Three Acts of Compulsion

Outside a bar on Levee Street, the quarrel of the first essay turned into a fight, and one man picked up a bottle. The patrol officer reached them, pinned the man with the bottle to the ground, handcuffed him and took him to the station. The man who was pinned down suffered a broken wrist. The same night, the social worker went to the child’s home and verified that the nine-year-old was suffering continuing harm; she removed him that night and placed him with a foster family. The next day, the family division of the City Court appointed the Department of Children and Families as his temporary guardian. In the daytime the next day, the Tax Office froze the bank account of a grocer on Levee Street. He was two years behind on his property tax; the Office had sent two written notices and held one hearing, and it left an amount sufficient for basic living.

All three are compulsion, and in none did anyone wait for the consent of the person acted on. Yet they do not rest on the same thing. The patrol officer blocked a harm happening before his eyes. The Tax Office blocked no harm at all: the grocer had hurt no one, he had only not paid his tax. When the social worker took the child away, she blocked the harm at home; but from the next day, when the Department signs for the child and handles his affairs, it is no longer blocking anyone. Institution Theory, having finished with guarding the line, handed over one sentence: “On what grounds compulsion is warranted is the business of the Theory of Government.” The second paper takes it up.

A Chain

On what grounds may a construct, against a person’s will, lay hands on him? Institution Theory gave part of the answer: a construct’s acts cross no line, and in guarding the lines between its internal subjects, the way of guarding must itself be a limit. These bound how far a construct may go; they do not, on their own, say which position, for which matter, acquires which authority to compel. The Second Critique, handing the harm one person does to another over to external constructs, wrote as much: “To hand something to a construct is not to have proved that the construct is legitimate or effective.” So the paper sets up, for every class of compulsion, a chain of four links: normative ground, matter and authority, necessary and limited means, carrying out and being questioned.

Normative ground asks why there may be compulsion here at all, and it holds two necessary conditions. One is not crossing the line: that basic rights may not be violated holds against governments as against anyone, and compulsion that itself crosses the line has no ground left to speak of. The other is peculiar to government: guaranteeing the recognition-based rights it has embedded. The Tax Office sent two notices and held a hearing before the freeze; suppose these were procedural positions the ordinance had embedded, and existed only on paper; then the freeze would lack this condition. Both are necessary, neither sufficient. Matter and authority asks on what grounds this position has this matter in its charge; whether it does must be stated case by case. Necessary and limited means asks how much force and through what procedure: once the man was pinned and cuffed, any further force had no ground; the freeze left an amount for living. Carrying out and being questioned asks about what comes after: the man pinned down can sue, the grocer can ask, the guardianship must be reviewed. The chain teaches no one how to compel; it lists the four things an act of compulsion must be able to answer.

Compulsion is also classified, by root, into three kinds. Stopping blocks a line-crossing under way. Enforcement brings about compliance with a rule not made to block line-crossing. Substitute exercise exercises, in a person’s stead, a function that in this matter he cannot yet, or for a time cannot, exercise himself, without acquiring its first-person ownership. After-the-fact disposition is not a fourth root but stopping at a later moment in time. One act may touch several slots: taking the child away was stopping, holding guardianship afterward is substitute exercise.

Not “Only”

The paper starts from a withdrawn section of the first version of How Is Institution Possible, whose place, the author ruled, is the Theory of Government. Its answer was blunt: “institutional coercion is defensive, not colonial.” It separated punishment from stopping: “punishment presupposes the violator is below subject status,” whereas stopping treats him as still a subject whose behavior is infringing on others. And it drew boundaries, the first of which reads: “coercion may only be used to stop infringement upon other subjects’ core zones, not to compel obedience (compelled obedience is colonization, not defense).”

