The Counter Stays Open

In the winter of Year 7, the application counter of Apple City’s Housing Department is open as usual. An ordinance embeds a winter heating subsidy for low-income households: a household whose income falls below a certain line may receive a fixed amount each month in winter, applying to the Housing Department, which decides within thirty days. The provision went into the ordinance in Year 1. The counter has stayed open and applications are received as usual; but the assessment post in the Housing Department has stood vacant since the winter of Year 4, and no one has been appointed to it. By this winter twelve hundred applications have piled up, and no one is processing them.

One applicant handed in an application as winter began, and forty days later went to the counter to ask. The person at the counter said: “We take the applications. The assessment post is empty.” The ordinance is there, the counter is open, applications are still taken; on paper the subsidy lacks nothing at all. It just does not run.

Three things first. Whom it concerns: the households that have applied and meet the conditions. Which line: a post standing empty and a pile of applications do not in themselves cross anyone’s line; an embedded position has a gap in its operation. Whether a winter without heat presses on some household’s life-substrate is checked separately. Baseline: the decision within thirty days that the ordinance stipulates.

This essay asks: how far a government must guarantee what it has written into an ordinance, what a guarantee is made of, how a lapse is to be read, and how withdrawing or amending is to be questioned. Beyond compulsion, this is what a government does most. None of it looks like compulsion, yet its weight on people is often far from light: how the households behind those twelve hundred applications get through this winter rests on one empty post.

Two Ways of Putting It

About those twelve hundred there are two ways of putting it. One: the subsidy is something the government gives; it gives when it can, and when it cannot, it cannot, and owes no one anything. The other: heat in winter is everyone’s basic right; if the government does not provide it, that is a violation. Each is half right and half wrong: the first treats the subsidy as a favor, the second as a basic right.

Rights Theory divides rights into two kinds. One is basic rights, which presuppose only that others refrain from violating them, and need no one to constitute them. That a person is not enslaved, that his body is not harmed, is not given by the government, nor by anyone at all; it comes from his own side and holds against everyone: against a neighbor, against a factory, against the government alike. Institution Theory says: “basic rights are not newly made by the institution.” Not violating them, then, is no demand peculiar to government. The other kind is recognition-based rights; such a right “does not come by grace or permission; it is constituted by constitutive recognition.” The subsidy is of this kind. Rights Theory says it plainly: “If continuing supply is to become something claimable, it is constituted as an institutionally embedded position at the recognition layer; it is not constituted as the content of a basic right.” The households that have applied can claim the subsidy because Apple City wrote it into an ordinance.

Now it is clear where each is right and where wrong. The first has the source right: the subsidy was written into an ordinance by Apple City; it did not grow out of each household’s own side. It goes wrong in its second half. Once embedded, the subsidy is no longer a favor to be given or withheld at will; it is a position, on the strength of which applicants may apply, question and require an answer. The second has one thing right: everyone has a floor no one may cross, the life-substrate included. It goes wrong in counting the subsidy itself as part of that floor. That the subsidy stops is not thereby a violation of a basic right; whether there is some other violation is checked separately.

Here the series establishes an ought: a government ought to guarantee the recognition-based rights it has embedded for its internal subjects; where it does not, its power at that place is illegitimate. This ought is not derived from Rights Theory. What Rights Theory gives is a structure: recognition-based rights and power sit on the two sides of one seam; read from the side of acting, it is power; read from the side of the subject’s position, it is a right. A government holds the side of power. If it holds only the power and does not let the right’s side operate, the position breaks down, by de-righting or by hollowing-out; the Housing Department is the latter. A structure gives a reading, not an ought; Rights Theory itself says that its criterion for de-righting “judges the structure of network-processing, not whether the thing is normatively legitimate smuggled back in.” The ought is the series’ own, a normative undertaking newly added on the government’s side.

