The Vampire Apocalypse and the Ontological Duality of Rights

It’s Hallowe’en and the No-deal Brexit deadline has come and gone. Brexiters are out on the streets in their dozens to express their disappointment that the country did not crash out of its international relationships and obligations into the sunlit uplands of a grey English November day.

But what would it have meant? What was this project that the last two Prime Ministers seemed so bent on? For what did they intend that ordinary citizens should be prepared to go without basic medications, ports jammed with trucks clearing customs and a hard border with the United Kingdom’s nearest neighbour?

In the spirit of Hallowe'en I thought I might share a few thoughts about the ontological nature of rights in relation to the narrowly-averted No-deal Brexit. 

I’ve been thinking about what it means when a government withdraws some vital right from its citizens, such as rights to data privacy or the right to life. Recent examples range from the proposals to make British people’s data available to US firms in a future UK/US trade deal in contravention of the legal rights under which that data was handed across, to more serious matters around healthcare – for UK citizens in the EU and for people in the UK whose vital medical supplies would have been disrupted by a No-deal Brexit.

As an obligate hæmophage the latter is of particular concern to me if a no-deal Brexit were to happen. I should qualify that I am not an active hæmophage, and never will be for as long as basic medical supplies of certain endocrines, in my case thyroxine, remain available. Nor does it now seem that thyroxine was on the list of medications that UK citizens were to go without if the government’s intended ‘No deal’ form of Brexit went ahead, unlike the medications needed by many others. But we only know this because a Belfast newspaper published a list. So while it seems that those of you with the appropriate endocrines in your veins can rest easy in terms of what we potential hæmophages need to do to stay alive, it would be extending too much credit to the UK government to say that they were not prepared for people to go without thyroxine, or any other particular medication. Information on the supply chains that would be affected by a no-deal Brexit for medications has been very hard to come by, and one wonders whether the government itself had a handle on these.

But that is not the point here. I and many others may turn out to be OK, after many months of worrying otherwise and having to make drastic life plan alterations to mitigate against the personal risks this represents. Others will be less fortunate if no-deal ever does happen, in particular those whose medications have a short shelf life such as Type 1 diabetics, and those whose treatments require radioactive elements, the half-lives of which render any delay in the supply chain intolerable.

The point though is that this UK government, both under May and now under johnson, was willing to risk whosever lives it took, to tear up all the UK’s existing EU treaties and in so doing introduce constrictions and congestion into the supply chains for vital medical and other supplies. Regardless of today’s actual outcome, they were willing to withdraw this right from any number of the country’s residents. These are the implications of going after a No-deal Brexit.

None of this is an objection to Brexit itself – I don’t like it but if the majority really want it, it can be done within a proper legal framework.

Put simply, this government indicated itself willing to withdraw the right to life. In the teeth of considerable Parliamentary and juridical opposition it continued to pursue a course of action in which this right would be actively withdrawn, right up to the end.

Let’s say that again: The Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was prepared to withdraw the right to life.

That is a pretty basic right.

What does this mean?

This is not a blog post about politics. Today I want to explore something about meaning. What does it ‘mean’ for a government to withdraw the right to life?

What does anything mean?

A bunch of us have been getting together to unpack the more interesting corners of meaning. This is the realm of formal ‘semantics’ – put simply, how we formally pin down the meaning of one concept or another using a combination of formal logic and applied cognitive science. We use the logic to make unambiguous statements about what something is (‘There is this thing, it is a kind of one of those and it is distinguished from other kinds of those by this this and this’). That’s what we call ontology. Then we use the basics of cognitive science to consider how we build out the meanings of complex concepts, like credit default swaps or oregano or the right to play a song, by fixing these in a network of concepts (called a ‘semantic network’) in which these complex concepts are derived from combinations of semantically primitive, or foundational concepts. These foundational concepts may be things like goals, identity, commitments or a particular shade of blue. Just as the meanings in human brains arise from combinations of our sensory inputs, so concepts in the wider social and business world arise out of primitive notions like rights and obligations, social and linguistic acts, intentions and so on. Everything else is just a combination of these: kinds of something, framed in terms of their features, that are themselves defined with reference to other kinds of something. This is what we call a ‘foundational’ ontology.

So we started looking at what would be a good semantic model, a foundational ontology, for ownership, rights and related concepts.

It turns out there are two sides to two sides to this.

First we look at the basic ontology of transactions. This is known as the Resource, Event, Agent (REA) ontology and was created by leading researchers in the accounting space [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resources,_events,_agents_(accounting_model)].

Under the REA ontology any transaction can be considered as an exchange of two or more sets of Commitments (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The REA Ontology of Transactions and Commitments

Note that in ontology we focus on concepts, not words. While the words ‘commitment’ and ‘obligation’ may be used interchangeably in general speech, we will pin down one concept and call it Commitment, and later we will formalize another concept and call it Obligation.

