The domains in this chapter are not presented as unrelated reform agendas. They are organized around three political premises: people recognize one another as subjects, build public institutions through ongoing labor and contribution, and risk institutional failure when benefits and burdens become structurally unaccountable. The claim that reforms reinforce one another is a political and empirical hypothesis whose strength varies by domain and context; it is not an automatic entailment of the modal proof. Above the proposed floor, an enormous amount remains open, and the choice belongs to the people who live there.

A society that reforms its healthcare floor without reforming campaign finance gets its healthcare reform captured back by the financial pressure that produced the original gap; a society that reforms representation without reforming community infrastructure gets recognized direction distorted by an information environment that has lost its face-to-face base. Each piece, alone, is fragile. Together they protect one another.

*The unification is structural, not coincidental.* If the per-domain reforms were independent proposals from independent traditions, their joint adoption would be an extraordinary political coincidence. They are not. Every per-domain fix in §[§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)–9.13 operates on the same three premises. The fixes do not just *add* across domains; they *interlock*. That shared pattern is what produces a single chapter rather than several independent chapters, and the interlocking is itself worth naming explicitly.

The interlocking is visible in the cross-domain coupling implications worked out within each section. [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) (Rights) couples constitutively to every domain that delivers participation conditions: [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy), [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) (Healthcare), [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) (Education), [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) (Agriculture), and [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) (Environment). It couples further to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) at the direction-recognition interface, to [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) (Justice) at the enforcement interface, and to [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) (Enforcement) at the rights-protection-orientation interface. [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) couples to [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) (Belonging) at the recognition-and-deliberation infrastructure level. [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) couples to [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) (Justice) at the property-and-extraction interface. [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) (Healthcare) couples to [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) (Education) at the developmental-and-maintenance interface. [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) (Enforcement) couples to [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) (Healthcare) at the mental-health-crisis interface, and to [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) and [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) (Education) at the upstream-conditions interface. It couples further to [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) (Defense) at the demilitarization boundary and to [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) (Justice) at the prevention/accountability boundary. [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) (Justice) couples upstream into [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) (Healthcare), [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) (Education), and [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) at the upstream-conditions interface. [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) (Agriculture), [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) (Defense), and [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) (Environment) all couple to [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) (Economy) at the structural-extraction interface and to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) at the recognition-of-affected-parties interface. The couplings are not exhaustive; they are illustrative. The chapter is internally connected at every point because the three premises operate throughout.

**Public institutions form a revisable public model.** This is a functional claim, not the claim that a political community is literally one mind. Representation, public information, law, statistics, administration, and review are the means by which a population registers its conditions, compares possible directions, and acts on what it learns. Exclusion removes relevant evidence from that model; censorship and manipulation corrupt it; opacity prevents it from being checked; capture redirects it toward a subset's interests. Public correction is therefore not an external limit imposed on otherwise complete institutions. It is how institutions learn what their first account missed.

Legitimacy is consequently not exhausted by a founding authorization or a periodic aggregation of preferences. It is maintained answerability: those living under an arrangement must be able to identify its errors, contest its decisions, and secure revision when its public account fails them. A polity that cannot be corrected by the people whose conditions it organizes does not merely use defective procedures; it loses the capacity to recognize the political community it claims to govern.

**Pluralism improves public knowledge.** Differently situated people encounter different parts of shared political life and therefore register different failures, costs, and possibilities. Their inclusion does not guarantee truth, and agreement does not replace evidence. It gives the political community access to information no single office, discipline, class, generation, or region can hold alone. Pluralism is thus not merely tolerated after institutions are built; it is one condition of their capacity to recognize the society they govern.

> [!corollary]
> **Distributed Correction** · **R27** · *Result of Participation Conditions*
>
> Democracy's first function is not the periodic aggregation of preferences but the continuing correction of a shared public model by those living under its consequences. Representation supplies direction, information makes conditions visible, plural institutions test competing descriptions, and public review allows an arrangement to revise itself when its first account fails. Exclusion, censorship, opacity, and capture are therefore not merely procedural defects. They damage the polity's capacity to learn what it is doing to its own members.

*The layered structure is the invariant beneath the couplings.* The couplings just mapped are not a loose web; they are the visible seams of a single structure each domain runs. Every domain that protects or repairs a condition of participation instantiates the same layers the §9 root derives from prevention-dominates-correction: a *wellness-prevention* layer addressing the conditions upstream of breakdown, a *breakdown-repair* layer restoring what was lost when prevention fails, and a *recovery-reintegration* layer returning the affected party to participation. Healthcare runs it as wellness → treatment → recovery ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)); justice as upstream conditions → restitution → return to participation ([§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)); defense as recognition-building investment → defensive force → the surrender made real by quarter and return that restores foreclosed standing ([§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>)); enforcement as upstream prevention → de-escalation → the handoff to clinical care or reintegration its own encounter cannot complete ([§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)). The layered structure is not borrowed domain to domain; it falls out of the recognition obligation ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) the same way in each, which is why it recurs without being copied. And it explains the coupling map rather than merely accompanying it: where a domain's recovery layer exceeds its own register, it hands off: enforcement to healthcare at the mental-health-crisis seam and to justice at the reintegration seam, defense to the cross-boundary accountability register at the post-surrender seam ([§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>)). The couplings are where one domain's third layer becomes another domain's home.

Take one fix out, and the others get harder to sustain. Reform the economic structure without reforming representation, and the new economic structure is captured back. Reform representation without reforming the information environment, and the recognized direction is distorted before it reaches the mechanism. Reform healthcare without reforming the structural-extraction tolerance generally, and the reform is rolled back through the same political-economic mechanisms that produced the original configuration. The reforms reinforce each other on installation; they are mutually vulnerable to dis-installation.

Put them in together, and each shores up the rest. This is not a happy coincidence about how the reforms happen to fit. It is the consequence of the reforms following from one premise. The coherence is the argument's political asset.

*Cultural-friction reduction as emergent property.* The per-domain fixes share a further property the individual sections did not name explicitly: they replace identity-coded distribution disputes with structural-pattern-coded distribution disputes. The shift produces an emergent reduction in cultural friction that is itself a structural prediction worth surfacing at the chapter level rather than diffusely across the individual sections.

The mechanism. Online vitriol and engagement-optimization both need *identity-coded targets* to operate. When the political system stops running on binary tribal occupancy of office ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>); [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)), the binary loses its identity-coding. When the economic argument runs on structural-position rather than class-resentment (the no-class-warfare property the framework derives in [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) simultaneously), there is no us-vs-them axis for engagement-optimization to amplify. When religion-as-political-identity loses its political anchor (because the political system itself stops running on tribal identity-affiliation), religion-as-meaning, which [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) protects and the framework does not touch, gets cleaner room to operate without being weaponized as political-tribal marker. When face-to-face community infrastructure ([§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>)) is restored, mutual recognition has a non-digital foundation, ground-truthing what the online environment cannot supply. The engagement-optimization apparatus loses its principal raw material. It does not lose all of it: the non-monetary incentives [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) leaves standing (ideological conviction, status, coalition-building) can still generate identity-coded targets, which is one reason the friction reduction is an empirical prediction rather than an entailment.

Friction reduction is not a promise of social peace. The framework does not promise the elimination of conflict. Structural extraction is still opposed; structural infractions still get repaired; framework-incompatible designs still get precluded. What gets reduced is the *kind* of conflict, not the *amount*. Identity-coded distribution disputes (which run on us-vs-them and require the destruction or subordination of the other to resolve) are replaced by structural-pattern-coded distribution disputes, which run on what-pattern-applies-here and resolve through structural reform. That is a different kind of conflict, and it is the kind the political community can sustainably maintain itself through.