It adds no sixth heading to the five oughts; taken apart, it falls into Institution Theory’s first, second and fifth. The undertaking is peculiar to government only in this sense: within this series it is established for government alone; it does not assert that other constructs owe nothing for the positions they embed.

Must Be Questioned

“Illegitimate” has a definite landing place in this series: must be questioned, that is, must explain and must correct, through the channel of the fifth ought. Its range must be stated precisely too. Where the lapse is, there the government’s acts through that position and in that scope are illegitimate; the Housing Department’s empty assessment post is one such place. Where lapses have become the normal state, one item hollowed out after another, or de-righting, the government’s power must be questioned as a whole. A crossing of the line does not land here; it is read under the first ought.

Two expressions must be kept apart. “Open to questioning” means that the channel is always open: for every government, at all times, whether or not it has lapsed. “Must be questioned” means that a verified lapse at one place owes an explanation and a correction. The Housing Department’s case is already clear: the post has been empty for three years, twelve hundred applications have piled up, and the thirty-day limit has been kept for none of them. It must be questioned. Other departments of Apple City may at present have no verified lapse anywhere; they are open to questioning all the same; a government never achieves perfection, and being questioned is the normal state. The two are not to be mixed: being questioned is not in itself evidence of illegitimacy, and providing a channel for questioning is not proof of repair.

The Backing

The second essay told of a sentence in an Orchard Court stairwell: “Go to the management again and you won’t get out of this door.” The resident downstairs called the police; a patrol officer separated the two and helped him apply to the City Court for a temporary protection order. That the downstairs resident is not to be threatened, not to be blocked at his own door, was given neither by the protection order nor by the City Police. What the order gives it is a form written down that can be invoked; what the police give it is someone who will come and enforce it.

Rights Theory has a two-by-two table. By source, basic rights are endogenous and recognition-based rights registered; by direction, there is negation and there is emergence. Where registered meets negation is the institutional backstop for the negative floor: a constitution that writes the prohibition of slavery and of torture as untouchable clauses is “giving the basic-rights floor ‘refuse to be reduced’ a registered backing.” One and the same right has its core on the basic side and its backing on the recognition side.

Backing can be hollowed out. Where a freedom is still written in law but enforcement bodies, procedures and the network’s recognition have all been drawn away, Rights Theory says, “What is hollowed out then is the institutional backing, what is suppressed is the exercise of this basic right, and what is untouched is its core.” Suppose the City Court issued the temporary protection order, but the City Police said they were short of staff and never sent anyone to enforce it: the order is on paper and cannot be delivered. What is hollowed out is the backing; that the resident downstairs is not to be threatened is not diminished in the least. What is missing is its anchorage in Apple City.

So what a government gives in this half is backing and enforcement, not the core. This heads off two readings. One reads the government as the source of the core: if the government does not give it, there is none. Not so; the core does not move. The other turns it around: since the core does not move, the government owes nothing. Not so either. Backing and enforcement are on the recognition side and fall under this essay’s guarantee. Institution Theory says: “Protection on paper is not securing; being able to enforce does not prove that what is enforced, or the authority to enforce it, is warranted.” A protection order signed with no one to enforce it goes under the second ought: the construct guards the lines between its internal subjects, and the way it guards may not shrink to paper. If a government does not guarantee this layer of backing, its power at that place is likewise illegitimate and must be questioned.

Back to those households. Does a winter without heat press on some household’s life-substrate? That must be checked separately, and what is checked must be stated precisely. Rights Theory draws a restriction: “A violation on the basic layer is confined to action upon the existing thick layer and contains no claim upon future supply”; “Bare natural scarcity is not a rights event.” When an embedded supply fails, it is read on the recognition layer; it does not thereby become a violation on the basic layer. What is checked separately is whether anyone laid hands on a household’s existing circuit of maintenance, and whether the backing Apple City may have set up for that floor stands empty too. These households rest on an embedded position; their weight lies in the readings of the recognition side.