The series accepts the direction and declines the word “only.” Taken as it stands, it would leave nothing to say about the Tax Office’s freeze: the grocer infringed on no one. Yet for a government to run, taxation, registration, requisition and compelling witnesses to appear all need compulsion, and none of them blocks an infringement under way. Whether they have grounds must be asked separately; the “only” would shut them all out, and with them the very question that needs asking. So it is kept within stopping alone, where it is still right. The second half, “not to compel obedience,” the series takes over in a narrow sense: taking obedience itself as the end, or requiring someone to take the government’s ends as his own law. A grounded demand for a particular action, such as paying taxes on time, does not become compelled obedience because it requires compliance. The other two boundaries stay: “excessive coercion is itself an infringement upon the violator’s subjecthood,” and compulsion without due process is unilateral violence; the series extends both to everyone compelled, not only violators.

The word “only” calls Mill to mind. On Liberty says that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The shape is the same, and there is one point of agreement as well: “His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” They part at the “only”: Mill’s principle governs all power against a person’s will, and this series does not adopt the “only,” not because the harm principle is wrong, but because enforcement has a root of its own and must go along a chain of its own. That is a difference in how the field is divided, not a refutation.

Stopping

Back to the bar. By the time the patrol officer arrived, the bottle was in a man’s hand; he pinned him down and cuffed him. This is stopping: the body of the one being beaten was being crossed, and the officer’s hands came in between. Its root is Institution Theory’s second ought, guarding the lines between internal subjects; its limit is in the same place: guarding “judges the operation, not the person.” What the officer pinned down was the act of holding the bottle; his pinning down does not give the man the identity of “a man who hits people.”

The one compelled need not first be one who crosses the line. A traveler is diagnosed after arrival with an airborne infectious disease. The Health Department requires him to isolate at a designated place for the set period, with meals delivered, calls to his family, and a retest at the end. He disagrees: his symptoms are mild, and he would rather rest at home. He has hit no one and means no harm; why lay hands on him? Because the line is “decided by structure, not by motive,” and “crossing the line does not require that anyone intend it.” Institution Theory said both of a construct’s acts; applying them to what one person’s condition brings down on others is the series’ own step, resting on the Rights Theory criterion behind them, which never looked at motive. A disease that passes through the air lands on others’ bodies whether or not he means it to. The step has to be written narrowly. It removes only one necessary condition, intent; it does not by itself make a risk a violation. Stopping grounded in risk must say which grounded risk is to be prevented, here a diagnosed airborne disease, to those living with him and those he will meet, not “he may have some illness,” nor “this man is dangerous,” and against whom the act is directed. Here it falls on someone who has not crossed the line, and that brings a further burden, the one enforcement carries.

The closure of the restaurant in the first essay was stopping of the same kind: it guarded staff and diners against a risk of carbon monoxide, and fell on an owner who had crossed no line. Two weeks later the test did not support the risk. If the risk had grounds at the time, the stopping could have grounds, and the test does not make the grounds retroactively nothing; but the questions to be answered had already arrived: on what grounds the risk was judged, why the whole restaurant was closed rather than one cabinet, and how the loss is booked.

Enforcement

The grocer crossed no line, and the freeze blocks no infringement. This is enforcement: bringing about compliance with a rule not made to block line-crossing. Taxation, registration, regulation, requisition and compelled testimony all belong here. On what grounds? The Law Series has a corollary: “If law contains affirmative provisions (registration, procedure, charter), their legitimacy must be retraceable to a negative root, namely the prevention of suppression, the safeguarding of channels for questioning, or the maintenance of co-constructive space.” And: “Affirmative provisions that cannot be retraced to a negative root are not law but administration or colonization.” The paper borrows this for a government’s enforcement, marking the step as its own: the compulsion must be able to retrace to one of the three. And it guards against one handy reading: what cannot be retraced does not become acceptable by being renamed administration; and a well-grounded administrative aim does not by itself ground the means of compulsion.

Enforcement mostly falls on people who have crossed no line, and then a further burden of proof is owed, since what they bear is not drawn down by any operation of theirs and can only be explained by the side that compels. Five things must be answered: who bears it and who is protected; on what grounds; how necessity and proportion are judged; whether there are alternatives and where the time limit lies; how loss and remedy are booked. The freeze: the grocer and his family bear it; those protected are the common affairs the tax sustains and those who pay on time; two notices and a hearing came before it, and the amount left for living keeps it from pressing the family’s life-substrate to the point of threat. Isolation: suppose the traveler lives alone with an entrance of his own, and isolating at home would do as well; then isolation at a designated place fails “necessary.” The root of stopping is still there; the means must change.

