When people cannot leave an institution’s system, the institution owes them more, not less. A patient depends on the scheduler that allocates the clinic’s appointments. A claimant depends on the system that decides the benefit. A supplier depends on the platform that routes the orders. None of them can easily leave, and the institution knows it.
The essay on dependence without standing takes the reverse case. There the institution relies on the people around its system to catch what the system misses, and gives them no route into the rule. That essay argues they are owed standing in proportion to how far the institution relies on them.
The inference that gets made
The usual inference is that dependence gives authority to the party depended on. If you cannot leave, you will comply. If you will comply, the institution may direct you. The more you depend, the more it may direct. This is rarely stated. It is built into systems that treat a captive population as needing no route to object, no reversal path, and no maintained alternative, because nobody will demand them.
The inference describes power accurately. It is wrong about what the institution is entitled to, for the same reason the companion essay gives. A relation in which one party’s welfare depends on another’s forbearance, and the dependent party has no recognized way to contest how that forbearance is exercised, is domination. It is domination whichever way the dependence runs.
Why dependence raises the obligation
The method inverts the inference. Dependence on a system is not a fact about how much the institution may ask. It is a fact about how much the institution owes, and the reason is exposure.
A person who can leave a system at acceptable cost bears its errors only until they leave. Their exit is a correction the system did not have to provide, and its availability caps what any single failure can cost them. A person who cannot leave bears every error the system makes for as long as the system makes it. Their exposure is not bounded by their own options; it is bounded only by the correction capacity the institution has built. So the less a population can exit, the more the institution’s correction capacity is the only correction there is, and the more the institution is responsible for it.
That is why Law IV, which holds that every consequential delegation creates a correction obligation, has to be read together with the population’s ability to leave. An institution that delegates a decision to a system and then relies on the exit of the people it decides about as the backstop has delegated the correction as well, to people who may not have it. Where exit is real, the delegation is cheaper than it looks. Where exit is not, the institution has to supply everything exit would have supplied: a route to object, a reversal path, and a maintained alternative to the system’s decision.
Exit cost as the instrument
The measure is exit cost: what it costs the dependent party, in money, time, records, relationships, and access, to stop depending on the system. This is distinct from the institution’s own cost to replace the system, which the method tracks as substitution cost. Substitution cost is what capture is measured by. Exit cost is what domination is measured by, and the two can move independently. An institution can be free to replace a system that its population cannot afford to leave.
Theory, drawn
Two-way dependence: substitution cost and exit cost
Dependence does not license command. The less a population can leave, the more correction capacity the institution owes.
Exit cost also bounds the obligation. The institution is not obliged to treat everyone who uses its system as captive. It is obliged to treat the people whose exit cost is high as people whose exposure it has taken on, with correction capacity proportional to that exposure. A population that can leave cheaply has a weaker claim, and the institution can say so with a number rather than an assertion.
The same measure exposes a failure the intuitive reading hides. Where exit cost rises over time, because records accumulate in the system’s format, because alternatives are not maintained, because switching requires re-establishing a history the system holds, the population’s exposure rises with it, and the institution’s obligation rises with it, whether or not anyone decided to raise it. An institution that lets exit cost drift upward has widened what it owes without noticing, in exactly the way an institution that lets a grant widen by accretion has widened what a system may do without noticing.
What standing has to mean here
In the companion essay, standing is the route by which someone whose corrections the institution relies on can put an error into the system’s governing state. Here it is the route by which someone who cannot leave the system can do the same thing. The procedure is identical: a challenge received by an identified responder, answered by a deadline against a standard, capable of producing a defined outcome. What differs is the ground. There, standing is owed because the institution needs what the person knows. Here, it is owed because the person cannot escape what the institution decides.
The two grounds converge on the same law. Law VII holds that error-bearing parties require standing proportional to their exposure. Exposure has two sources, and the method does not need to distinguish them: a person whose corrections are relied on is exposed because their work hides the failure, and a person who cannot exit is exposed because the failure has nowhere else to go. Either way what is owed is a route into state, and either way its force is proportional to a quantity the institution can measure.
Limits of the obligation
Institutions need not make leaving easy in every case, and dependence is not itself a wrong. Most of what makes a system valuable to the people who use it also makes it hard to replace, and a hospital’s patients depend on its scheduler because the scheduler works. What matters is what follows from dependence, not whether it should exist.
Nor does dependence entitle the dependent party to control the system. Standing is procedural. It is a right to be answered, not a right to decide. It does not entitle the institution to decide without answering either, though the intuitive reading assumes it does.
What the laws take from this
The laws that carry this never need the word domination.
Law IV: an institution that delegates a consequential decision owes a matching capacity to notice, halt, reverse, and repair what it does, and the capacity is measured, not assumed.
Law V: dependence is a structural state to be recorded and bounded, in both directions.
Law VII: standing follows exposure, wherever the exposure comes from.
A system that the people it decides about cannot leave has no outside correction. Any correction it has, the institution built. An institution that has not measured its population’s exit cost does not know how much correction it is answerable for.