Three Legs

Back to the Housing Department. Rights Theory says a recognition-based right operates on three legs: “institutional embedding gives an invocable form, effective community recognition gives distributed predictability, real power backing gives the capacity to deliver.” Applied to the subsidy: the ordinance writing it in is the first; applicants and the counter alike treating it as something that can be applied for and asked about is the second; someone in the assessment post, a decision within thirty days, the money paid each month, is the third. It is the third that has fallen through. Rights Theory calls this hollowing-out: “Hollowing-out is power backing falling below threshold while the institutional shell remains, the position reverting to a declaration, operation gone.”

For embedded rights a government keeps three things: no de-righting; no empty shell; withdrawal or amendment made in public and open to questioning. Taken apart, the three fall into the first, second and fifth oughts, and add no sixth heading.

The Freeze Stays

De-righting is a different failure from hollowing-out: “De-righting is coercion persisting while the relevant network no longer treats the recipient as a holder who can, on the strength of this position, initiate requests, invoke procedures, and require response, the position degenerating into sheer force.” Its antecedent is that compulsion persists; the Housing Department has applied no compulsion to the applicants; it simply does not assess.

Suppose instead that the freeze on the grocer’s account from the second essay simply goes on; he files an objection and the Tax Office does not accept it; he goes to the administrative division of the City Court and no one there processes his representations either; the case officer is replaced and the new one likewise refuses his objection; the freeze stays as it was. The freeze is still there, the compulsion is still there; but the position from which he, as a taxpayer, can make representations and ask for an explanation is no longer processed by the network.

To judge whether this is de-righting, Rights Theory gives three tests: “whether the recipient can initiate a procedure on the strength of this position; whether the position can be replicated and processed identically across independent nodes; and whether, after the direct power-wielder is replaced, the position is still maintained by the network.” In this supposed branch all three answers are no. Rights Theory says: “Only when it can be sustained solely by the same power-wielder’s continued pressure, the network not processing the recipient’s request-position, is it de-righting.” The government is then acting on through a position that has degenerated into force, and the case falls under the first ought: an act that no longer passes through a rights position must have its effect on the person checked against the line, and “this was originally a lawful freeze” cannot carry it through.

Empty Shells

No empty shell is the main matter in the subsidy’s case. An empty shell has three readings, and they must be kept apart. The first: the backing of a basic right is hollowed out, as with the protection order signed and never enforced; this goes under the second ought.

The second: a person’s existing self-maintained or substitute routes are first actively sealed off, so that he can depend only on this supply, and then it is hollowed out; this goes under the first ought. Institution Theory counts dismantling, too, as an act of the construct: “the dismantling itself may not cross the line, for instance by first sealing off people’s pre-existing self-maintained or substitute circuits, so that they can depend only on that supply, and then withdrawing; this part falls under the first ought and is not discounted.” Suppose the Housing Department had earlier, for the sake of central heating, removed the stoves that households in public housing had installed themselves, so that tenants could pay for central heating only through the subsidy; then the assessment post stood empty and the subsidy stopped turning. What is hollowed out then is more than a position of supply: Apple City first sealed their old road with its own hands, and this branch is judged under the first ought, without discount. That sentence of Institution Theory speaks of withdrawing, and here the second step is hollowing-out; but Rights Theory says: “Monopolization and induced dependency are themselves the severing; the withdrawal only completes it, and splitting the act in two does not change the reading”; so the same sentence applies, a reading that is the series’ own step.

This reading must keep its threshold: no factual dependence by itself is judged under the first ought. Even if those households can in fact get through the winter only on the subsidy, that alone is not enough: “Mere factual irreplaceability is not monopolization: monopolization requires the exclusive laying of hands.”

