Part I — Who counts, and what they are owed

3. What You Are Owed

Bela is owed food, shelter, care, learning, bodily safety, material security, expression, belief and the company of other people. The rules conclude each of those entitlements for her, and for each item they name the public body that owes it. Every person is owed the same list. Each entitlement follows from personhood alone; employment, payment, registration, citizenship and approved conduct are outside its conditions.

Shelter means protection from the weather, warmth sufficient for safety, clean water and sanitation. An inadequate roof called a home leaves that obligation unfulfilled. The entitlement names a protected condition rather than whatever an institution happens to provide under its name.

Bodily safety and material security are separate items. Bodily safety is freedom from violence and threats to the person. It is guaranteed as protection, answered by the protective duties and their remedies rather than shown by a receipt. Material security is the essential goods a person needs beyond food and shelter. Like food, shelter, care and company, its arrival can be shown by a recipient-side receipt. Each item is owed in its own right, and neither stands in for the other.

Belief and expression are distinct. A person can be free to speak while their beliefs are subjected to an official test. The design rules out both an approved belief as a condition of the floor and a conclusion certifying what someone believes. Company is distinct from keeping a body fed and housed. Its entitlement remains when someone is confined, and confinement never makes isolation an acceptable substitute.

The environmental right and protections for ecological commons, future conditions and animals have their own grounds and chapters. They stand beside the floor items rather than in place of one, and a claim that an environment is protected is separate from evidence that food, shelter or care reached a person.

Where the protection stops

A rule making the absence of a protected floor condition, or of the debt owing it, a ground for confinement is refused before it can change anyone's status. The protection covers confinement, and it depends on how such a rule is written. Other uses of a missing floor condition are held back by separate checks on how delivery conclusions may be used, and each needs its own test. The optional method's section Why the hostile floor rule is refused shows how the refusal works and where it stops.

Separate constitutional limits protect private life and economic rights. Belief, speech, friendship, intimacy, association, voluntary care, gifts, pooling, domestic production and mutual aid stay free of public prescription and of any score of personal worth. A contribution earns no status that could reach wages, property, credit, pensions, authority, political weight or the floor. That a hostile rule can be written does not make its use a lawful public power.

Violence, forced labour, captivity, document control and obstruction of exit likewise sit outside what privacy protects. Equality asks a further question: whether people are being sent along unjustifiably different routes to what they are owed. These protections rest on their own rules, beyond the floor's refusal mechanism.

Movement has its own protection, checked separately; it gives no protection for food, shelter or another floor item.

Owed by whom

The public body named State owes each floor item to every person, and the rules divide the work among its tiers. The common tier finances the floor, equalises between regions, sets its minimum standards and backstops it for every person; its duties need nothing but personhood. A region must provide the floor, and a locality must reach the person and deliver it, where a witness authorised for that person records the person as present there. When a source and a separate independent reviewer, neither of them the failed body, certify that a region or locality has failed, the tier they name must assume continuity, and only a publicly answerable tier can be named. The failed body's own duty stands.

None of these allocations is a condition of the floor: each divides a debt already owed. A person whose presence nobody has recorded is owed everything, and the common tier's duties reach them. A rule confining someone for lacking a tier's duty is refused, as one confining them for lacking the debt is.

The State is itself publicly answerable: an exposure against it can attract the shield on the same terms as an exposure against another answerable actor. The State's record gives it no authority to sign findings as an examiner, and owing the floor grants no power to make a credibility finding against someone.

The floor debt is not a receipt. Bela is owed food and shelter, and on the record as it stands the delivery conclusions for both are absent. Nothing in the rules reads the debt itself or turns it into something received.

Ordinary delivery needs its own evidence: a recipient-side report, a witness authorised for that person, a matching item and scope, and separation between witness and provider. An alternate witness must meet the same conditions. Without a receipt the route is unsupported, and the entitlement stands. The next chapter follows that route.

Custody adds duties to secure shelter, voice, care and independent access. The rules conclude that Hano is a prisoner, and Hano's shelter and recorded speech still wait on evidence of their own: a lawful sentence and a report of physical holding each fall short of a shelter receipt or a record that the person spoke. A separate isolation finding requires positive evidence of denied contact for a specified holding, place and period; missing company evidence is not that evidence.