Requisition shows the five in their hardest form. To build the flood levee, Apple City requisitioned a riverside vegetable plot from a farmer who supplied two restaurants on Levee Street; compensation was at market price, and he objected that market price could not buy land as close to the river and as easy to water. His objection is read in two steps. Actively severing someone’s existing maintenance circuit, if it thereby closes a dimension he has already incorporated, is violation, and no price can pay it into a limit; but land itself is a resource, and whether the requisition has closed anything for him depends on whether he still has another path, which the case file leaves to be checked. Only if nothing is closed does the requisition stay within the line; and then market price has answered how much the loss is worth in money, not where the other path lies or how far the effects reach. That part has not yet been booked.

Compelled testimony sits closest to questioning. Mill too permits it: “There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others, which he may rightfully be compelled to perform; such as, to give evidence in a court of justice.” He brings it under the harm principle by counting inaction as a way of causing evil, and adds at once that “The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former.” The conclusions concur; the placement differs. The series puts the witness in the enforcement slot: he has crossed no line, the compulsion he bears must retrace to the safeguarding of channels for questioning, and the further burden must be answered item by item.

After the Fact

One night a sixteen-year-old smashed the glass of the bus shelter on Levee Street, and the broken glass cut a person waiting for the bus. The City Prosecutor’s Office brought a public prosecution. The line has already been crossed; what a government does now is after-the-fact disposition. The withdrawn section has a sentence, “punishment presupposes the violator is below subject status”; the series accepts its negative half: it does not accept punishment premised on the violator being below a subject. To dispose of a person as something a grade below a subject is itself to cross the line.

What is done after the fact divides into three, and the three must be kept apart. First, stopping effects that are still going on: the broken glass is still on the platform and will cut the next person waiting, so it is cleared away and the shelter closed for repair. Second, preventing recurrence: also stopping, of the same operation in the future; it too must name a grounded risk and may not put “this person is dangerous” in its place. Guarding “judges the operation, not the person”; established operations can be attributed to him, but “no permanent identity is assigned to him.” What is prevented is the smashing of shelters, not the making of a sixteen-year-old into “a vandal” for life. Third, responding to harm already done: the injured person’s medical bills, the repair of the shelter. This is not stopping, since compensation blocks nothing that has already happened; it needs a ground of its own. The paper names a candidate, the maintenance of co-constructive space, and does not walk the retracing to its end. What it insists on is that this ground may not be swapped for preventing recurrence. Swap it, and compensation rises and falls with how dangerous he looks, which slides from judging the operation to judging the person; or the amount is reckoned by what will frighten people off rather than by the harm, which is punishment under another name.

And the prosecution: not the injured person but a public position brought it. The Law Series says that some acts “must be prosecuted by public authority on behalf of all subjects”; the series reads “on behalf of all subjects” as initiating proceedings, by a valid public position, for those under protection. In a matter like this, some in the city will be angry, some will not care, some will think it should be forgiven; public prosecution legislates for none of them, and does not avow, on the injured person’s behalf, how that person sees it. Whether to forgive is the injured person’s own law; public prosecution neither forgives nor refuses to forgive in that person’s stead. Nor does the name of representation give the Prosecutor’s Office more authority than its position has. Applying this reading to public prosecution in general is the series’ own step.