The third: any other gap in operation enters the explanation and correction of the fifth ought. The Housing Department’s case falls here. The explanation must answer to these: what has not been delivered, how long each of the twelve hundred has been waiting and for how many the thirty days have already run out; whether the original ground still holds, whether heating for low-income households in winter is still a matter at all; and what arrangements there are for restoring operation, for transition, or for a grounded withdrawal or amendment: when the post will be filled, what becomes of the backlog until then, and, if the subsidy is not to be run any longer, on what grounds and by which route.

Explaining is not repairing. However clearly an explanation is written, while the post is still empty and the twelve hundred still go unassessed, the shell is still a shell. “No empty shell” does not shrink into “no hidden empty shell.” Where it truly cannot be done, say no one can be hired for a while, the rule the fifth essay sets out applies: inability does not cancel the burden of explanation and correction, and an explanation is not booked as having done it.

Its Own Share

If Apple City truly no longer wants to run the subsidy, the road it must take is withdrawal or amendment, not leaving the ordinance hanging and the post empty. Withdrawal or amendment checks authority, grounds, scope and transition, and is made in public and open to questioning; this falls under the fifth ought. What a government withdraws is its own share. Rights Theory separates source and operation into two layers: at the source, a recognition-based right is constituted by constitutive recognition, through vertical institutional conferral and horizontal mutual recognition; in operation, it runs on the three legs. “Source-side institutional conferral and operation-side institutional embedding are not one thing.” Apple City’s share is its conferral at the source, together with its embedding and its backing, withdrawn together and in public, no shell left behind. The subsidy as it now stands, shell in place and backing gone, is exactly the shape a withdrawal must avoid.

A public announcement neither acquires legitimacy by itself nor by itself proves that the right has been outright withdrawn. Outright withdrawal is “the exit of all constitutive sources within the relevant scope, not merely the disappearance of the old bearer”; and “After an institutional conferral is revoked, horizontal mutual recognition may still constitute the same position.” What Apple City can withdraw is its conferral, its embedding and its backing; if mutual recognition among people still constitutes this position, the withdrawal is not yet outright. That is not for the government to declare.

Suppose the City Council repeals the subsidy ordinance and sets up a new program under a different name, with applications starting over. First it must be read what this step is. If the new program constitutes the same position with only a change of bearer, Rights Theory calls it carrier migration: “Carrier migration is the bearer migrating while the right runs on in the new bearer.” Then the position continues, the applications filed under the old ordinance move over with it, and “starting over” must itself be explained. If it is another position, the old one is withdrawn by the road of withdrawal. Either way, three things do not vanish with the name. The floor of basic rights: whether any household’s life-substrate is pressed is still checked separately, and a new name for the program does not change the answer. Old accounts already incurred: the twelve hundred already filed and already past thirty days were incurred under the old ordinance and are not written off when it is repealed. Other sources and commitments that stand independently: they are checked by their own sources and their own conditions.

What is held to is the ways. The three things lie on the side of holding to: they are not discounted for lack of resources and do not stop in an emergency. Yet what is held to is these three ways, not the continued existence of every embedded position. The subsidy can be amended or withdrawn; the ways of amending and withdrawing are not withdrawn. Institution Theory has stated the same shape: “what is held to is the ought, not a particular structure.”

The Stone Bridge

In Apple City’s old quarter stands the Stone Bridge. Long ago the City Council granted a private company a fifty-year toll franchise on it. The franchise was embedded in an ordinance, tolls have been collected as usual, and the revenue long ago far exceeded the cost of building the bridge. In Year 7 some residents cross without paying, and the company asks the City Police to help collect. Whom it concerns: the company; the residents who cross. Which line: within the line. Crossing a bridge is an action that may be limited; neither collecting tolls nor crossing without paying crosses anyone’s line; what is involved is an embedded position, and the compulsion of helping to collect. Baseline: a public bridge with no franchise.