In a typical transaction for goods or services, one Commitment may be the commitment to deliver some goods, while the other, reciprocal Commitment in that transaction would be the commitment to pay an agreed amount of money in settlement for those goods. Each Commitment has detailed terms setting out how the parties agree to deliver the goods or the payment (or indeed, other goods in exchange).

The REA ontology can be further generalized to frame any kind of contract, not only those which exchange measurable commitments in a financial transaction. So for example a property rental agreement may include the commitment not to play loud music after 11pm. This is still a Commitment.

The concept of Commitment as it is understood here is not specific to one or other party; it is an ‘in the round’ or ‘helicopter’ view of that which is a commitment, as seen from the perspective of any neutral observer. The Commitment has two parties to it, an Obligor and a Beneficiary.

One early criticism of REA was that it does not represent accounting concepts in a way that is compatible with traditional double-entry book-keeping. This is not a weakness. By representing the concepts that accounting deals with, without framing these from the perspective of one party whose books are being represented, REA provides a sound overall semantic framework for understanding transactions and other contractual exchanges.

To address these concerns, the Semantic Shed [ www.semanticshed.org ], a community of practice in business semantics modeling, developed a bridging ontology to connect the REA terms to basic double-entry book-keeping terms. To do this, we used a basic ontological trick: for any given kind of thing in the world, we define what it means to be some ‘side’ or ‘aspect’ of that thing. This may be one side of a coin, one face of a die, or one aspect of some less physical thing, like a Commitment, from the perspective of one or other participant (party) to that Commitment. This notion of an Aspect specializes a more general ontological notion of some ‘contextually defined thing’ (sometimes called ‘Relative Thing’). Figure 2 shows this trick.

Figure 2: Aspects of a Commitment

In this case, contexts of the ‘aspects’ of some Commitment are the perspectives of one or other party: the obligor and the beneficiary. The two sides of a Commitment as seen from these parties’ perspective we call a Right and an Obligation. Note again that while the words Obligation and Commitment may be used interchangeably in general discourse, here Obligation means a Commitment as seen from the perspective of the Obligor. The other side of the same Commitment is called a Right.

These Rights and Obligations, as seen from the perspective of some one party, can then be reflected in books of accounts as assets and liabilities respectively, provided these can be expressed in monetary terms, as in transactions for goods or services.

One party’s Right is the other party’s Obligation. If we consider one Commitment in a general goods transaction, the Commitment to deliver the goods, this Commitment has two parties: the delivering party and the receiving party. From the perspective of the delivering party, this is the Obligation to deliver the goods; from the point of view of the receiving party (the buyer in the overall transaction), it is the Right to receive those goods. The other Commitment that makes up the transaction similarly can be viewed as being the Obligation to pay for those goods or as the Right to receive that payment, depending on your viewpoint. One Commitment’s Obligor is the other Commitment’s Beneficiary, and vice versa.

All transactions, and contractual exchanges more generally, have two dualities:

1. The duality of Commitments: one Commitment is exchanged in consideration for another in a transaction or contract;
2. The dual viewpoints of each Commitment, as an Obligation to one party and as a Right to the other

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What does this mean for Rights more generally? We speak of certain inalienable rights, such as the right to free expression, the right to life and so on. Normally we refer to these as being simple, singular things in their own right. Since some of these were hard-won over the centuries, it is appropriate that we do so. However, even these universally enjoyed rights may be framed in terms of the double duality of contracts.

This matters when we consider what happens when a rogue government (and if you have a better name for any government that would subject its people to a sudden reduction in rights, I would like to hear it) decides to withdraw the right to life for a section of the populace for which it is responsible.

Figure 3: What it Means to Own Something

Consider for example what it means to own something (Figure 3).

Ownership consists of a number of rights; for example the right to hold something, the right to dispose of that something as the owner sees fit, the right to benefit from that something in various ways, and so on. Some of these are shown in Figure 3, though there is more detail to be found.

Ownership also includes the right to control something – you can own something without controlling it, for example if you own a fleet of cars and rent those out. But you could only confer that right to the renter because it was yours to confer as a result of your owning that thing.

Each of these rights forms one side of one Commitment. At this point the language runs out of words, since we don’t normally speak in formal ontology. There is some Commitment, of which these rights, like the right to life, are one aspect. The corresponding Obligation is a little vaguer – basically the counterparty to the owner of something is society as a whole. If you live in a society where the concept of ownership exists, then society, in conferring upon you the right to enjoy a thing that you own, participates in (is a party to) that Commitment by virtue of committing not to interfere in your enjoyment of that thing. For example, not to take that thing away. Not to steal your stuff.