In His Stead

After the night of the removal, things changed shape. During the temporary guardianship, the Department does certain things for the child: consent to medical treatment, school enrollment, statements on his behalf in the family division. Other things he does himself: say whether he wants to see his father, choose his after-school activities, make friends. The Department’s protocols require that his views be heard on every decision concerning him and recorded in the file; the foster family looks after daily life; the family division reviews the case every six months. Signing a consent form for him blocks no one. On what grounds? This is the third root, substitute exercise. It enters by function, not by the name of the setting: signing medical consent is substitute exercise; whether he wants to see his father is not, for that he can say himself. Nor is anyone judged to need substitute exercise because he disagrees: a person who can judge for himself and only disagrees with the government’s aims is not registered as needing it. Three things must be proved: which function; why it must be exercised for him now; who does it, with what authority. For this child: medical consent, school enrollment and court statements; at nine he cannot yet do these himself, and the home that would have done them is where the harm was happening; the Department, appointed by the family division.

Its root is not the government’s goodwill, nor its knowing better what is good for him, but his own standing. On Rights and Entitlements says: “The rights of the subject-to-be are grounded in its already being an end, its standing equal to a present subject’s, not in its coming-to-be a subject.” A child does not have standing because he will grow up; he has it now. What passes to the guardian is a function, never the standing. The root has a second branch: one whose gate already self-exercises but who for a time cannot exercise it himself. Then help with the function is “a re-delegation of function that is no regression of qualification and no return of standing to the network,” and Meaning Theory draws its boundary: “Temporary incapacity, an interruption in expression, or a reduced bandwidth of exercise is not by itself enough to entail that the first-person position of carrying-forward has exited.” Extending these from family and guardian networks to a public position is the series’ own step; what the public position adds is compulsion, and so it falls under the limits that compulsion carries.

A man who lives alone is hit while cycling and lies in a coma; the doctors expect him to wake within weeks. One operation is not urgent, but delaying it past two weeks would affect his recovery, and someone must decide. His relatives cannot be reached, and he appointed no proxy. Three years earlier, at the City Hospital, he left a written statement: “If there is a choice, I would rather have conservative treatment and no unnecessary surgery.” On the hospital’s application, the City Court appointed a public guardian to act on this one decision only, until he wakes or for sixty days, whichever comes first. Living alone does not authorize any public position to act for him; this came through a court, for one matter, when no one else could. What he wrote does not vanish because he is in a coma: the public guardian decides in his name, and the statement stands in his name too; whether the operation is “unnecessary” the guardian must judge and explain, but the statement cannot be treated as unwritten. The term is the path of return: if he wakes, the function goes back to him; if sixty days pass, there must be a fresh judgment, as Institution Theory says of guarding: “A temporary structure of guarding must be re-examined after its conditions change, and is not renewed automatically on the strength of its origin.” And “for a time” is a fact to be established, here by the doctors’ prognosis. Suppose the prognosis turned into “whether he can recover cannot be judged”: then neither branch applies, and this state, as Meaning Theory also leaves it, the series does not judge. “Neither applies” means only that the root given here does not cover it, not that nothing may be done, nor that anything goes.

Toward Return

Substitute exercise has a root and it has limits; the paper gives three. The first: it is oriented toward return. Institution Theory says of asymmetric assistance: “Asymmetric assistance has a direction: what is withdrawn is dominating dependence, the occupation of another’s office of constitution, and local restrictions that have lost their grounds.” Said of assistance, it is applied to substitute exercise as the series’ own step. Two of these carry over directly. What the child grows into during guardianship is his, not the Department’s; where he can now act for himself, the Department withdraws. And “Whether a restriction has lost its grounds is judged by whether the problem it was meant to solve is no longer there; its origin does not vouch for it.” Suppose a year later the father applies to resume visits and the child says he is willing: whether the problem the restriction was meant to solve is still there is for the family division to check; the child’s willingness does not decide the outcome on its own, but it cannot fail to count. The third item, dominating dependence, does not carry over directly: a child needs someone to sign for him not because the Department set up a barrier, and dependence is not judged domination unless the Department has added a barrier of its own, such as cutting ties he did not need to lose. Carried over into substitute exercise, return becomes a limit on compulsion, on the side of holding to: a shortage of staff and funds is no reason to go on acting for him and be slow to hand back.