The company’s reasoning can be written in three steps: the franchise is a recognition-based right embedded in an ordinance; a government ought to guarantee the recognition-based rights it has embedded; so the City Police should come. The first step is only half right: the franchise is a position embedded in an ordinance, but the company is a construct, and by On Accountability, “A company does not hold a recognition-based right in its own name”; at this position it serves as an address of attribution; and the ought the series established speaks of rights embedded for internal subjects. The second step leaves something out: that a position is embedded and operating does not mean it should be kept operating by the government; whether it should is checked separately. And the third does not follow either: from “ought to guarantee” to “should come” there still lies a chain of proof for compulsion.

When Rights Theory sets out how recognition-based rights operate, it adds a sentence at the end: “Neither constitution nor operation succeeding is the same as normative legitimacy.” That a franchise is constituted and operating says what it is in structure; it does not say whether it should exist, still less what the government should use to keep it up. Earlier: without the guarantee, power is illegitimate; here, the other face: with it, power is not thereby legitimate. Read together, the guarantee is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Rights Theory’s sentence says only that structure issues no legitimacy; requiring that the scope of the guarantee itself be under review is a step the series takes from there. The three things are kept for every embedded position; scope review concerns something else: whether a position should continue, whether the government should deliver its operation, and whether, in delivering it, it may use compulsion.

The review checks against that sentence of Institution Theory: “continuation and dismantling are both checked against the persons protected, the task, the authority, the cost and existing commitments.” On the Stone Bridge: does it protect the company recovering its cost, or those who cross having a good bridge; with revenue long past the cost, does the task remain; the cost falls on everyone who crosses; the fifty-year franchise is itself an existing commitment, to be checked as such. Institution Theory also says that a construct’s own continued existence “is not an independent sufficient reason to close off questioning, or to continue a particular arrangement automatically”. That an arrangement has lasted long is not in itself a reason for it to continue either; that step is the series’ own.

The paper does not judge whether the franchise should be withdrawn or kept; it judges one thing: Apple City cannot answer the company with “it is embedded, it is operating.” To withdraw it, it takes the road of withdrawal, with the existing commitment among the things checked; to keep it, keeping too must be explained. If the City Police come to help, they are enforcing this position; as enforcement lands on residents who cross without paying and converges their action, the right the position carries shows its face as power, which Rights Theory calls “conditioned on convergence, not a standing state of any running right.” Once that face shows, what the police do is compulsion and goes through its own chain, as in the second essay; that a franchise is embedded does not wave this compulsion through.

Fuel Vouchers

The subsidy is a supply. A government gives out more than one kind of supply, and they do not all sit in one slot; there are three. What is embedded: the heating subsidy is in this slot. It is guaranteed as a recognition-based right, under the three things; it can be withdrawn only by the road of withdrawal, and the withdrawing itself passes through the first ought.

What is not embedded. Suppose that for the past five years the mayor has, every winter, issued “fuel vouchers” by a temporary decision, written into no ordinance and embedded in no other form. In the winter of Year 7 the mayor says there will be none this year. Whom it concerns: the households that received vouchers in past years. Which line: stopping a supply does not in itself cross anyone’s line. Baseline: the heating each household had before Apple City began issuing the vouchers. The vouchers are not in the embedded slot; they are an entitlement, or one of the conditions Apple City provides according to relational thickness. But not embedded does not automatically mean they may be stopped at will. Institution Theory, having said that continuation and dismantling are checked against the persons protected, the task, the authority, the cost and existing commitments, goes on: “beyond that, existing rights, commitments and dependencies are checked as in the preceding sentence.”

Bare entitlement. On Rights and Entitlements says the granting side may stop giving, and that in the slot of bare entitlement stopping is not violation, “but only so far as the granting end has not first exclusively monopolized, manufactured dependence, and sealed off alternative routes”; and it goes on, “a giving already loaded through promise, institution, trust, or guardianship is no longer bare entitlement.” The first sentence sets a limit on stopping; the second moves a great swath of supply out of the slot.

