Social Contract Theory under Heterogeneous Subject Conditions: Membership, Representation, Mediation, and Shared Nomos

This preliminary paper investigates social-contract justification where subjects exhibit heterogeneous capacities for communication, decision-making, legal participation, collective organization and dependence. It distinguishes membership, protected interests, consent, legal capacity, supported agency, contractual authorization, representation, mediation, and the legitimate formation of shared normative orders. Hobbesian authorization, Rousseauian political association, Rawlsian representation and inclusive democratic theory provide distinct interlocutors rather than a unitary contractual canon. Selected legal illustrations include disability rights, children's participation, Indigenous self-representation and the statutory legal personality of Te Awa Tupua, with their source-specific legal effects preserved. A three-level Generative Relational approach suspends ultimate ontological commitments, studies historically effective relations and examines their context-dependent manifestations. AI participation and hypothetical extraterrestrial interlocutors are evaluated as speculative boundary cases; current legal obligations concerning AI systems govern identified human and organizational actors according to their applicable regimes. The paper proposes an open framework for comparing direct agreement, supported participation, delegated representation, mediated coordination and non-contractual duties of protection; the common analytical vocabulary does not presume identical legal status across these cases. The analysis covers membership, support, representation, power, institutional competence, temporal change, and counterexamples. It identifies source-specific criteria for assessing whether a relational arrangement supports authorization, contestable coordination, and independently grounded duties of protection, while specifying limits of the proposed formal representations.