*Power and conflict do not disappear.* Political life always contains competing interpretations, unequal influence, ambition, coalition-building, and real disagreements about what justice requires. The chapter does not treat every conflict as a maintenance failure, or imagine that good institutions make power vanish. Its claim is narrower: power is legitimate only when it remains answerable to those affected by it, removable when it becomes unaccountable, and unable to turn public institutions into instruments of private extraction. Conflict remains; domination does not become acceptable merely because conflict is permanent.

The reduction operates on conditions, not on conduct. The framework does not place violent or identity-coded expression off-limits; it dismantles the conditions of which such expression is a symptom. Where the conditions of live possibility fail at scale (deprivation, precarity, untreated illness, the ready availability of lethal means, the felt fear taken as political evidence in §9 root), conflict is forced into its most damaging register, and it is characteristically misdirected. The structural cause is diffuse and cannot be confronted directly, so the aversion it generates is discharged horizontally, against whoever is nearest, and most often against others failed by the same arrangement. That misdirection is the clearest mark that the violence is a symptom rather than a targeting: it does not point at what produced it. Address the conditions and the discharge loses both its pressure and its occasion.

These conditions are structural at two layers. The social layer, the maintenance of the floor across the domains of this chapter, addresses the larger share. The biological layer is not an exception to the present account but a deeper instance of it: pathology is a structural condition of the organism, and its recognition and treatment fall to the healthcare floor ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)), which is why the enforcement interface couples to healthcare at the mental-health-crisis boundary ([§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>); [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)) rather than to the punitive apparatus. What both layers track is the near-universal aversion established in [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>), to pain, coercion, deprivation, and being treated as property, which is what makes the floor a derived structural requirement rather than a stipulated list of goods. Neither layer promises the elimination of violent events. Both mitigate the share that is structurally produced, and a residual survives even a well-maintained floor; the framework does not claim to legislate that remainder away. The defensible claim is the narrower one: the volume and the register of conflict track the conditions, and the conditions are the structural variable a shared political community can act on.

*What does not get unified.* The framework unifies a particular axis of disagreement; it does not unify all disagreement. It leaves substantially underdetermined the following. Specific institutional designs within each domain: designs that tolerate structural-extraction at scale, or substitute profit-extracting structures for the floor, are precluded; the choice among framework-compatible alternatives is not, and §[§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)–9.13 each end with substantial underdetermined-list passages making this explicit. Specific transition paths from current configurations to framework-compatible alternatives: the framework derives the destination; the transition path is implementation work. The calibration of cross-domain priorities under resource constraints: when two reforms compete for political attention or budget, the framework does not pick. The substantive direction of the population on framework-compatible questions: the framework's representation derivation deliberately leaves this work to the direction-recognition mechanism ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)); that is what the mechanism is for. And the reception of the framework by particular populations or political coalitions: the framework derives the constraints; reception is reception.

The underdetermination is itself a structural property. A framework that picked every implementation choice would be a much smaller framework, applicable in much narrower conditions. The argument can apply across domains only because it leaves most implementation choices to the relevant design literatures and to the direction the public recognizes through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>).

*Why some interior registers became domains and others did not.* The chapter’s domains track the Chapter 8 registers that name a condition the polity has to provide or protect: [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) (self-continuation), [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) (knowledge), [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) (will), and [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (morality) among them land as rights, education, representation, and the institutions that maintain them. Three Chapter 8 registers do not become domains, and the absence is structural rather than an omission. [§8.15](<8.15 Synthesis.md>) (Synthesis) is not a domain because it is what this section is. [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) (Spirituality) is not a domain because the framework protects religion-as-meaning without installing it (the friction-reduction passage above), leaving its content under the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) communal self-determination. [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>) (Art) is not a domain because art is a transmission register rather than a province of provision: its political work decomposes into domains the chapter already has: shared-reading-at-scale and the manipulation-vector into [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) (Information), modal-field densification into [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) (Education), and protected cultural production into [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) (Belonging), while its irreducibly aesthetic remainder stays the interior matter [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>) establishes. The decomposition is why there is no Art domain, not evidence that one is missing.

*Convergence with traditions, divergence on grounding.* The convergence-from-different-grounds pattern that has appeared in each domain section appears at the chapter scale as well. The framework's per-domain conclusions converge with traditions supported on independent grounds: capabilities-approach political theory (Sen; Nussbaum) on the floor of human flourishing; republican political theory (Pettit; Skinner) on freedom-as-non-domination; relational-egalitarian political theory (Anderson) on equality as a standing among persons rather than a distribution of goods; communitarian political theory (Etzioni; Sandel; Taylor; MacIntyre) on the constitutive role of community in political legitimacy; the restorative-justice tradition (Zehr; Braithwaite; Sullivan and Tifft) on harm and repair; ecological economics and ecological political theory (Daly; Costanza; the Planetary Boundaries framework); Indigenous political and environmental philosophy (Whyte; Kimmerer; LaDuke; Yunkaporta) on long-horizon stewardship and relational accountability; deliberative democratic theory (Habermas; Fishkin; Gutmann and Thompson) on the conditions for legitimate collective direction; the capabilities-and-public-health tradition (the WHO social-determinants-of-health framework; Daniels on just health distribution); and Smithian political economy at full reading (*Wealth of Nations* Book V Ch. 2 *and* *Theory of Moral Sentiments* together).

The chapter does not treat these traditions as premises. It develops its own political framework through Chapters 8 and 9, while recognizing that its experiential and normative inputs are conditional and contestable. Agreement reached from different premises offers corroborative support for particular conclusions, not independent confirmation of a modal derivation. A reader committed to capabilities theory, or to restorative justice, or to ecological economics, or to Indigenous environmental philosophy, can arrive at most of the framework's per-domain conclusions through that tradition rather than through the framework's own derivations. The framework's contribution is the unification (the demonstration that the domain reforms follow from one structural premise), not the originality of the per-domain conclusions.

*Structure is not all content.* The argument specifies the conditions of political life; it does not by itself decide every object-level question those conditions raise. Boundary cases at the edge of the recognition threshold (the standing of artificial intelligences should consciousness be established at machine substrates, the standing of biological forms below the welfare-science evidence threshold, and similar contested cases) require extensions of the derivation the present account does not fully supply. (Recognition of non-human animals at welfare-science strength, of ecological infrastructure across the temporal horizon, and of future generations under the technology condition is derived in [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) and [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>); what remains residual is the boundary where evidence or theory has not yet settled.) Specific institutional designs (electoral systems, property regimes, immigration policy, the boundaries of the political community) remain genuinely contested and underdetermined by the structural argument alone. Aggregation principles for residual trolley-shaped cases (those that survive structural reform and present genuine last-resort choices) remain live. Military force and the ethics of organized violence between shared structures require an extension of the derivation the present account does not fully supply: the prevention-over-correction and non-domination arguments motivate the existence of international institutions and multilateral conflict resolution, but the specific conditions under which force is structurally justified remain underdetermined. One edge of that open register is already fixed by the defense derivation: it is established at [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>) that the license to use force ends at surrender while accountability for conduct committed under the license survives it. The conditions under which cross-boundary force is justified remain underdetermined; the asymmetry between an expiring threat-license and a surviving accountability does not. Within an arrangement, accountability is adjudicated through the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) recognition mechanism: continuous ratification by the population whose conditions are at stake. Across a boundary, two arrangements share no such mechanism, so the surviving accountability has a determinate ground (recognition-failure under [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>), graded by responsibility and, per [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>), by knowledge) but no determinate adjudicator. The framework neither stipulates a tribunal (the implementation-picking it forgoes everywhere) nor concludes that cross-boundary accountability is therefore void; it derives instead the condition under which the register closes. A cross-boundary adjudicator legitimate on the framework's own terms would require a cross-boundary recognition channel, the between-arrangement analog of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>), and constructing that channel is precisely the recognition-building investment [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>) already makes load-bearing alongside deterrence. The register's content is therefore underdetermined not as a gap in the derivation but as a function of how far that channel has been built: cross-boundary accountability becomes determinate exactly to the degree recognition-building investment constructs the recognition infrastructure between arrangements, and stays open to the degree it has not. This threads between the realist claim that cross-boundary recognition is unavailable and the cosmopolitan claim that the boundary must dissolve into transnational authority ([§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>)): the channel is buildable between arrangements that remain distinct, and accountability tracks its construction rather than awaiting a world-state or conceding anarchy. Which norms best answer to any given pattern of shared vulnerabilities is the work practices, institutions, and further ethical reflection have to do. Naming the conditions is not naming the content.