The second limit: no fixed binary threshold. For a child whose capacity grows by degrees, a line drawn once and for all, by age alone, without regard to the matter, and not open to challenge, would systematically risk misclassifying what he can already do himself. A list kept by matter, reviewed every six months, open to challenge and to correction by the facts of the case, is another thing; whether this child’s list is like that has to be checked as it actually is. For the man in the coma, the limit is that re-delegation of a function is no regression of qualification: being decided for in one matter does not make him someone to be decided for in others. The third limit: it does not decide for him what he is to become. Guarding, Institution Theory says, “does not draw his lines for him; once the violation is blocked, it does not decide for him what he is to become.” It was said of the one guarded; applying it here is again the series’ own step. The Department may choose his school; Value Theory puts the measure finely: “The guardian network can maintain the accessibility of candidate contents, maintain their expression, maintain their future revisability”; “it cannot fix any candidate configuration as a first-person value content the subject-to-be has already completed.”

Then the case that enters neither door. The Housing Department declares an old building on Levee Street unsafe. A resident in his seventies refuses to move. He is clear-headed, has heard the explanation and knows the risk; he does not want to leave the home he has lived in for forty years. He can judge for himself and only disagrees, so this is not substitute exercise. Where the danger is to himself alone, no one else’s line is being crossed, so it is not stopping either; what the government can do there is explain and offer conditions. Suppose the facade faces the street and bricks may fall on passers-by: that part is stopping, its root the passers-by’s line, and its means go as far as stopping the bricks, closing the pavement, shoring up the wall. If stopping carried on to the point of his having to leave, “his moving out” still may not be smuggled into the stopping as a result hoped for all along.

Kant has a heavy sentence on governments that decide for people what is good for them: a paternal government, which treats its subjects as minor children unable to tell what is truly useful or harmful to them and leaves them to wait on the head of state’s judgment of how they should be happy and on his kindness, is “the greatest despotism conceivable.” The series agrees for those capable of rights; the old man in the unsafe building is exactly such a person. Substitute exercise differs from paternal government in root, the person’s own standing rather than the ruler’s benevolence, and in limits: paternal government decides how people ought to be happy, while substitute exercise may precisely not decide what anyone is to become, nor register a person as needing it because he disagrees. The paper drafts Kant’s strongest objection itself: every paternal government will say of itself “we act only in these few items,” “there is a term,” “we will hand it back when you grow up.” Its reply is that the difference lies not in the name but in a structure that can be checked: the three things proved, what he can do himself recorded and left to him, review by a node other than the one acting for him, return by re-examination rather than by origin. Without these, substitute exercise falls back into what Kant opposed. And the name itself buys no exemption: claiming “this is only substitute exercise” closes off questioning no more than claiming to cultivate does.

The Entry Card

Orchard Court has an owners’ assembly that adopts the covenant and an owners’ committee that enforces it, through a contracted property-management company. Its covenant provides that a household six months in arrears on the management fee is fined monthly and loses the clubhouse and surface parking. In Year 6 one household was twelve months behind. The committee decided to deactivate the household’s entry cards for its building: each time they go in or out, a member of staff opens the door, and after 10 p.m. no one opens it. The household’s elderly mother lives with them. Whom it concerns: the household and those living with them. Which line: what is cut is the way into their own home, not some facility subject to agreement. Baseline: the coming and going of residents who pay on time.

The covenant does not list the entry system; but this case goes beyond authority: even had it listed it, the cutting off would not pass. A home is itself a resource, and resources do not enter the thick layer however important they are. But Rights Theory draws the other half: “that resources do not enter the thick layer does not mean that action through resources cannot reach it”; “Actively severing, intercepting and gatekeeping, or exclusively monopolizing the subject’s existing maintenance circuit, so that an already incorporated dimension is closed, is typed by the dimension it closes, and is violation.” The clubhouse and the parking spaces can be suspended and the family still lives at home. The building’s door is their way home. With the cards dead, the door stays locked, whether it opens is decided each time by the staff, and after ten it does not open: the committee has not withdrawn from a supply, it has taken hold of whether the door opens. Every night after ten, whoever comes home late cannot get in, and whoever is home cannot get out; and recovery is not in their hands: the elderly mother owes nothing and has no account of her own to settle; even if paying up reopened the door, paying to be let through is the gatekeeping itself, not a channel of recovery; the ways to question it are representations to the committee that took the measure, or a lawsuit that takes a year at first instance. This is not one exercise restricted; it is a structural cutting off, a closing, and it crosses the line.