The vouchers must be gone through item by item. Did the mayor promise to issue them every year? The branch supposes not; had he, they would no longer be a bare entitlement. Did Apple City manufacture dependence? Five years of issue, if households now get through winter on them, is factual dependence; factual dependence is not manufactured dependence, and what must be seen is whether Apple City first sealed off people’s old ways of heating. Whether there was monopolization, whether alternative routes were sealed off, is likewise checked down to whether there was an exclusive laying of hands. If all of these pass, stopping in this slot is not read as violation. Not violation, yet it must still be explained; as Institution Theory puts it, “For what the construct has organized, taken up or restricted, it must correspondingly explain how room is left and provided.” Whether a supply is in the slot of bare entitlement cannot be settled by its name; it must be tested item by item.

Carried over to government, the slot must also be narrowed. Stopping is not violation because a supplier withdrawing its own supply, as Rights Theory puts it, “is disposing of one’s own exercise under one’s own law.” Apple City is a construct; a construct has no law of its own, and so no such exercise of its own to dispose of. What carries over, then, is only the half that concerns the reading: in this slot, stopping is not read as violation; whether it may stop, and how, goes back to the third ought and the explanation it owes; carrying it over so is the series’ own step.

Here the paper draws a one-sentence contrast with T. H. Marshall. Marshall divides citizenship into three elements, the third being the social element: “By the social element I mean the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” Both place welfare within the structure of rights, not as a favor. They part at one point: on the line of reading that takes his essay as its principal reference, social rights are drawn by membership and attach to citizenship; the series’ two guarantees are addressed to internal subjects, and the interior is drawn by entanglement, not by identity. Who is a member belongs to the Theory of the State.

The Assessment Post

Twelve hundred applications are piled up there, and the root of it is one post. The subsidy is delivered through the assessment post; the post standing empty is a matter of administration. Rights Theory says that real power backing “is not only the prevention and repair that follow a violation, but also everyday performance, the allocation of resources, access to procedures, and the honouring of qualifications.” Filling a post, ordering the assessments, making a decision within thirty days, paying the money each month: all of this is delivery. Whether a recognition-based right goes hollow often depends not on some great violation but on whether these everyday things get done.

The paper gives administration two roots. One is making embedded rights really deliverable: no empty shell, brought down to the everyday, is administration. The other is providing conditions for cultivation according to relational thickness. Institution Theory’s third ought says: “An institution provides conditions for the cultivation of its internal subjects according to relational thickness; it is concerned with conditions, not with outcomes.” Apple City opening a community arts center and paying for it is administration on this root. Neither root comes from Rights Theory: it tells us only which everyday things delivery includes; why administration must do them comes, for the first, from the guarantee, and for the second, from the third ought.

The two roots ground only administration that uses no compulsion. If administration is to use compulsion, say to check a household’s declaration by compulsory means, that step goes separately through the second essay’s chain: what cannot retrace to a negative root does not stand by being renamed administration; a grounded administrative aim does not by itself ground compulsory means.

One more matter of accounts. When the person at the counter says “The assessment post is empty,” that is the fact, not an evasion. The entry for the empty post is not at the counter; it is at the positions that set the staffing, provide the funding and decide whether to fill the post. The first essay, on the front line, said the accounts must be kept apart: one falls on the front-line position, the other on the positions that set its rules and allocate its resources. What these positions must explain is exactly the list in the third reading of the empty shell.

What Did My Taxes Get Me?

The grocer from the second essay had his account frozen with an amount left for basic living. Property tax is the main source of Apple City’s general budget, and the heating subsidy is funded from that budget too. The grocer asks: “What did the taxes I paid get me?” The question can be read in two ways. One reads it as a price: so much paid, so much back; if nothing comes back, pay less or pay nothing. The other reads it as a demand for an account: where the money comes from, on whom it presses, where it is spent, who bears the shortfall. The paper takes the second, and must also make clear why the second is not simply the first.