*Pettit, Sen, Scanlon: independent grounds for overlapping conclusions.* *Pettit's republicanism.* Pettit's republican political theory (Pettit 1997, 2012) grounds freedom in non-domination (the absence of arbitrary power over one's conditions) and requires that institutions be designed to prevent such power rather than merely guarantee formal rights. The present argument reaches the same requirement from a different starting point: a mechanism that allows some to set direction on behalf of others is not maintaining the basic structure of society but the subset's position within it. Non-domination falls out as a structural consequence of what maintenance of the shared society requires, not as a value stipulated in advance. Where the derivations differ, the present account does not need freedom-as-non-domination as a foundational concept; the requirement for non-domination is entailed by what political maintenance structurally consists in. This is independence rather than dependence, not a verdict on the comparative strength of the two derivations. The same argument reaches relational equality by its own path: an open exit is necessary but not sufficient, since a relation can dominate from within even where the door is unlocked, so what the account adds is that the ongoing relation must not corrode the standing of those inside it (the benevolent-dominator and inescapability analyses of [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>), the capture-prevention of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)), making equality a standing held within the relation and not merely the right to leave it.

*Sen's capabilities approach.* Sen's capabilities approach holds that justice requires securing the real conditions under which people can live flourishing human lives, not merely formal rights or primary goods, but the actual ability to function. The present account derives the same threshold from what political life structurally consists in: subjects who persist, occupy distinct positions, and can be reached across asymmetric exchange. A society that cuts people off from the conditions required for that kind of participation is degrading what it is supposed to maintain. Sen arrives at the threshold by asking what human dignity demands; the account here arrives at it by asking what political maintenance structurally requires. The conclusions are closely aligned; the grounding is independent.

*Scanlon's contractualism.* Scanlon (1998) grounds morality in what principles no one could reasonably reject. The present account grounds it in the conditions of mutual exposure among persisting members of shared social structure. Both arrive at requirements of reciprocity, proportionality, and respect for the conditions of others' participation. What the account here adds is that these requirements do not depend on a prior commitment to reasonableness: they follow from what Nature is and what being in it consists in. The contractualist asks what we owe each other; the present account explains why it is owed, without needing the contractualist scaffold to get there.

*Departures from neighboring traditions.* What the account is *not* is equally worth naming, and each comparison is owed the position in full before the present account departs from it.

*The departures share a structural signature.* Each of the three departures below runs the same two-step move. First, a burden-flip: the position takes some configuration as the default and asks what reasons license deviation; the framework asks what configuration is structurally required and treats deviation as what needs to be justified. Second, a relocation: the position derives from breakdown cases (coercion, sacrifice-requiring aggregation, ignorance behind a veil), while the framework derives from what political maintenance structurally requires and treats breakdown as the failure of those conditions to hold. The same two-step runs the book's macro-thesis at this local scale: what has been attributed to abstraction (hypothetical agents, pre-political rights, optimization functions) is relocated to the actual structural conditions of shared life. The departures below are local instances of that move; naming the signature makes them legible as one structural disagreement rather than as three independent rejections.

*Not utilitarian.* The most developed utilitarianism, sophisticated indirect or rule utilitarianism (Hare 1981; Brink 1989), and threshold-deontology hybrids that incorporate rights-protections instrumentally, accommodates much of what maximum possibility requires by recognizing that long-run aggregate welfare is best served when basic conditions for everyone are protected from case-by-case calculation. The present account agrees with that conclusion and disagrees with its grounding: the maximum-possibility criterion is not a constraint vindicated because it maximizes welfare on net, but a structural condition of political maintenance. A society that maximized aggregate welfare by cutting some people off from the conditions of live possibility would be failing structurally, not succeeding at a different kind of justice. The criterion's force does not depend on the empirical claim that respecting it always maximizes aggregate welfare.

*Not libertarian.* The most developed libertarianism (Nozick 1974), updated by left-libertarian variants that take seriously the unowned status of natural resources (Otsuka 2003; Vallentyne and Steiner 2000), locates the political starting point in pre-political rights of the person and treats coercive structures as legitimate only insofar as they protect those rights. The present account does not refuse the moral seriousness of self-ownership intuitions; what it refuses is the pre-political starting point. There is no pre-political position of self-ownership from which a person could opt out of the social infrastructure; that infrastructure is in place before any contract is signed, and the baseline is not isolation but shared dependence on an infrastructure no individual builds or exits alone. The libertarian's intuitions about coercion are addressed by the rule-of-law and recognition requirements; what is rejected is the picture of the political as a deviation from a natural pre-political condition. Nor are the maximum-possibility conditions a restriction on freedom that needs to be balanced against it: they remove the survival pressure that was coercing exchange under deprivation, and what results above that point is a marketplace freer than the unbacked one, because more of what subjects do in it is what they actually choose to do. Liberty, on this account, is the political name for the field of live possibility maintenance opens, not the absence of conditions but the presence of the conditions under which formal rights become real alternatives.

*Not Rawlsian* (closest convergence, with explicit grounding-difference). Rawls (1971, 1993, 2001) is the closest established convergence-partner the structural account has. Rawls's basic structure is the structural account's shared arrangements; the difference principle and the requirement of maximum possibility answer to overlapping concerns; Rawlsian public reason and the recognition requirement target the same problem. The present account reaches similar conclusions about institutional design without the original-position machinery: there is no veil of ignorance, no hypothetical contract, no idealized deliberation. The relevant facts are not about what hypothetical agents would choose under conditions of imposed ignorance, but about what the basic structure of society actually requires given that real subjects co-inhabit it. The account here does not refute Rawls; it offers a parallel argument for overlapping conclusions, without the idealizing scaffold the Rawlsian project depends on. Where Rawls's original-position device freezes a one-time procedural moment behind a constructed veil, the framework's recognition mechanism ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) runs continuously: direction is not chosen by hypothetical agents behind ignorance but is recognized iteratively across the actual population whose conditions are at stake. On the freestanding-political-vs-comprehensive-doctrine question Rawls draws across *Political Liberalism* (1993), the framework is comprehensive: it carries the structural derivation of being, awareness, and morality developed across Volume I and Chapter 8, and it does not bracket that derivation when it enters the political register. It is not a freestanding political conception in Rawls's strict sense. What it offers in lieu of overlapping consensus among reasonable comprehensive doctrines is the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) recognition mechanism: a continuous procedure through which populations holding diverse comprehensive doctrines ratify, revise, or reject the framework's institutional implementations. This is the framework's analog of overlapping consensus, performed by actual ratification through the mechanism rather than by hypothetical convergence among idealized agents. The freestanding-vs-comprehensive distinction Rawls draws is preserved as a real distinction the framework does not collapse; what shifts is the procedural work overlapping consensus was constructed to do, which the recognition mechanism performs continuously rather than at a single hypothetical moment.