There are some societies, for example the Xoi San of Southern Africa, where this concept of ownership apparently does not exist, or is framed in very different terms. It is a given society or culture that recognizes or does not recognize the concept of ownership, and in the case where we do have this concept in our society, it is that society which enables the existence of the Ownership commitment, under which you as Owner get to enjoy the thing and we as the rest of society, as party to that same commitment, are obliged to leave it in your hands.

If that is one Commitment, what is the ‘Contract’? And what is the other Commitment on the other side of that contract?

This is the ‘Social Contract’. We will Leave aside for now such nuances as whether the Social Contract is based in society at large or in government or the legal system specifically – each of these will give rise to broader or narrower kinds of Social Contract with specific distinguishing features.

The Social Contract is a contract, so it is something in which two sets of Commitments are exchanged. In one set, we have things like the Ownership Commitment above, along with those Commitments of which the right we enjoy are the rights to life, to free assembly, to free expression and so on. Figure 4 shows the overall picture.

  

Figure 4: The Social Contract

If the Social Contract is a Contract, then what is the other side of this? That is, not the other aspect of the Commitment (we have that already) but the other Commitment in the Social Contract?

What is exchanged for those Commitments is our own commitment to society. These are my commitments not to steal people’s stuff; not to beat people up or interfere with them; not to prevent their exercise of free speech and so on. On that side of the Social Contract then are those Commitments of which I am the Obligor: to do or refrain from doing those things that impact on the rights of others in society, and thereby of society as a whole. These may even include things like the Obligation to pay taxes, in the case of the kind of contract that we have with governments.

As an example, society and the government it appoints has an obligation to maintain the peace. In the early days in the UK this was called ‘The King’s Peace’ – it was new enough that people saw and named it as a real, identifiable thing. This is the Commitment (seen in the round). Government has an obligation to maintain the King’s Peace and we as individuals have the right to enjoy it. On the other side of the social contract, to which we have made a bundle of Commitments, one of these represents (to us) our obligation not to disturb the Peace. If I disturb the peace (actually called ‘Disturbing the Peace’), this carries with it certain liabilities. This is the mechanism whereby each of us ‘paying in’ to our individual Commitment to society, this being aggregated into the obligation that society pays back to each one of us, in terms of the Peace and other well defined Obligations.

If I breach these obligations – if I violate, from my side, the Social Contract Commitments of which I am the Obligor, the word for me is Criminal.

Using this language – the ontology of the double-duality of rights – we can address such questions as: What does it mean if society has extended to me none of the rights in return for which it expects certain obligations from me? Or what does it mean if a government takes it upon itself to unilaterally revoke one or more of the rights to which I have been accustomed, and for which I have engaged in a firm Commitment to that society?

These are difficult and dangerous questions. The reason we try to discourage governments from rowing backwards on the Commitments to which it is a party, such as the Right-to-life Commitment, is because we have all entered, in good faith, into a transaction with our country, our society and our government, in which we extend to that society as a whole our own Commitments, and expect in return the reciprocal commitments on their side of the deal.

As soon as that is not the case, we are no longer equal participants (parties) in society. Ontologically, this is Feudalism. We had moved far beyond that. Yet some in positions of what they call power (in fact positions of responsibility for discharging Society’s obligations towards us) would want to return us to this one-sided feudal set-up (which is not really a contract as it is one sided), in which the government can dispose of the populace’s rights as it sees fit. This is not the thing we signed up to.

We could, in theory, go out and indulge in all manner anti-social behaviors, from hæmophagy on down. We won’t, because we believe that most of you are good people who would hold up your end of the Social Contract even when your government does not. But you have an ontological emergency on your hands: the nature of a contract is that it cannot be allowed to remain unbalanced indefinitely. Claims become due eventually – someone has to pay the ferryman.

As it turns out, even while the government showed itself willing to withdraw from key aspects of the social contract, the parliament and the (Scottish) judiciary fought a principled struggle to prevent this happening. They prevailed. Thanks to their efforts, the social contract has not been broken, at least so far. We wait for the next deadline in January but it seems less likely that we will face the governance failure of a no-deal Brexit. The apocalypse has been averted.

What sort of apocalypse would this have been?

There seems a peculiar fascination in popular culture with the notion of a zombie apocalypse – as though in any scenario where society as we know it breaks down, our antagonists are the mindless, living dead. People without agency. If there ever is any kind of apocalypse, it is realistic to assume that society’s counterparties will be of a more proactive frame of mind. Not the undead but people wanting to stay alive, whatever it takes. If the social contract ever does break down, it is not the mindless undead we should fear but the disenfranchised living. It is not a Zombie Apocalypse but a Vampire Apocalypse we should prepare for.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Mike Bennett

London

October 31 2019