Pressing for real arrears can have grounds; fines, if they retrace to a negative root, can have grounds; but grounds cannot save the means. Compulsion itself must be a limit, with one layer toward each party. Toward the one compelled, it crosses no line and does not seal off his channels of exit, refusal and revocation; once the man with the bottle was pinned and cuffed, the stopping was done, and force added after that would have no ground to retrace to; whether the pinning down was excessive is for a court to judge. Toward the one protected, it does not draw his lines for him. One reading must be headed off. These channels are not an immediate veto over every order. Sealing off, Rights Theory says, “is not the presence in a relation of terms, procedures, conditions, or costs of exit; it is the subject no longer holding a structural channel for refusing, revoking a standing bond, or passing into a reviewable procedure.” The household cannot make a fine lapse by refusing it, nor the grocer void the freeze by saying “I do not agree”; what they must keep is a path, after refusing, into a reviewable procedure. So compulsion is checked segment by segment: the part that acts on restrictable actions, such as control of an account or the way a door is opened, and the part that touches a line, such as leaving a family unable to get home at night, are judged separately, and the second is not carried through because the first has grounds.

A Statement of Assent

In Year 6, the City Council passed an ordinance: new public-housing tenants must attend six sessions of the “Apple City Spirit” course and, at its end, sign the Declaration of Identification with Apple City Values; those who do not sign are fined, and their lease is not renewed. What is penalized here is no action but non-assent. This is compelled obedience in the narrow sense, requiring someone to take the government’s ends as his own law, and it crosses the line: “exclusion, ghostwriting, or redrawing by an outside force is violation without exception.” The course looks like teaching; the case is judged not by its name but first by the line, and the side of it that poses as education can, in the narrow sense, be called colonization.

Institution Theory drew the same line for the provision of conditions: “once a condition carries the demand ‘accept this direction of development,’ it becomes ghostwriting by an outsider.” This case is a layer heavier: there, support with a condition attached; here, compulsion with a direction attached. If support with a direction is already ghostwriting, compulsion with one is all the more so; that a fortiori step is the series’ own. Hence the sentence: compulsion may protect channels; it may not maintain a direction. A government may use compulsion to stop those who block a channel; it may not use compulsion to make people walk in a direction. The direction is the Kingdom of Ends, which is made by persons and is not made because an institution declares it; a direction held in place by compulsion is no longer that direction. Suppose instead the course explained fire safety and recycling, and required only attendance, not a signature. That is a demand for outward action, and goes back to enforcement: what the compulsion to attend retraces to, and how the further burden toward new tenants who have crossed no line is answered.

Protect First

Upstairs and downstairs in one Orchard Court building had quarreled for three months over a leak. One evening the upstairs resident blocked the downstairs one in the stairwell and said: “Go to the management again and you won’t get out of this door.” The downstairs resident called the police; a patrol officer separated the two and helped the downstairs resident apply to the City Court for a temporary protection order. Three months of quarreling was a matter between two people, to be talked out, taken to the management or to court. After that sentence in the stairwell, things changed. The Conflict Treatise wrote of this slot: once asymmetric operations begin to compress a person’s capacity to interrupt, to exit, to speak, or his basic conditions, “Protection may come before any reciprocal handling.” How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible writes the same place as a handover: “protect first, then transfer to a procedure with the corresponding authority.” The Conflict Treatise was speaking of graded handover between two persons; carrying it over to a government’s stopping is the series’ own step, grounded in the treatise itself, which says that at this point the matter passes to the mechanisms of law and security. The officer separating the two is protecting first; the protection order is the handover; the leak can still be argued as before.