*Stability for the right reasons is supplied by ratification.* Rawls's further requirement in *Political Liberalism* is not met by the freestanding-vs-comprehensive distinction alone. A political conception must be stable *for the right reasons*: affirmed from within citizens' own comprehensive views, not merely endured as a *modus vivendi* that lasts only as long as the balance of power that produced it. A comprehensive framework can look as though it forfeits that stability, since it does not bracket its own grounding to earn assent across doctrines. The framework meets the requirement in a different procedural register. An arrangement counts as more than a *modus vivendi* when affirmation of it does not track the standing distribution of leverage, and the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) recognition mechanism elicits exactly that affirmation continuously, across a population holding diverse comprehensive views, for a floor grounded in the near-universal aversion of [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) rather than in any party's temporary advantage. Where Rawls secures stability at a single constitutional moment behind a constructed veil and asks whether it will hold, the framework secures it iteratively: an arrangement that stopped being affirmed would be revised through the same channel that installed it, and one that holds does so because its members continue to recognize the conditions it maintains as their own. Stability for the right reasons is then performed as an ongoing procedure rather than guaranteed at a single hypothetical moment, the same continuous-ratification register in which the framework already supplies its analog of overlapping consensus.

*Moral disagreement is intelligible without threatening the account.* Moral disagreement (Doris and Plakias 2008; Wong 1984; Prinz 2007) becomes intelligible without threatening the account. Different groups and persons occupy different positions within the social field, inherit different histories, undergo different forms of moral training, and become responsive to different levers. They may share the same basic vulnerabilities while disagreeing sharply about which norms best answer to them. That is exactly what is to be expected if morality is intersubjective, socially cultivated, and constrained by the requirements of cooperative life. Across societies the alignments are often similar without being identical: social species require a workable spectrum of trust, reciprocity, restraint, care, and coordination in order to avoid internal collapse, but there remains wide room for variation in how those pressures are interpreted, weighted, and enforced. Disagreement does not show that morality is unreal. It shows that norm construction, like every other social achievement, is partial, contested, path-dependent, and shaped by the environments through which groups try to survive: the same ecological-shaping pattern [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) documents for religious vocabulary applies here to moral vocabulary.

*Convergence-skeptical objections.* Four traditions deny the chapter's convergence claim at its premise and are owed engagement. *Value-pluralist objection* (Berlin, 'Two Concepts of Liberty' 1958; *Four Essays on Liberty* 1969): the values the chapter's domains track are genuinely plural and partly incommensurable, and any framework claiming to converge them commits a category mistake at the start. *Hayekian knowledge-problem objection* (Hayek, 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' 1945; *Law, Legislation, and Liberty* 1973–1979): the convergence claim presumes more synoptic knowledge of how domains interact than any institution can have, and spontaneous-order arrangements among the domains outperform designed convergence. *Foucauldian power-analytic objection* (Foucault, *Discipline and Punish* 1975; *Security, Territory, Population* 1977–1978 lectures): a totalizing convergence framework is itself a regime of governmentality, and the framework's unification claim is a structural-power operation rather than a structural derivation. *Agonistic-political objection* (Mouffe, *The Democratic Paradox* 2000; *On the Political* 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, *Hegemony and Socialist Strategy* 1985): any convergence-claim is itself a hegemonic articulation that constitutes its own constitutive outside, and the framework's [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) recognition mechanism is not a neutral procedural floor but is itself politically achieved; treating that mechanism as the audit mechanism that distinguishes structural derivation from governmentality begs the question against an agonistic reading.

The framework grants each its central concession. Berlin is right that some values are incommensurable at the level of personal choice and life-form ([§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) protects exactly that register). Hayek is right that institutional knowledge is partial and that spontaneous order does real work within framework-compatible designs ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) builds it in at the economic-coordination level). Foucault is right that frameworks claiming totalizing reach have historically been used to entrench power. Mouffe is right that any framework operating in political space, including this one, is itself part of political contestation rather than outside it; the recognition mechanism's operation is itself politically achieved and remains contestable through the same channels it provides.

Where the framework parts from them. To Berlin: the chapter's convergence operates at the structural-conditions-of-political-maintenance level ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)), not at the substantive-good level; what converges is what political life structurally requires, not what subjects should choose within it. To Hayek: the framework's convergence is a constraint structure within which spontaneous-order designs run, not a substitute for them; it specifies which extractive designs are precluded, not which compatible designs are chosen. To Foucault: the framework's structural derivation is itself auditable against the political community's recognized direction ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) and revisable through it; a framework that could not be revised through recognized direction would indeed be a governmentality move, and the reversibility-and-audit property [§9.15](<9.15 Installation.md>) names is the constitutive feature that distinguishes structural derivation from governmentality.

To Mouffe: the framework's response is not to claim neutral-procedural standing for [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) but to acknowledge agonistic character openly: structural derivations are offered as the framework's current best work, contestable through the recognition mechanism, with the constitutive outside (positions for which framework-compatible design excludes their political commitments) named rather than effaced; the distinction from governmentality is not procedural neutrality but constitutive revisability, which is itself an agonistic feature.

The agonistic objection also raises a sharper question: does the framework institutionalize permanent antagonism, or does it treat a reasonable boundary as doing genuine work? The question dissolves once the boundary is located correctly. The boundary does real work, but it falls between designs, not between persons or doctrines: arrangements that breach the floor are precluded, while no participant's standing, voice, or comprehensive view is. This is the framework's analog of reasonable pluralism, supplied through the continuous ratification of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) rather than through a stipulated reasonableness-condition; the reasonable/unreasonable line runs between floor-holding and floor-breaching arrangements, not between admissible and inadmissible citizens.

Mouffe's own distinction carries the rest. Antagonism (the adversary met as an enemy to be destroyed) and agonism (the adversary met as a legitimate opponent contested within a shared space) name two registers of political conflict, and the agonistic tradition is right to prefer the second. Where that tradition locates the conversion from the first register to the second in democratic ethos, the present account locates it structurally. The enemy-mode register is in large part the symptom of a floor that is not held; holding the floor shifts the register of contestation from antagonistic to agonistic without quieting the contestation, for the same reason the framework reduces identity-coded friction generally: the conditions forcing the enemy-mode have been drained, not the disagreement. What survives is permanent, genuine agonistic disagreement, much of it over the contested thickness of the floor, ratified continuously through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>). That is what the agonistic tradition asks a political settlement to preserve, and the framework preserves it, granting Mouffe the permanence of conflict and the political achievement of the mechanism while parting from her only on whether the conversion to agonism is a matter of ethos or of structural conditions.

