Jurisprudence and Justice in Generative Relational Systems: A Preliminary Position Paper on the Generation of Subjects, Causation, and Responsibility

Modern law possesses a refined apparatus for relations, structures, and causal chains, and criminal causation is among the most developed causal theories in any normative discipline. This paper argues that the difficulty presented by heterogeneous generative relational systems lies elsewhere, in the form that legal representation is able to take. Four claims are advanced. First, law generates the subjects it requires to be antecedent to the acts it attributes, and its capacity doctrines locate that generation in natural fact, official act, or individual condition, while a small family of status doctrines already locates it in relational pattern. Second, legal causal representation carries six requirements, namely apportionment, co-level control, reversibility, locality, rate, and a fixed grammar, and generative systems violate each of them independently. Third, those requirements are projected from the form of the available judgment: acyclicity follows from finality, a binary measure of contribution follows from the binary verdict, a fractional measure follows from divisible damages, and locality follows from territorial jurisdiction. Fourth, every attribution device in law is a control test, so a system that generates its objects at a level no participant occupies can be neither obligor nor obligee, and law reaches such systems only by fiction, by proxy insertion, by personification, or by channelling. A constructed case of several parties coupled through one generative system, with no communication among them, exhibits a configuration for which the doctrine of joint attribution has no category, since it supplies causal coupling in the absence of normative coupling. The paper closes on two positive questions, the recognition of relationally generated value and the conditions under which the generation of a relation can be known at all, together with the conditions under which its claims would fail.