On what grounds does Apple City collect tax? The paper’s answer: the root of tax and funding is the funding of the functions that carrying the five oughts and the two guarantees requires. The assessment post needs someone in it, review officers need to be employed, the hotline needs someone to answer it, the courts need to open, protection orders need someone to enforce them; the oughts and the guarantees come down to functions, functions to positions, and positions need funding. Hanging the root of tax on the functions that the oughts and the guarantees require is a step the series takes on its own account.

Where the root is, the account follows: on whom the burden of raising the money falls, which people property tax presses on; where the funding goes, how much of the general budget reached the subsidy and how much the assessment post; who bears the shortfall, and where, in the three years the post stood empty, it fell. If no position comes forward to explain the last, the answer settles by itself: it falls on the households that are waiting. A shortfall no one explains must itself be questioned.

Freezing an account to collect tax must retrace through tax’s own root. The Law Series requires that the legitimacy of affirmative provisions retrace to a negative root: “the prevention of suppression, the safeguarding of channels for questioning, or the maintenance of co-constructive space.” Review officers, the hotline and the courts safeguard the channels for questioning; protection orders enforced prevent suppression; embedded positions delivered maintain the positions people already share; retracing through these functions is the series’ own step. The part raised for conditions on the side of striving for, such as the arts center’s funding, can be read only as the maintenance of co-constructive space, and providing conditions goes a step beyond maintaining. Until the retracing is finished, the series does not vouch for the standing of this part of the compulsion and leaves it as a remainder, registered together with two places in the second essay: the land taken for the levee, and the compensation after the Levee Street bus shelter was smashed.

Paying taxes is no universal quid pro quo. On Accountability has: “A recognition-based right is not got in exchange for recognizing a power.” And then: “The generation, the continuance, and the termination of a chain’s accountability are judged by that chain’s own content and conditions; an accountability is not generated automatically because the other chain has been performed, nor released automatically because the other chain has not.” Apple City, through the Tax Office, collects tax from the grocer, and at that place he holds a taxpayer’s accountability; the embedded positions he holds in Apple City ask it for delivery, and Apple City owes them its guarantee. The first sentence blocks joining the two into a sale: the guarantee is not bought with taxes. The second blocks two automatisms: having paid taxes does not automatically generate a claim to any particular benefit; Apple City’s hollowing out the subsidy does not automatically release him from his accountability to pay tax. Conversely, being in arrears does not automatically cancel positions he has already established elsewhere. Once the subsidy is hollowed out, that chain is gone and what remains is the guarantee owed; applying the sentence there is the series’ own step.

Nor does the guarantee of the subsidy come from taxes: whether the households that applied paid taxes, and how much, is no condition of it. On Accountability keeps one more sentence: “Whether a particular arrangement makes some fact a condition of application is judged separately, by that arrangement.” A fee charged per use, a service stated to be conditional on payment, are judged by their own conditions. So paying taxes is no universal quid pro quo, and particular claims already established are not thereby erased.

A Thirty Percent Cut

In the winter of Year 7 Apple City’s revenue falls, and the City Council discusses cutting next year’s budget by thirty percent. Three proposals are on the table: abolish the Housing Department’s complaints desk and merge complaints about the subsidy into the Mayor’s Office complaint hotline; suspend new applications for the heating subsidy for one year; cut the community arts center’s funding by half. Whom it concerns: those who complain, those who apply for the subsidy, those who use the arts center. Which line: none of the three directly crosses anyone’s line; the first touches the fifth ought’s channel for questioning, the second an embedded position, the third a condition on the side of striving for. Baseline: last year’s budget. With less money, something must be cut. The question is what cannot be.