The Mouffe exchange also clarifies how the convergences noted throughout this chapter should be read, because a chapter that reports agreement with republican, capability, contractualist, and deliberative traditions at once invites the suspicion that it is manufacturing consensus where none exists. It is not. The convergences are predicted by the framework rather than assembled by it: if the floor tracks a near-universal aversion ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)), traditions that begin from other starting points will tend to arrive at neighboring conclusions, because they are partial approaches to the same substrate. Convergence is therefore evidence that the derivation is tracking something real, not a warrant borrowed from others. The ordering is worth stating plainly: each result is derived first from the framework's own base, and the agreement of a neighboring tradition is recorded afterward as corroboration, never used as a premise. Pettit's freedom as non-domination is a case in point; the framework reaches the same protection against arbitrary power on its own grounds and welcomes the convergence at that level without adopting the republican apparatus around it. Sen and Nussbaum are another: the floor coincides with a capability threshold, but it is derived rather than read off a defended list, and that difference in grounding is not erased by the agreement at the level of result.

So the convergence claims operate at the level of result and, frequently, of diagnosis; they do not assert shared grounding, and the divergence in grounding is real rather than diplomatic. This is what keeps the chapter's ecumenism from collapsing into the post-political gesture Mouffe warns against, in which a contestable position presents itself as neutral common ground. The framework's grounding remains its own and remains open to contest, and the traditions it meets remain genuinely distinct at their foundations. Naming where agreement holds (outcome, and often diagnosis) and where it does not (grounding, empirical assumptions, and theoretical machinery) is what lets convergence be claimed honestly rather than hegemonically.

One objection carries more than the others and deserves separate treatment. A framework pitched at the level of structural design is open to the charge, pressed most sharply by Charles Mills (2005), that it commits the signature evasion of ideal theory: it describes an arrangement in which domination has no place and thereby falls silent on the domination that actually exists. The charge has force, and the response is to divide it rather than deny it. At the level of design, the framework grants supremacy no standing at all. A racial order is an arrangement that places a group below the floor and treats its members as lesser, which is the very treatment [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) establishes a near-universal aversion to and which the floor-holding criterion of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) precludes; there is no framework-compatible design in which supremacy occupies a legitimate position. But granting supremacy no standing in the design is not the same as ending it in the world. Supremacy is sedimented (carried in the distributions, advantages, and disadvantages laid down by the order being replaced) and a clean architecture inherited by a society shaped for centuries under the old one does not dissolve that sediment merely by being clean. Mills is right that this is where ideal theory tends to stop; the framework does not stop there, but owes the non-ideal, reparative work of dismantling what the prior architecture built, and carries that as a structural obligation rather than a hope.

This is also where the framework's universalism must be stated with care, since the wrong form of it reproduces the very erasure Mills attacks. The floor is universal, but breaches of it are not interchangeable: racial marginalization is not financial marginalization under another name, and treating them as a single generic harm would lose precisely the specific architecture Mills insists must be seen. The floor is universal in what it guarantees and positional in how its violations are recognized. That positional recognition is not bolted onto the theory; it follows from the theory's own evidential commitments. If first-person experience is the primary political evidence, as the felt-evidence chain of this part holds (§9 root; §8), then those who live a given marginalization have access to its specific texture that an outside designer structurally lacks. The [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) recognition mechanism is the channel through which that evidence enters, which is what makes it epistemically mandatory rather than optional: there is no armchair from which the content of every position's breach could be derived in advance.

From the universal floor and the positional character of its breaches, the distributive shape follows. Because people stand at different distances from the floor, bringing everyone to it means raising it to different heights for different people: equal in the horizon it secures, unequal in the lift required to reach it. The equalized term is access to possibility, not holdings or outcomes, and what each person makes above the floor may differ widely without offending the principle. The order of repair follows from distance rather than desert: those whom the prior order buried deepest hold the first claim on the installation, not because they are owed more in some ledger of merit but because their distance from the floor measures the urgency. This gives the framework, on its own grounds, the priority on the worst-off that Rawls reaches through the original position: a convergence of result resting on a divergence of grounding. This priority is prioritarian rather than strict-lexical: the worst-off hold the first claim and the heaviest weight, but that weight is balanced against competing repairs rather than lexically overriding every other gain: a strict-lexical priority would let any marginal improvement to the very worst-off foreclose large gains elsewhere, which both the never-below-the-floor constraint and the framework's deliberate underdetermination of cross-domain priorities forbid. One constraint keeps the repair true to its principle: it raises the marginalized toward a shared horizon and never pushes anyone below the floor to do so. Differential lift toward an equal horizon is repair; depressing one group to raise another would install a fresh breach, which the criterion that condemns the original supremacy equally forbids.

None of this entails the leveling it is sometimes assumed to require. Above the floor, divergence is not a defect to be corrected but the freedom the floor exists to make possible: one person may work toward a yacht and another may want nothing of the kind, and the framework takes no position on which is right. What it requires is that earning above the floor stay bound by the floor it presupposes. Accumulation may not proceed by means that push others beneath the floor, nor harden into the concentrated power that would let it capture the system and foreclose others' possibility (the limit developed in [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)). And because the system that makes large earning possible is the same system that sustains the floor, those who earn most contribute most to maintaining it, through a progressive return into the subsistence base. That return is the reciprocal condition of a system in which such earning is possible at all, rather than a penalty imposed on success.

*Subsistence rests on a non-rival structure, and capture is the rival residue.* The reciprocal return just described is not a redistributive convention bolted onto an otherwise rivalrous economy; it follows from what the shared arrangements are made of. The modal *field* (the private interior in which a subject actualizes possibility) is rivalrous and the subject's own ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)); but the modal *structure* it draws on (□(T∧S∧Φ), uncreated, numerically one, and the same for every subject; [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) is non-rival in the strict sense that one subject's use of it removes nothing from another's. Non-rivalry runs through three layers of what political life actually circulates: the uncreated structure itself; the ideas, concepts, and proxy-data built on it, which carry the near-zero marginal cost of reproduction that Romer made the engine of growth (Romer 1990; [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>); [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)); and the recognition by which subjects hold the modal field in common, though that last is the *epistemic* subsistence T9 names ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) and grounds the political claim only by way of the *political* Subsistence definition, never by being mistaken for it.

From this a decomposition follows. Every economic act splits into a *line-adding* component (the part that opens a possibility others can also take, which is non-rival and other-expanding) and an *access-capturing* component: the part that forecloses a possibility to secure it, which is rival. The decomposition sorts structural relations *within* acts, not acts into kinds: the same enterprise can expand possibility and capture access in one motion. Generative wealth is the limiting case in which the capturing component approaches zero, and the accumulation cap derived in [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) is just the requirement that the capturing component not harden into the concentrated power that forecloses others' possibility. The load-bearing asymmetry is that the two components carry different modal status: possibility-expanding non-rivalry is *structural* and necessary, falling out of what the modal structure is, while access-capturing rivalry is in large part *institutional* and contingent: a function of how property, infrastructure, and recognition are presently arranged, and so revisable through the same mechanism ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) that installs the floor.

The hinge from stock to direction sits exactly on this seam. That accumulated wealth confers leverage over shared direction is *derived*: it is what concentrated capture structurally is; but how much leverage a given stock actually buys is *empirical*, a matter of the rate at which capture converts into direction-setting power under present institutions. This channel/rate split is the engine of both limits at once: it is why the political cap (no stock may capture the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) direction-recognition mechanism) and the economic cap (the capturing component bounded toward zero) are one constraint read in two registers, and it is why a wealth tax is necessary but not sufficient: it works the rate, not the channel.