The rules distinguish entitlement, the responsible public function, evidence of arrival, challenge, interim continuity, individual remedy, common-cause correction, re-examination and recurrence checking. The chapter on who owes follows those duties and the independent offices that must act on them.

These conditions have costs, and particular people bear them. Among the tiers, only the common tier's finance and backstop duties reach a person whose presence nobody has recorded. Provision by a region and delivery by a locality begin with an authorised presence record, and an entry by a writer nobody authorised for the person allocates nothing. Continuity passes to another tier only once two separate parties certify the failure, so the people a failing locality serves depend on that certification; the failed body's word, or one attester's, moves nothing. And the debt is silent about arrival: the person owed depends on a receipt and an independent witness before the rules conclude that anything was delivered.

What this cannot settle

The presence record decides which region owes provision and which locality owes delivery, so an authorised witness who records the wrong place sends those duties to the bodies it names. The common tier's duties follow from personhood and stand either way.

Closing the record to direct entry of a delivery conclusion leaves a changed rule free to produce one. In one experiment, a rule simply says that every person has a selected floor condition. The altered design then reports that condition without a receipt, while a separately evidenced isolation finding stays in place. A delivery claim has to be checked against the evidence that supports it.

A different experiment changes what one floor debt promises. The changed rule still owes something to a person, but something other than the selected item. The test for that debt fails while the other debts continue to follow. Each item needs its own test, because the outward shape of a promise can survive a change to its content.

An offer, accessible and adequate provision, a finding reaching the office that must act, and completed restoration each need evidence of their own, beyond the debt. Whether any of them happens is a question for the second book.

Run it: the companion runs this chapter's cases on your own device, at dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/cases.

Argument: Owed to everyone, by someone

The companion states these rules as Article 3.

I choose a floor owed to every person as a debt, with a public body named as owing it, because a duty without a bearer leaves nobody to answer when food fails to arrive. Henry Shue argued that subsistence is a basic right and that each basic right brings duties to avoid depriving, to protect from deprivation and to aid the deprived.^[1] Asbjørn Eide's study for the United Nations set out duties to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food,^[2] which the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted in its General Comment 12.^[3]

The strongest alternative is the Committee's own standard. Under General Comment 12 the duty to provide food directly arises for people who are unable, for reasons beyond their control, to enjoy the right by the means at their disposal, and Eide placed fulfilment last, after people's own efforts. General Comment 3 finds a state failing on the face of it where a significant number of people lack essential food, primary health care, basic shelter or basic education, allowing for its resources.^[4] Its case is economy and self-reliance: provision goes to those who need it.

I depart at the condition. A test of inability waits on a finding about the person, and the person with nothing but a birth entry is least able to ask for it. So the floor is owed to each person, where the minimum core counts deprivation across a population. That costs what the conditional duty saves, and whoever funds the common tier pays for a debt owed also to people who could feed themselves.

The floor shares the Committee's refusal of a bare roof,^[5] but my shelter is narrower: weather, warmth, water and sanitation, where the Committee adds security of tenure, affordability, accessibility, location and cultural adequacy. Someone housed warmly on insecure terms is owed less by this item and bears the difference. For health the Committee names availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality, applied according to each state's conditions;^[6] the floor owes care to each person and asks separate evidence that it was accessible and adequate.

A second alternative keeps universality and drops the named goods. Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght defend an unconditional basic income paid to everyone, rich or poor, active or inactive, as the most realistic response to insecurity and exclusion.^[7] Finland ran a basic-income experiment in 2017 and 2018 and evaluated it officially,^[8] and a peer-reviewed analysis found its employment effects minor at best, with days in employment unchanged in the first year.^[9] I keep named goods because the entitlement names a condition and a payment is an input: money can be paid in a town with nothing to rent, and no payment secures company or bodily safety for someone who cannot arrange them. Recipients who would rather choose for themselves bear that cost.

I would reconsider the named goods if cash brought shelter, care and company to people who cannot manage money, a small child or an adult in crisis, as reliably as provision does. I would reconsider the unconditional debt only on evidence that a test of inability can be run without shutting out the people it exists to reach.