthy own. The framework's no-class-warfare property is built in at the derivation level, not added at the rhetorical surface.

Policy details remain open where the constraints permit more than one answer. Single-payer and multi-payer healthcare designs, ranked-choice and approval-voting electoral systems, and marginal-rate schedules are not decided here as such. The chapter decides only where the constraint decides: when one option violates the conditions and another satisfies them.


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← [8.15 Synthesis](<8.15 Synthesis.md>) | [9.1 Rights](<9.1 Rights.md>) →