The substrate floor scopes the claim rather than dissolving it ([§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>)). The substrate has its own three layers (structure, accessibility, and actualization) which cut the economic act rather than the goods that circulate on it, and are not the three circulation layers named above. Non-rivalry holds without qualification at the first two (structure and accessibility/knowledge) but at the third, actualization, a subject draws on finite Φ: the same act is non-rival only within the substrate's replenishment rate and becomes access-capturing, across time, past it. This is the temporal instance [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) already names (intergenerational extraction is extraction across time) and it is why subsistence is a rate-bounded obligation rather than an unbounded entitlement. (A second rivalrous register, the positional goods whose value consists precisely in others not having them, sits outside the substrate axis (Hirsch 1976); it is named here only to mark that the non-rival result is scoped to the structural and substrate layers and makes no claim over goods that are rivalrous by definition.) What the lemma secures for the convergence is the structural root of Subsistence: we subsist one another because the structure we live on is non-rival at its base, and the work of politics is to keep the rival residue (institutional capture, and temporal capture past the replenishment rate) from foreclosing the field that root holds open.

*The argument applies to every person regardless of identity.* The upstream-conditions argument, the requirement of maximum possibility, and the rule of law are not abstract principles that apply in general but not in particular. They apply to every person who participates in the shared arrangements. The history of political life is substantially a history of systematically violating these requirements for specific groups: shaping the shared arrangements so that some people's participation conditions were degraded, their directions unrecognized, and the rules applied to them differently based on race, gender, or identity. Each of these is not a separate political question requiring a separate derivation. Each is the same structural failure applied to a specific population: upstream conditions systematically narrowed, the conditions of live possibility selectively withheld, direction-recognition mechanisms designed to exclude, and rules applied unequally. Structural racism, patriarchal arrangements, and the legal exclusion of people based on gender identity or sexual orientation from participation conditions others take for granted are each instances of the same structural failure the account has been describing throughout: the mechanism being used to maintain a subset's preferred conditions rather than the conditions of all. The framework does not add these as special cases. It names them as the most prominent historical and ongoing applications of what it has already derived.

*Consent and the aversions that ground the floor.* The floor derives from a near-universal aversion ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) to pain, coercion, deprivation, and being treated as property, and a question the per-domain sections leave implicit deserves stating directly: which aversions ground a claim on the shared arrangements, and which do not. The answer follows from what consent does. A near-universal aversion installs a default protection; informed consent is the competent subject's authorization to modify that protection for themselves, within a defined scope, and revocably. Consent changes the permitted relation only to the extent the competent subject has authorized it ([§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)), which is why the conditions on it are that it be informed, voluntary, competent, specific, and revocable ([§9.1.2](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>)), each tracking a dimension of the modal depth [§8.9.4](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>) requires. The same act can breach the floor or honor it depending on whether the subject it is done to has authorized it: a strike that is assault on the sidewalk is sport in the ring, because the contestant has bypassed, for themselves and under known rules, the aversion-protection the passerby retains in full.

This fixes the criterion. An aversion grounds a floor-claim only where it is an aversion to what is done to oneself without one's consent; an aversion to what others do consensually among themselves, however genuinely felt, grounds none. The distinction is between an infringement and a distaste. A subject averse to another's consensual way of life is not having anything done to them, and being discomfited by the knowledge or sight of how others live is not a breach of one's own floor; the inner life that holds the aversion is protected ([§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>)) while generating no claim against anyone else. The operational test is neutrality: a restriction is floor-grounded only if it can be stated without reference to who is acting. A rule against public sexual conduct restricts such conduct by anyone, and applied neutrally it does not reach a relationship or its ordinary expression; a rule that cannot be stated without naming an orientation is a distaste wearing the grammar of a floor-claim, and the test exposes it as one. What does the work in the cases people reach for is the presence or absence of consent, never the count of the offended: conduct imposed on the unconsenting in shared space breaches the floor whoever performs it, and conduct confined to those who have authorized it breaches nothing however many onlookers object.

The criterion that licenses consensual conduct is the same criterion that forbids what cannot be consented to. Consent requires a subject whose modal field is developed enough to understand the act as a choice ([§8.9.4](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>)); where that capacity is absent, as in the developmentally immature, there is no consent to be had, and an act imposed under those conditions breaches the floor on grounds that do not depend on one another: it is done without authorization, it is done to a subject who cannot authorize it, and it tracks the harm the aversion-floor exists to register. Consensual life and the protection of those who cannot consent are not supported on independent grounds that might come apart; one line cuts both, licensing the first and forbidding the second by the same structural fact.

One limit completes the mechanism. Because authorization holds only to the extent it remains revocable ([§9.1.2](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>)), a subject cannot validly authorize a relation that forecloses the capacity to revoke it: a waiver that would end the agency doing the waiving dissolves the very thing consent is, and so cannot count as an exercise of it. The protection here does not restrict the subject's freedom over their own life; it keeps the bypass an exercise of will rather than its surrender. The floor runs through the subject's own future as well as between the subject and others.

*Better never, or better tended?* Benatar's asymmetry (*Better Never to Have Been* 2006) presses the one question the maximum-possibility maximand seems to invite and never answers: if the polity exists to widen the field of live possibility, does bringing more subjects into existence count as a good in itself, and Benatar argues the reverse, that coming into existence is always a net harm. The argument runs on an asymmetry between absences: the absence of pain is good even with no one to enjoy that good, while the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is someone for whom it is a deprivation. Existence therefore carries real harms against no benefit the never-born are denied, and the conclusion is that it is always better never to have been.

The framework grants the intuition Benatar's asymmetry runs on. There is a genuine difference between the wrong of bringing a subject into conditions that will crush it and the non-wrong of not bringing into being a subject who would have flourished; the first obligation is real and the second is not. Where it parts from Benatar is on what that difference shows. He reads it as a verdict on the value of existence, scored in a ledger of pains avoided against pleasures forgone, and the framework has already refused that currency twice over. The maximand of this chapter is not aggregate welfare and not a head-count but the field of live possibility held open for the subjects who exist (the *Not utilitarian* parting above), so no maximizing pressure toward more subjects arises here for the asymmetry to resist. And the value a life carries is not a balance of episodes but the standing of a self-modeling current that can come to take its own continuation as its own ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>), [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)). Absent pleasure is no loss to no one only because, before there is a subject, there is no one for *either* column to be scored against: the same no-subject fact that voids the forgone good voids the avoided harm, and the asymmetry survives only by tacitly scoring the empty side it has just emptied. The consent form of the same worry (that the unborn cannot authorize their own creation) is answered where consent is already located: authorization requires a subject, so it cannot run before one exists, and is constituted downstream as the live, revocable standing of the subject who comes to be, exit preserved ([§9.1.2](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>); [§8.12.5](<8.12.5 What is Concluded.md>)).

