Claim Grounds

Summary

A claim ground is the relation that makes a particular someone a claim holder against a particular addressee. Standing establishes that every someone can be owed; a ground identifies who owes what to whom. Without this second step, the formula whatever affects a someone must answer to them would expand causal contact into universal liability and directedness would disappear.

The reconstructed theory recognizes six grounds: imposition, initiation, holding, exercise, responsiveness, and need. They do not share one support status. Some restate or generalize source material, one is derived given a bridge, and one is proposed. The list covers the cases tested so far but is not proved exhaustive.

Theory position: diagnostic theory · foundational, derived, defended, proposed, and open · source framework, reconstruction, generalization, and clarification.

Depends on: Standing · Answerability · Authorization · Account · Means-Bound · The Holder's Good.

Ground before content

Claim identification asks four questions in order: who is the holder, who is the addressee, what relation grounds the claim, and what that ground requires in this situation. A grave interest without an individuating relation may show that something bad is happening while leaving no directed claim against a particular agent. Conversely, a ground 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.

Imposition (G1)

An imposition claim arises where A's conduct sets back or endangers P's interests through a causal route A controls, contributes to, or creates the risk of, and P cannot avoid the impact at reasonable cost through ordinary exercises of standing. The impact must not consist solely in other parties' unowed exercises.

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. A chosen rival, an honest criticism, or another holder's refusal can set back P without giving P an imposition claim against the person whose exercise produced the setback. 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.

Initiation (G2)

An initiation claim arises where A knowingly begins a condition another someone must carry, or deliberately assumes responsibility for a condition begun by someone else. Its content is 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.

Holding (G3)

A holding claim arises where A governs, employs, confines, keeps, classifies, or otherwise holds effective power over P. The holder owes 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 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.

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.

Responsiveness (G5)

An unsatisfied claim generates secondary claims appropriate to what occurred. A justified override, a necessity-wrong, and an unjustified wronging can all leave something owed afterward, though not the same thing.

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.

Need (G6)

A need claim arises where P's central interest is in imminent peril, A is uniquely or saliently positioned to remedy it, no adequate institutional channel is available in time, and the remedy would impose neither a claim-violating means nor a cost grave relative to the stake. Directedness comes from A's situational position rather than from general beneficence.

This rescue ground is proposed. 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.

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. 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.

Standing · Answerability · Authorization · Account · Means-Bound · The Holder's Good · Provision Claims · Exposure · Standing Answerability