“Protect first” says when, not who. Not every compression authorizes any government at all to step in; who protects goes back to matter and authority. Here protection came from the City Police and the order from the City Court. The owners’ committee gained no compulsion from it: its covenant concerns fees, facilities and the sale of homes, not threats to the person in a stairwell, and it may not “protect” the downstairs resident by killing the upstairs household’s entry cards, a cutting off already judged.

Nominated by the Mayor

The man pinned down outside the bar that night, whose wrist was broken, later sued the City Police, saying the officer used excessive force. The judge hearing the case was nominated by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council; the loser can appeal to the state court. Compulsion often ends in an adjudication, and adjudication is itself an act of government. The Conflict Treatise wrote when two parties may hand adjudication to an outside body, and what is handed over: “What is ceded is the procedural power of adjudication over disputes about action, not the constitutive power over one’s own law.” A government’s court cannot carry this over directly: it often judges under compulsory jurisdiction, and the defendant has ceded nothing. The sixteen-year-old did not consent to be judged; the court may judge him all the same. So the court’s authority must go back to the chain. Its range follows the Conflict Treatise: “It cannot decide which law is truer in the first person, and it cannot decide whose subject standing is higher.” The court judges whether the force went beyond what was necessary, not whether the officer is a rough man, nor whether the plaintiff had it coming.

Here the government is itself a party: the defendant is the City Police, part of Apple City, and the judge was nominated by Apple City’s mayor. The Conflict Treatise warned: “A third party selected unilaterally by the stronger side may be only an extension of that side’s power.” How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible states the converse just as precisely: “that a third party was nominated by one side does not by itself prove it has been captured by that side; what must be examined is whether it still acts solely on that side’s will, and whether it holds independent procedure and applicable authority.” So the nomination is a relation to be checked, not proof of capture: that nomination and confirmation are split between the mayor and the Council; whether, once appointed, the judge’s tenure can be decided by the mayor alone; whether, in this case, the judge has independent procedure and applicable authority. Appeal to the state court is a path at another level, and its independence is checked again there.

With Mill

The paper ends with Mill again. On three things the two accounts agree: a person’s own good is not a sufficient warrant for compelling him; a person may be compelled to give evidence; those who cannot yet look after themselves need others to do some things for them. They part at three places. Mill set up one door, a “sole end,” and, to let testimony and shared defense through it, counted inaction as a way of causing evil; this paper sets up three roots, each with its own chain, and the witness who has crossed no line is not counted as one who causes harm, only owed a further burden of proof. Mill excluded children and those who need others’ care from his doctrine; this paper excludes no one, and takes up substitute exercise item by item, with a term, toward return, never deciding what anyone is to become. Mill’s ground is utility in the largest sense; this paper’s is that a person is an end in himself, and the paper registers the difference without ruling between them.

Mill’s strongest objection, drafted by the paper: one principle restrains a government better than three roots; a single door, “prevent harm to others,” and nothing else; open a separate road for enforcement, and you widen the door; with more roots, a government can always find one. The reply: the width of a door was never a matter of how many doors there are; testimony and shared defense already walk through Mill’s, by way of reading inaction as harm, and this paper merely puts the same things in the open, writing out which compulsion, on which root, owes which further burden, including how loss and remedy are booked, which Mill’s passage does not ask. The road of enforcement is not wide: what cannot retrace to a negative root does not stand, renamed administration or not. Where the paper itself has not finished the retracing, as with the levee requisition and the compensation in the bus-shelter case, unfinished is not failed, and the paper does not judge them to fail; until the retracing is finished, it does not vouch for that compulsion either, and leaves it as a remainder. Nor does it claim to have refuted the harm principle; what it gains is a division of scope and of method.

The hold outside the bar, the levee, Orchard Court: they come back in the essays that follow. What the second has said comes to this: every class of compulsion goes along a chain of four links; it is stopping, enforcement or substitute exercise, and each has its own root; it must itself be a limit; it may protect a channel, never maintain a direction.