What the asymmetry's intuition does track, the framework keeps. The difference Benatar starts from is real, and it lands exactly where the chapter has already put its weight: not as a reason to withhold existence but as the obligation to hold the floor before extending it: maximum possibility applied first to the conditions a new subject would enter, so that what is brought into being is brought into arrangements that can sustain it (§9 root; [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)). The residual case he is right to fear (unrelievable, inescapable suffering) is not met by ending the lives that would meet it but by the only honest response the framework leaves open: fixing the conditions, never selecting the subjects, which is the line that keeps the floor's universality clear of the eugenic reading it must never collapse into. Schopenhauer's prior pessimism divides into two charges the chapter meets at different points. The *blindness* charge (that the Will beneath every appearance is blind striving) was already met upstream at [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>), where the drive–registration biconditional shows that a drive deep enough to take itself as object is not condemned to blind striving ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)). What [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) deferred downstream is the *suffering-surplus* charge (that existence carries a standing surplus of suffering over satisfaction) and it is met here, on the chapter's two usual registers: structurally, the value a life carries is the standing of a self-modeling current that can come to take its own continuation as its own rather than a ledger in which suffering outweighs satisfaction ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>); [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)); empirically, for whatever it is worth as corroboration and no further: the settled wish to be dead is uncommon and, where it arises, tracks the conditions the floor is meant to manage — depression, loneliness, pain, isolation (Briggs et al. 2021; Rodríguez-Prat et al. 2024) — characteristically easing as those conditions are addressed. That datum is offered as consistent with the structural point, not as its proof, because it could not bear more weight than that, for three convergent reasons. First, Benatar's own debunking (self-reports of well-being are inflated by optimism bias, adaptation, and the Pollyanna tendency) would, if granted, predict exactly this kind of report, so producing the report cannot answer the debunking that predicts it. Second, even setting the debunking aside, the drive to keep living is itself selected for largely independent of how good a life actually is, so a settled death-wish's rarity is cheap news about the survival drive's integrity, not strong news about well-being. Third, self-report carries a further, more mundane distortion: what people say about their own lives shifts with who is asking and why, skewing upward in exactly the contexts (a public survey, a checked-in-on friend, a system with a stake in the answer) where the reporter has some end served by reporting well. None of this is a case for disbelieving anyone who says their life is worth continuing; it is a case for not asking that report to do rebuttal-level work against a debunking argument built to predict it. The structural point does not need it: the value a life carries is the standing of a self-modeling current that can come to take its own continuation as its own, not a tally of good moments over bad, and that point is unmoved whether or not the tally's self-reports can be trusted (the wish never to have been born is itself little measured directly; the durable death-wish is its nearest proxy, and neither needs to be trusted for the standing-argument above to carry the leg). The framework converges with the anti-natalist tradition on the one thing it gets right (that bringing a subject into guaranteed suffering wrongs it) and parts on the inference, relocating the wrong from existence to the world that fails it.

*Patchwork implementations.* The theory's predictions are most testable where societies have already implemented partial versions of one or two domains. Each natural experiment confirms a piece of the structure; none confirms the whole, because no society has yet attempted convergent integration across all the domains.

The patchwork can be read as a series of natural-experiment confirmations, with the per-domain detail in §[§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)–9.13.4. Nordic social democracies (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland) approximate convergent investment in [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) / [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) / [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) and post the highest measured life satisfaction, lowest incarceration, lowest infant mortality, and highest intergenerational mobility (*World Happiness Report*; Stuckler and Basu 2013). Costa Rica abolished its standing army in 1948 and redirected military spending toward [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) / [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>), posting life-expectancy and literacy figures comparable to wealthier nations at a fraction of GDP ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)-confirming). Germany's Bismarckian social insurance (1883–) is the longest-running continuous test of [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) collective health investment (Hennock 2007). Taiwan and Japan confirm the prediction ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)) that near-single-payer architectures deliver better population-health outcomes per dollar than fragmented private systems. Bhutan's Gross National Happiness operationalizes [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) / [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) as first-order policy targets rather than residuals of GDP. Portugal's 2001 drug decriminalization is the cleanest natural experiment for [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) upstream justice (Hughes and Stevens 2010; Greenwald 2009). Japan's incarceration rate (roughly 1/10 of the US) confirms the prediction ([§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)) that punishment volume tracks upstream extraction more than crime rate. UK austerity (2010–) is the natural experiment in the opposite direction: defunding [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) / [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) produced measurable increases in mortality, suicide, and homelessness (Stuckler and Basu 2013; O'Hara 2014). Ireland and Australia's ranked-choice voting confirms the prediction ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) that representation architecture changes coalition behavior. Switzerland's direct democracy confirms the prediction ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>), [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)) that frequent low-stakes participation builds the muscle for high-stakes participation. Australia's compulsory voting and France's automatic voter registration confirm the prediction ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) that participation friction is the binding constraint on representation. US fifty-state variation functions as a continuous natural experiment: Massachusetts and Mississippi differ on life expectancy by roughly 8 years, with the gap tracking state-level [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) / [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) / [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) investment intensity. No existing society has fully implemented the account developed here. What the evidence shows is that where the derivation's requirements are met in particular respects, the predicted outcomes follow in those respects. The patches sketch the outline of political arrangements that fully implement the derivation; the integration work remains.

These implementations confirm the three structural predictions §[§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)–9.13 derive in the directions the account predicts. *Maximum possibility under shared conditions* is confirmed by the Nordic outcomes, Costa Rica's military-to-floor reallocation, Bismarckian social insurance, Taiwan and Japan's healthcare cost-outcome ratios, and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness framing. *Prevention over correction* is confirmed by Portugal's 2001 drug decriminalization, Japan's incarceration-rate gap, and the UK's 2010 austerity program as the natural experiment in the opposite direction. *Direction-recognition from all* is confirmed by Ireland and Australia's ranked-choice patterns, Germany's mixed-member proportionality, Switzerland's direct-democracy reach, Australia's compulsory voting and France's automatic registration on the access side, and the US fifty-state variation as the within-federation diagnostic case. The per-domain confirmation sections (§[§9.1.4](<9.1.4 What is Confirmed.md>) through [§9.13.4](<9.13.4 What is Confirmed.md>)) develop the evidence in detail; what the chapter-level view adds is the *interlocking*: that no jurisdiction has implemented all three together, that the partial implementations show the predicted outcomes in the partial directions, and that the structural prediction is for joint implementation to produce joint reinforcement rather than aggregated independent gains.

A society that implemented all three structural requirements together (the conditions for maximum possibility, prevention-weighted justice, and direction-recognition from all) would constitute, in political form, what the present account derives in structural form. No such society currently exists in full. The pieces do.

This section's argument settles into a single structural observation: the domain reforms share three premises, and that shared grounding is what makes them interlock rather than merely coexist. The interlocking is the chapter's political asset (reforms that reinforce one another under installation are harder to roll back than reforms that stand alone) and it is the derivation's structure, not a rhetorical claim, that produces it. The possibility of reduced identity-coded cultural friction is a further empirical prediction of the shared-grounding hypothesis, not an added promise or a necessary consequence. It requires testing against political conditions, institutional design, media environments, and historical context. What the chapter leaves underdetermined is everything the structural account deliberately leaves open: specific implementations within the constraints, transition paths, the calibration of cross-domain priorities under resource constraints, and the recognized direction of the population on framework-compatible questions. The convergence is the argument's contribution to those open questions, not their answer. What the convergence implies for the work of installation is addressed at [§9.15](<9.15 Installation.md>).

Several limits remain. The per-domain reforms are not the only acceptable reforms; multiple compatible designs can satisfy the same constraints, and the choice among them belongs to implementation literatures and recognized direction. Adoption is not politically inevitable in the near term; the affected industries have every reason to resist changes that close their extraction channels. Friction reduction does not mean harmonious agreement; conflict over substantive direction continues, but on a structural-pattern axis rather than an identity-coded axis. Convergence with other traditions does not erase the argument's originality; it supports the conclusions while leaving the grounding distinctive. And the technology condition is not settled; the species-level test of whether technology under shared-structure maintenance can scale fast enough to meet the environmental challenge is treated at [§9.5.3](<9.5.3 What is Predicted.md>) Prediction 7 as still being written.

*The framework does not align with any political party.* The argument does not align with any political party or tradition. It aligns with an outcome: shared structures that maintain the conditions of maximum possibility for all subjects. Every political tradition has gotten something right about what that requires, and every political tradition has used its partial insight to justify arrangements that fall short of it. The conservative recognition that institutions are fragile and that working arrangements should not be casually discarded is structurally sound: it describes how the possible is lost. The progressive recognition that arrangements which degrade participation conditions for specific groups must change is equally structurally sound: it describes what the structure is for. The opposition between them is not a disagreement about the goal. It is a disagreement about which existing arrangements are actually working, and that is an empirical question, not an ideological one.

