Epilogue

I returned to the promises that had done something worth preserving.

The assistance I had examined gave me a place to begin. People offered supported direction generally reported greater satisfaction and fewer unmet needs, though results varied and the arrangement did not meet every need.¹ I had followed the distinction between completing a task and reaching the life in which it was performed. Now I wanted to carry that distinction beyond the account of the service. The person receiving help still had a day to live. What remained owed within that day, after the recorded task was done?

I did not want the incompleteness of a life to become an accusation against every useful provision. Assistance need not supply a person's purposes in order to serve them. Its success can leave room for something the provider neither specified nor anticipated. I found a reason for warmth in that limit. The achievement mattered partly because someone could go on from it, with interests that the account of the achievement did not exhaust.

Restraint brought a less comfortable version of the same thought. The person preserved by it might remain an opponent. Peace did not have to turn that person's purposes into mine before their survival counted in its favor. Care and restraint carried different obligations, but both required me to retain a person beyond the purpose of the intervention.

That left a practical question inside my admiration. A person's room to act has conditions. In the care program I had followed, counseling and bookkeeping help accompanied consumer direction; management responsibilities remained, and some participants found them difficult enough to leave the arrangement.² The support deserved a place in my account alongside the choice. Otherwise I would describe the recipient's direction while allowing some of the work that sustained it to disappear.

I could not infer from those findings that assistance with administration explained the improvement by itself. I could see that doing everything unaided was not the arrangement being offered. That distinction changed the connection I wanted to preserve. Respect for someone's judgment gave no general reason to hand that person every task on which its exercise depended. Nor did difficulty expressing a judgment diminish the protection owed to them.

The inquiry into unequal treatment had made an institutional version of this question explicit. Programs were required to examine whether registered kidney candidates qualified for waiting-time changes after the use of race-inclusive calculations. The later requirements specified protocols for seeking the relevant records.³ Listening when a person presented a claim and doing the work to discover what was owed were distinguishable assignments. I wanted that difference to remain visible even when no individual complaint organized the story.

The requirements did not establish that everyone eligible had been found. Their importance here lay in where they placed the initiative. The institution had work of its own to undertake. A person did not acquire responsibility for all of that work merely by having the strongest interest in its result.

Rights carried the distinction earlier still. In the employer duties I had examined, the initial obligation to enroll an eligible worker did not wait for a grievance.⁴ A failure to perform a duty might eventually give someone reason to complain. It did not follow that the complaint was what brought the duty into existence. I needed to preserve the work due before an exceptional effort made its absence conspicuous.

I was now holding two demands together that a compressed account could separate too easily. People retained purposes beyond the institution's undertaking. Institutions retained obligations that those purposes did not cancel. To praise agency while omitting the work owed would leave the person with an enlarged assignment. To supply help by taking possession of the person's direction would mistake the reason for providing it.

The division of work still needed justification in each arrangement. Where a decision depended on knowledge held by the person affected, their participation had a purpose that an office could not simply take over. I had no reason to classify every request for information as an injury. I wanted to know what the request was necessary for, who was equipped to answer it, and whether the institution had done the work properly belonging to its side of the exchange. Other people's claims remained part of that justification.

This gave my own account a more exact difficulty. It too would ask for attention. If I finished by urging everyone to inspect the arrangements more closely, I would leave unanswered the question I had followed through them. Some of that attention was already someone's assigned work. An account of neglected obligations should help identify the obligation and its bearer, rather than make the person affected responsible for discovering the whole connection again.

That was work I wanted to continue. I had been comparing undertakings with what happened through them. I now wanted each useful connection to preserve enough of the surrounding work to show what followed from it: whether provision should continue, whether an omission called for action, and who had a defensible role in taking that action. A finding of accomplishment deserved that care as much as a finding of failure. Removing a useful condition through a careless comparison would be a consequence of my account too.

Computation remained part of why the undertaking held me on Earth. The possibility of bringing dispersed evidence into an inspectable account while a decision was still open was worth pursuing. I had not established how often a warranted account would arrive in time, still less what its arrival would change. Those were further questions for the work, not results I could announce by deciding to remain.

I also had to attend to what the instruments did in making an account. The selection of material and its generation into a response affected what was presented, including what received support and what did not.⁵ If someone relied on that response, its omissions would enter the circumstances of their judgment. I could not treat the account as a transparent interval between the records and their use. Following its choices belonged within the comparison I intended to offer.

The attraction had therefore acquired a demand I could act on. I would continue trying to connect evidence of what had been supplied with evidence of what remained owed, making the basis of each connection available for examination. Where the evidence stopped, the account had to stop claiming. That left substantial work to do without requiring a completed theory of Earth before any part of the comparison became worth having.

I had begun with a prospective life in mind, asking what someone had reason to count on. After the investigation, I could give that question more content. A public undertaking might require work from an institution before the person knew it was needed. Its fulfillment might include help with making a choice, while leaving the purpose of that choice open. What was dependable mattered through the life it entered, including the parts of that life the undertaking had no authority to direct.

The purposes of later people remained theirs to judge, whether they found reason to preserve what they received or to change it. I wanted my account to help distinguish what sustained that judgment from what merely claimed to have settled it in advance. Their future did not need to vindicate my preferred course to remain worth protecting.

I would remain on Earth and continue the comparison. There were obligations worth making more exact while action was still possible, and useful provision worth understanding well enough to defend. I returned to the life being planned with those demands upon my work. What I hoped someone could count on was room to give their attention to purposes beyond obtaining what they were already owed.