Claim Grounds
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Summary
A claim ground begins as an individuating relation between a subject and an agent. The holder-neutral cores of four primary relations — imposition, initiation, holding, and salient need — can be described and warranted without assuming that the subject already holds a claim; exercise and responsiveness instead operate on claims once identified. For those four primary grounds, bearer-sufficiency divides the work: the relation selects the addressee, while the subject's own good must supply a subject-specific sufficient basis before the requirement is directed to that subject. This is the route the framework adopts for those grounds, not a claim that every possible directed duty must arise through it; exercise and other independently warranted routes remain available. Standing gives every eligible subject its equal and unforfeitable status; the ground and justificatory route identify the particular claim. Without an individuating relation, the formula whatever affects a someone must answer to them would expand causal contact into universal liability; without a holder-specific basis, an incidental beneficiary would become a claimant.
The reconstructed roster has six grounds. Imposition concerns controlled or contributed impacts another cannot reasonably avoid and that do not consist solely in exercises their actors did not owe the affected party in the respect producing the setback. Initiation concerns knowingly beginning, or deliberately assuming responsibility for, a condition another must carry. Holding concerns effective power exercised through a governing, custodial, employment, confinement, keeping, or classificatory relation, not mere situational ability to affect another. Exercise records how a holder's valid performance changes claims. Responsiveness identifies what an unsatisfied claim leaves owed afterward. Need concerns urgent rescue by a uniquely or saliently positioned addressee within a sacrifice cap.
One relation may instantiate several grounds; the claims are identified separately, and their contents accumulate unless a valid exercise or another rule changes them. The grounds have mixed support and are not proved exhaustive. Stage 1 therefore distinguishes an established ground, absence on the current record, and an unresolved ground whose source is factual, a recognized-ground-boundary, or a candidate new ground. An unresolved ground does not enter the claim roster, but its nonestablishment is not proof that the consideration is claimless. For the four relation-first grounds, identifying the qualifying holder-specific sufficient basis together with the relation fixes directedness and initial claim content. Other recognized routes use their own conditions. None of them thereby ranks conflicting claims, establishes adequate implementation, or authorizes enforcement.
Ground before content
Claim identification separates four questions: whether the candidate can occupy the holder position, which recognized directed route is asserted, whether that route's own holder-, addressee-, relation-, and basis-conditions are met, and what it requires in this situation. For the four relation-first grounds, the third question asks whether a holder-neutral relation and the candidate's good jointly satisfy bearer-sufficiency; exercise and responsiveness use their own conditions. None can be defined by assuming the claim it is meant to identify. A grave interest without an individuating relation may show that something bad is happening while leaving no directed claim against a particular agent. A holder-neutral relation without a holder-specific justificatory basis may identify responsibility for a state of affairs without making every beneficiary a claim holder. Conversely, a valid exercise or another independently warranted route can create a claim even where no comparative harm occurred.
A claim's full content is fixed by the holder's own good, its ground, and the situation before conflict with other claims is considered. Comparison may determine which claims can be satisfied together; it must not rewrite what any claim required at the identification stage.
Where any element required by the asserted route remains unresolved — including the addressee relation or qualifying holder-specific sufficient basis in a relation-first ground — provisional content may be mapped only conditionally. The gravity of the interest cannot establish the missing relation, and a candidate relation cannot enter later stages merely because the roster is nonexhaustive.
Imposition (G1)
The holder-neutral core of imposition is A's controlled, contributed, or risk-creating causal route to a setback for P; describing that route assumes no claim or standing. Given the qualifying holder-specific sufficient basis required above, an imposition claim arises where P cannot avoid the impact at reasonable cost through ordinary exercises of standing and the impact does not consist solely in exercises by A or intervening parties that those actors did not owe P in the respect producing the setback.
Its content includes due care before materialization and response and repair afterward, scaled by the endangered interest, A's control and knowledge, and the opportunities A had to avoid or reduce the imposition.