What cannot be cut is the oughts and the necessary channels, not any old post, program or budget figure. On the series’ own grouping, what lies on the side of holding to is not discounted for lack of resources: the first and second oughts, basic rights not being violated among them; the half of the fourth that does not seal the channels of refusal, revision, exit and change of direction; the fifth ought’s channel for questioning; the ways of guaranteeing recognition-based rights; the limits of substitute exercise. Institution Theory also says: “This series grants that in practice an ought may not be achieved, and does not on that account withdraw or discount any of them.” That sentence governs all five, holding to and striving for alike, so the oughts on the side of striving for are not discounted either. What can be ranked when money is short is the conditions on the side of striving for: ahead or behind, more or less, never the ought itself; this division is the series’ own.

Item by item. The first: merging the complaints desk into the hotline. The desk is a structure, and structures can change; the three conditions cannot be withdrawn: “it is independent of the party questioned, internal subjects can actually initiate it, and initiating it brings no retaliation.” What must be checked is how things stand after the merger. The hotline sits in the Mayor’s Office, not the same party as the Housing Department; but independence is functional: “it is checked against the party actually questioned.” The party questioned is the Housing Department, and also the positions that set the staffing and provide the funding; if those sit in the Mayor’s Office, the hotline is not independent of them, and another route within reach is needed. Does the hotline take complaints about the subsidy; having taken them, can it make the questioned party answer; when the answer misses the point, where can the complaint go next? If these check out, the item is a change of structure. If not, complaints about the subsidy have nowhere to go at Apple City’s level; and what is cut is not a desk but this level’s channel under the fifth ought.

The second: suspending new applications for a year. This touches an embedded position and can go only by the road of withdrawal or amendment, made in public and open to questioning. Authority: the ordinance was enacted by the City Council, and suspending part of it is within the Council’s authority. Grounds: falling revenue is a ground; whether the subsidy’s original ground, heat for low-income households in winter, is still there must be stated too. Scope: only new applications are suspended; the twelve hundred already filed are outside it; they are old accounts. Transition: there must be an arrangement for households that newly qualify during the year. The suspension itself must also pass the first ought: has Apple City first closed off anyone’s existing way? And one more point: if the suspension becomes another way of leaving the empty shell hanging, the post still empty and the backlog untouched, it has not answered “no empty shell.”

The third: halving the arts center’s funding. This is a condition on the side of striving for; it can be ranked and it can be cut; if some item in it has already been embedded or promised, that item is checked separately. But ranking is itself a judgment. The Law Series says law suffers a structural discount at the level of enforcement, one strand of which is the priority of resources: “not every instance of suppression can be processed”; and ranking brings the one who ranks into the matter. Carrying this over to a government’s budget is the series’ own step; the ground lies in the first essay: when Apple City ranks its budget, people sitting in positions are judging, and judgment must answer. So ranking must be explained: the matters to be judged, the subjects concerned, and how the responsibility for making up the shortfall is to be questioned.

Who makes up the shortfall below the threshold? Institution Theory, in conversation with Sen and Nussbaum, left this question: “when a person falls below some threshold, which construct is to make it up, and by what division, is a question of distribution and design.” The paper answers as far as structure: an embedded position is guaranteed by the level that embedded it; for conditions on the side of striving for, each construct owes corresponding conditions and an account as far as it actually organizes the person’s life; who bears the shortfall must be stated by some position, and open to questioning. To whom, how much, and how the levels share it belong to specific theories of institutions; the paper sets up no theory of distributive justice of its own.

Where it truly cannot be done, where a thirty percent shortfall cannot be filled however it is ranked, the rule the fifth essay sets out applies: admit the inability, without withdrawing or discounting the ought, and explain the transition. What the third essay has said comes to this: the two kinds of rights are kept apart; for basic rights a government gives backing and enforcement, not the core; for embedded recognition-based rights it keeps three things, no de-righting, no empty shell, withdrawal or amendment made in public and open to questioning; a guarantee kept does not make power legitimate by itself; taxes are not the price of a guarantee; when money is short, what can be cut is structures and conditions, never the oughts and the channels. Someone will still come, later, to ask about those twelve hundred applications.