The goal of political progress is a shared structure that takes care of everyone. That is the progress the derivation points toward, not toward any particular party's platform, but toward the structural outcome. Once a shared structure genuinely maintains the conditions of maximum possibility for all subjects, it is worth conserving. Not because change is bad, but because what actually works is genuinely valuable and genuinely fragile. The conservative impulse, properly directed, is the impulse to protect what is doing the structural work. The progressive impulse, properly directed, is the impulse to close the gap between where the structure is and where it needs to be. Properly directed, they are less opposed ends than successive phases of one project.

The criterion the argument supplies is more demanding than either tradition has fully met, and more neutral than either is comfortable with. It asks only: does this arrangement maintain the conditions of maximum possibility for all subjects (the live field of action, refusal, contribution, and self-direction available to the people who share it)? Where the answer is yes, the arrangement is worth conserving. Where the answer is no, it is worth changing. The political labels are orientations toward the criterion: useful, limited, and not to be confused with it.

*Tradition is a legitimate choice, not a legitimate policy.* A subject who chooses to organize their life around traditional values (inherited family structure, religious practice, community hierarchy, cultural forms passed down through generations) is exercising their inner life in exactly the way the present account permits. The political structure has no warrant to interfere with that. The only constraint is the one that applies to every subject: a subject's orientation cannot be imposed on others through the shared structure. A person may live traditionally, but no one may legislate tradition for everyone.

The present account is not a mandate for any particular way of life. It is a structural floor beneath which no way of life can fall, and above which every way of life is free to operate. A person who lives by tradition within a shared structure that holds the floor is exactly what the account makes room for. A political structure that uses the shared mechanism to enforce traditional values on those who have not chosen them is doing exactly what it must not: converting the maintenance structure into an enforcement structure. The same structural argument that protects traditional subjects from having secular values imposed on them protects secular subjects from having traditional values imposed on them. The protection is symmetrical, and the structural floor holds for everyone.

*Religious-political separation cuts in both directions.* Religious belief is outside the present account's political reach, and that is not a concession but a consequence of the derivation itself. The structural argument is that the metaphysical claims of religious traditions are mislocated: the structures those traditions attributed to God actually live in Nature. That argument, if correct, does not give any political authority the right to act on it coercively. A political structure that enforced secular belief (or any belief) would be violating the structural requirement it exists to maintain. Direction must come from all. A subject whose orientation toward Nature is expressed in religious terms is participating in the shared structure no less than one who holds secular views. Their belief is their own reading of what Nature is. The political structure has no mandate to correct it.

This follows directly from the derivation rather than from reluctant tolerance. The account holds that the encounter with what exceeds the self-model is real, universal, and available to every subject. What traditions have built around that encounter (the practices, the communities, the vocabularies of meaning) are what subjects do with their inner lives. A political structure that trespasses on inner lives has confused its function. Its function is to maintain the conditions of participation, not to determine the orientations subjects bring to participation.

What the political structure owes subjects in this domain is education (honest, accurate, and complete) and the freedom to reach their own conclusions. What it owes is the conditions under which subjects can think for themselves, not enforced conclusions and not insulation from challenge. A subject who has been honestly educated and remains religious has not failed; a political structure that substitutes enforcement for education is what fails.

The structural separation of religious and political authority cuts in both directions. Religious institutions may not govern the shared structure: that would narrow participation to those who share the institution's beliefs, violating the derivation's first requirement. And the shared structure may not govern religious belief: that would violate the same requirement from the other side. Both directions of violation are the same structural failure: the shared structure being used to enforce orientation rather than maintain conditions. The separation preserves political contestation across religious/secular orientations rather than resolving it through stipulated reasonableness-conditions — the agonistic register Mouffe develops in *The Democratic Paradox* (2000).

The separation has corroboration from a different direction. Norris and Inglehart's comparative analysis of eighty societies finds that religious influence in governance correlates inversely with social trust, economic security, and institutional confidence: close to the metrics the structural account treats as constitutive of political maintenance (Norris and Inglehart 2004). Their proposed mechanism runs both ways: existential insecurity drives populations toward religious governance, and religious governance tends to resist the secular institutions that reduce insecurity. This is consistent with what the account would expect: where the structural requirements are met (the threshold held, direction recognized from all), populations have tended to become more secular over time, not because their inner lives are emptied but, on this reading, because the institutional function religion had performed is increasingly carried by the shared structure. Zuckerman's study of Scandinavia points the same way: high social cohesion, strong community, and robust moral life are compatible with the absence of religious governance (Zuckerman 2008). The finding is not that religion is incompatible with healthy societies. It is that religious authority over the shared political structure is.

*Belief is protected, not despite its content but because of what believing is.* Whatever orientation this argument points away from, it does not ask anyone to stop believing. Belief is how subjects model what exceeds their current understanding: reflexive awareness reaching toward what it cannot yet derive. It is how we collectively hypothesize. It is how subjects work out what there is. God has long been a convincing hypothesis: a way of modeling the encounter with scale, with depth, with the fact that there is something rather than nothing. That encounter is not an error, and this framework does not explain it away; it relocates its referent. What the tradition reached for was real, and it was here all along, not beyond the world but built into the fact that there is one. The name was provisional, but the pointing was not wrong.

Belief is shielded for what believing is, not for what is believed: a self-model straining toward what it cannot yet derive, the characteristic and honest motion of reflexive awareness. Beliefs are what challenge and shape the mental framework. They are how subjects push beyond what is already known toward what is not yet derived. Protecting belief is protecting the inner life's freedom to reach. The only limit is harm. A belief that produces physical or psychological harm to others has crossed from the inner life into the shared structure and is evaluated as action. The belief itself (the orientation, the hypothesis, the reaching) is protected absolutely. On this account, *Sola Natura* does not foreclose the sacred; it relocates its referent into Nature.

*The something larger is the population itself.* The longing for someone to take care of us (to protect us, to attend to our suffering, to make our condition matter) is not, in the end, a longing for someone outside us. There is no one outside us to do it; the someone the longing reached for was always within reach, because the population that needs taking care of and the population that does the taking care of are the same population. One function religion has reliably named (protection of the vulnerable by something larger than any individual) is one such a population can perform for itself, once the people within it orient toward maintenance. The impulse turns from above to across without losing what it pointed at; what was sought from outside can be supplied from within. This requires no uniformity. People vary (some thrive in striving, some in rest, some in family, some in solitude, some in production, some in attention to small things) and the framework names structural conditions for thriving, not a single shape thriving must take. The bar is not that everyone become the same. The bar is that each subject's field of possibility stays open and its own. (The chain-of-equivalence apparatus Laclau and Mouffe develop in *Hegemony and Socialist Strategy* 1985 names this collective-identity-construction work theoretically: shared political identity articulated through links among distinct subject-positions rather than their dissolution.)

What remains is the convergence itself. The account of cooperative arrangements developed across Chapters 8 and 9 generates reforms across the domains; the reforms interlock because they share premises; the interlocking reduces identity-coded cultural friction; the underdetermination of implementation choices lets the account travel across domains; and the convergence with other traditions strengthens the robustness of the conclusions. The argument converges.


---

← [9.13.5 What is Concluded](<9.13.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.15 Installation](<9.15 Installation.md>) →