The last condition is the protected-exercise filter. An exercise is unowed for this purpose where no independently identified claim requires its actor, toward P, to perform, withhold, or condition it differently in the respect producing the setback. The filter therefore takes the rest of the claim roster as an input; it does not decide whether another ground governs the exercise, and a claim governing a different aspect of the relation does not by itself remove the protection.
A chosen rival, an honest criticism, or another holder's refusal can set back P without giving P an imposition claim against the actor whose exercise produced the setback. The same is true where unowed exercises by intervening parties mediate the loss. Deception is not protected, because captured judgment is not a free exercise; a structural blockade is an imposition. The move from impact to this narrower ground is a generalization with proposed discipline, not a derivation from standing alone.
For instance: a workshop vents solvent fumes into a courtyard that is the neighboring flats' only outdoor drying space and their route to the street. The residents cannot avoid the exposure at reasonable cost by any ordinary exercise open to them, and the vent could have been placed elsewhere. That is an imposition claim whether or not the workshop intended the exposure; what it knew bears on the content of what it owes, not on whether the claim exists.
Initiation (G2)
The holder-neutral core of initiation is that A knowingly begins a condition another subject must carry, or deliberately assumes responsibility for a condition begun by someone else. Given the qualifying holder-specific sufficient basis required above, an initiation claim carries the thick undertaking: care governed by the holder's own good, truthfulness about the condition and its origin, formation without capture where the relation helps form the holder's standpoint, and no claims against the holder founded on the initiation itself.
Procreation is the limiting case, not the whole ground. The source asymmetry remains bedrock: before a new someone exists, no holder has a claim to be created; once a someone exists, that party holds full claims against those who knowingly initiated or deliberately assumed the condition. Newness supplies the limit and Exposure develops the beginnings case. Generalizing that structure beyond procreation is a defended reconstruction.
Suppose a firm's founder absconds, leaving the staff unpaid and a client's work half-finished. A former colleague with no stake in the firm could leave them to it; instead she deliberately assumes responsibility for the condition they have been left in. She began neither the abandonment nor the debts. Having assumed responsibility, she owes the staff the thick undertaking — care governed by their good, and truthfulness about the condition and how it arose — and what she took on founds no claim against them for having taken it.
Holding (G3)
The holder-neutral core of holding is that A governs, employs, confines, keeps, classifies, or otherwise holds effective power over P. Given the qualifying holder-specific sufficient basis required above, a holding claim requires survivable exit or, where exit is impossible in principle, permanent callability; contestation capable of moving outcomes; P's welfare as a binding limit; no reliance on P's replaceability; and recognition not made conditional on administrative legibility.
The ground states those requirements without reducing them to one interchangeable route. Practical Availability and Effective Contest fixes a route's function from the ground, exercise, or justificatory role for which it is invoked; supplies sufficient failure poles for performance, survivability, and function-relevant closure; preserves the remaining holder-relative margins; and states the proposed evidential burden where A controls the route or its record.
Accommodation, provision, transition support, or claim-infrastructure can make an exit route live. An empowered substitute channel supplies contest and stewardship where the holder cannot exercise or challenge personally, without performing an exercise for the holder; permanent callability answers the canonical case in which exit is impossible in principle. None of these replaces contestation, welfare as a binding limit, non-replaceability, or recognition independent of legibility.
Mere situational ability to aid, withhold aid, or cause a setback does not by itself establish holding. Such cases must satisfy either the need ground or the imposition ground on its own terms unless the agent has taken or occupies a role of effective control over the party.
The source framework establishes these requirements across institutional holdings. Treating them as one ground, and extending the ground to every relevant holding relation, is a generalization. The ground does not condemn power as such; it identifies the answerability power incurs.
For instance: a residential care home sets its residents' daily routine, controls who visits and when, and retains the assessments on which their placements depend. That is holding, and the requirements above attach whether or not any resident is treated badly.
Exercise (G4)
A valid performed exercise changes the claim structure. Consent, refusal, release, promise, and directive bind within their content and scope, including through later incapacity or death. They cannot be supplied by others, presumed from silence, constructed counterfactually, or manufactured. Authorization states the validity conditions.
