# 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*](https://dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/read/method/#method-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](https://dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/cases/#chapter-3).

## Argument: Owed to everyone, by someone

*The companion states these rules as [Article 3](https://dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/constitution/#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.[^shue] Asbjørn Eide's study for the United Nations
set out duties to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food,[^eide] which
the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted in its
General Comment 12.[^gc12]

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.[^gc3] 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,[^gc4] 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;[^gc14] 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.[^cash] Finland ran a basic-income experiment in 2017
and 2018 and evaluated it officially,[^finland] and a peer-reviewed analysis
found its employment effects minor at best, with days in employment unchanged
in the first year.[^finland-work] 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.

[^shue]: Henry Shue, [*Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign
    Policy*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691202280/basic-rights)
    (1980; 2nd ed. 1996; 40th anniversary ed. 2020), chapter 1, "Security and
    Subsistence", and chapter 2, "Correlative Duties". The three duties are
    taken from the chapter headings, the index and the publisher's
    description.

[^eide]: Asbjørn Eide, *Report on the right to adequate food as a human
    right*, [E/CN.4/Sub.2/1987/23](https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=E/CN.4/Sub.2/1987/23&l=en&t=pdf)
    (7 July 1987), paras 66–69 and 112–115, where fulfilment is the last
    level; and the [updated study](https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/12&l=en&t=pdf),
    E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/12 (28 June 1999), paras 52–53.

[^gc12]: UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
    [General Comment 12: The right to adequate food](https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=E/C.12/1999/5&l=en&t=pdf),
    E/C.12/1999/5 (12 May 1999), para. 15, and footnote 1, which credits the
    three levels to the published form of Eide's study.

[^gc3]: UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
    [General Comment 3: The nature of States parties' obligations](https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=INT%2FCESCR%2FGEC%2F4758&Lang=en)
    (fifth session, 1990), in E/1991/23, annex III, para. 10. The obligation
    is the state's, judged by whether a significant number of people are
    deprived, and a state pleading a lack of resources must show that every
    effort was made to use all the resources at its disposal.

[^gc4]: UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment
    4: The right to adequate housing (sixth session, 1991), in the
    [compilation HRI/GEN/1/Rev.9 (Vol. I)](https://docs.un.org/en/HRI/GEN/1/Rev.9(Vol.I)),
    paras 7–8, pp. 12–13: housing is more than "merely having a roof over
    one's head", and paragraph 8 lists seven aspects of adequacy.

[^gc14]: UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
    [General Comment 14: The right to the highest attainable standard of health](https://docs.un.org/en/E/C.12/2000/4),
    E/C.12/2000/4 (11 August 2000), para. 12.

[^cash]: Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght,
    [*Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane
    Economy*](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674237469) (Cambridge, MA:
    Harvard University Press, 2017), chapter 5, "Ethically Justifiable? Free
    Riding versus Fair Shares", on the objection that it rewards free riding.

[^finland]: Kangas, Jauhiainen, Simanainen and Ylikännö (eds.), *Suomen
    perustulokokeilun arviointi*, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health
    2020:15, [urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-00-9890-2](http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-00-9890-2),
    the official evaluation of the experiment's effects on wellbeing and
    employment.

[^finland-work]: Jouko Verho, Kari Hämäläinen and Ohto Kanninen, "Removing
    Welfare Traps: Employment Responses in the Finnish Basic Income
    Experiment", *American Economic Journal: Economic Policy* 14, no. 1
    (2022): 501–522, [doi:10.1257/pol.20200143](https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20200143).
    Its abstract reports employment effects that are minor at best, with days
    in employment statistically unchanged in the first year.

---

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