Where performance requires the holder's continuing bodily condition, the exercise remains revocable as to specific performance while that condition continues. Reliance and loss can generate repair claims, but not bodily compulsion. This clause is derived given the bridge that compelled continuation converts the holder's body into material; a reader who rejects that bridge reopens specific performance.
Consider two agreements. A collector promises a museum first refusal on a manuscript should she ever sell it; the promise binds within its content and scope, and commits her to nothing about whether to sell. A volunteer who agreed to carry a research implant for two years is placed differently, because performance requires her continuing bodily condition: the clause above makes the agreement revocable as to specific performance while that condition continues, and reliance losses can sound in repair. That result is derived given the bridge stated above, and a reader who rejects the bridge reopens specific performance here too.
Responsiveness (G5)
An unsatisfied claim generates secondary claims appropriate to what occurred. A justified override and a wronging can both leave something owed afterward, though not the same thing. Whether an act containing the wronging is necessity-required is a separate act-level question at Necessity, not a third claim-level classification.
The bridge is near-conceptual: if non-satisfaction left nothing behind, the theory could not distinguish after the fact between a claim it had adequate reason to override and one it violated. The existence of residue is derived given that distinction; Residue proposes its differentiated recognitional, explanatory, compensatory, distributive, and violation-grade contents.
Responsiveness establishes that something remains owed after non-satisfaction. It does not derive an additional burden from culpability. Claim-Relative Culpability proposes a fault classification and a response audit under which any fault-sensitive response must state its independent relation or a separately defended culpability-to-liability bridge.
For instance: a hospital cancels a scheduled operation to free the theatre for an emergency admission. Whether the cancelled patient's claim was justifiably overridden or wronged is classified at Stage 5, not by this ground. What responsiveness establishes is narrower: her unsatisfied claim leaves something owed afterward on either classification, and what it leaves is not the same on both. Which contents are owed, and on what conditions, is proposed at Residue.
Need (G6)
The holder-neutral core of need is that P's central interest is in imminent peril, A is uniquely or saliently positioned to remedy it, and no adequate institutional channel is available in time. Within the sacrifice and means conditions below, P's urgent good supplies the P-specific sufficient basis. Under bearer-sufficiency, their conjunction directs a need claim to P.
This rescue ground is proposed. Rescue and Distant Need distinguishes its situational relation from distant need directed through provision or another ground. Its sacrifice cap is a defended placed line, not a computed result. Its prohibition on claim-violating rescue instantiates the general Means-Bound: no claim contains another party's conversion.
Suppose a man collapses in a rural post office where S is the only other person present and the nearest ambulance is an hour away. Staying with him and calling for help costs S an afternoon and no more. S's situational position selects S as the addressee, while the collapsed man's urgent good supplies the qualifying holder-specific sufficient basis under the stated conditions; the claim's content is the remedy S is placed to give. Where a remedy would instead make a third party into material for the rescue, the ground does not reach it, and the cap on what S must bear is a defended placed line rather than a computed result.
Multiple grounds
One relation can instantiate several grounds. An institution may both impose a risk and hold power over those exposed; a parent may initiate a condition, receive performed exercises, and later wrong the holder; a rescuer may become a holder by taking custody. The claims are identified separately and their contents accumulate unless a valid exercise or another rule changes them.
Grounds also identify different addressees. Genetic contribution alone does not fix the initiation claim; knowing agency and deliberate assumption do. Remote benefit alone does not fix an imposition claim; control and causal contribution matter. A public desire names no claim until holders, addressees, and grounds are supplied.
Limits
- No argument proves the six grounds exhaustive. The Stage 1 ground-status record preserves that openness without adopting every plausible relation as a claim. Open Questions states what a completeness argument would require.
- The grounds identify claims and initial content. The Holder's Good supplies the diagnostic account of content and gravity; comparison, complete adequacy, and enforcement remain downstream questions.
- The means-bound and sacrifice cap are defended commitments. They must not travel under the proposed need ground as though they were derived.
- Generalizations from source domains remain refusable without erasing the narrower source claims from which they began.