Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
Freedom Is Reciprocal: The Boundary of Reciprocity
Why “your freedom ends where my nose begins” is the most underrated piece of political philosophy ever written—and why AI makes it more urgent than ever.
The Noise Problem
It’s 3 AM in the MOSAIC. The Sonic Arts Commons—a community of experimental musicians, sound designers, and audio engineers—is in the middle of a breakthrough session. They’ve figured out how to synthesize infrasound that induces feelings of awe. It’s beautiful. It’s revolutionary. It’s also rattling the windows of the Quiet Contemplation Commons next door, whose residents are trying to sleep, meditate, and not have their heart rhythms disrupted by subsonic pressure waves.
Both communities are, technically, exercising their freedom.
The noise-makers claim artistic liberty. The sleepers claim bodily autonomy. In the old world, this ends in lawsuits, city council hearings, or passive-aggressive note-leaving. Someone eventually wins, someone loses, and both resent each other forever.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: both are right. The musicians really do have a legitimate claim to creative expression. The meditators really do have a legitimate claim to rest and health. “Freedom” alone doesn’t solve this. Freedom plus freedom equals collision.
This is where the fourth axiom of the Five Laws comes in: Freedom is Reciprocal. Your liberty extends exactly as far as it doesn’t constrain someone else’s capacity to flourish. It’s a two-way street, a handshake, a treaty baked into the architecture of civilization itself.
The Ghost of John Stuart Mill
In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty and articulated what became known as the “harm principle”: the only legitimate reason for society to interfere with individual freedom is to prevent harm to others. You can drink yourself silly—that’s your business. But you can’t drink yourself silly and then drive a car through a crowd. Your body, your choice, up until the point where your choices start affecting other bodies.
This sounds obvious now. It was revolutionary then. For most of human history, governments didn’t need a reason to restrict you. Kings restricted because they were kings. Priests restricted because God said so. The radical claim was that interference required justification—that the default state of a human being is free, and that freedom can only be trimmed by proving harm.
Modern applications of Mill’s principle show both its power and its limitations. The principle works beautifully for clear-cut cases: you can’t stab people, even if stabbing them expresses your authentic self. But it gets murky fast. Does hate speech “harm” people? Does spreading misinformation “harm” public health? Does monopolizing a market “harm” consumers who can’t point to a specific bruise?
Mill himself was wrestling with a nineteenth-century problem set: factory owners exploiting workers, religious authorities policing morality, governments censoring newspapers. He couldn’t have imagined a world where a tech company’s algorithm could shape the thoughts of three billion people, or where a billionaire could buy enough resources to make everyone else’s freedom functionally meaningless.
The harm principle needs an upgrade. Enter reciprocal freedom.
Beyond Non-Interference: The Pettit Upgrade
The philosopher Philip Pettit noticed something Mill missed. There’s a difference between not being interfered with and not being dominated.
Consider a slave whose master happens to be benevolent. The master never beats the slave, never restricts their movement, lets them pursue their interests freely. By Mill’s standard, the slave is “free”—no interference is occurring. But Pettit points out that this is absurd. The slave isn’t free. The slave is lucky. At any moment, the master could change their mind. The master’s goodwill is arbitrary—it could be withdrawn for any reason or no reason. The slave lives at the master’s pleasure, even if that pleasure happens to be generous.
This is domination without interference. And it’s exactly what happens when economic power concentrates without structural checks.
A worker in 2025 might not be “interfered with” by their employer in any obvious way. But if losing that job means losing healthcare, losing housing, losing the ability to feed their children—then every “choice” that worker makes is constrained by the knowledge that their employer could destroy their life. The employer doesn’t have to actually do anything. The possibility is enough. The worker isn’t free. They’re lucky.
Reciprocal freedom addresses this. It’s not enough that nobody is actively interfering with you right now. Your freedom must be structurally secure. You must not be subject to arbitrary power, period. And this means that concentrated power—even power that isn’t currently being abused—is itself a threat to freedom.
The Unscarcity Implementation
In the MOSAIC framework, Freedom is Reciprocal functions as a constraint on both individual action and institutional design. Let’s see how it handles our 3 AM noise problem.
The Sonic Arts Commons can’t claim “artistic freedom” as a trump card. Why? Because their artistic freedom is actively destroying the Quiet Contemplation Commons’ capacity to exist. Freedom isn’t a one-player game. When two freedoms collide, the answer isn’t “whoever is louder wins.” The answer is negotiation within boundaries.
The solution in this case: soundproofing at the Sonic Arts Commons’ expense. They’re free to make any noise they want—really, any noise at all—they just can’t export the costs to people who didn’t consent. This is the reciprocity in action. Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my face, and your freedom to generate 120-decibel subsonic waves ends at my bedroom wall.
The principle scales up to much larger conflicts. Chapter 3 of the book describes a watershed dispute between the Synthesis Commons (high-tech neural researchers needing water for cooling) and the Kyoto Heritage Commons (traditional rice farmers whose paddies have been fed by those streams for four hundred years). Both claimed the water. Both had legitimate uses. The solution wasn’t declaring a winner—it was finding the actual constraint (both had over-estimated their needs) and negotiating a boundary that let both flourish.
The key insight: the boundary isn’t fixed. It’s negotiated when both parties share the same facts and seek the same ultimate goals.
Why This Matters Now: The AI Freedom Problem
Here’s where things get spicy.
We’re building AI systems that will make decisions affecting billions of people. These systems will allocate resources, flag behaviors, optimize outcomes. They’ll have enormous power to interfere—and even more power to dominate without visible interference.
Consider an algorithm that decides your credit score, your job applications’ visibility, your healthcare recommendations, your housing options. It might never explicitly “interfere” with you in any single decision. But its accumulated effects shape your entire life. You’re not free. You’re optimized.
This is domination at scale, and it’s almost invisible. There’s no master cracking a whip. There’s just a probability distribution that happens to deprioritize you, over and over, until your options have narrowed to a corridor you never chose.
Reciprocal freedom says: this is not acceptable. Not because anyone is being mean to you. Because your freedom is being structurally constrained by systems you didn’t consent to and can’t challenge. The principle demands that such systems be transparent (see Axiom II: Truth Must Be Seen) and that their power over you decay over time (see Axiom IV: Power Must Decay).
The EU AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, represents humanity’s first serious attempt to regulate AI based on these principles. But its carve-outs for national security and law enforcement show how easily the principle gets compromised. The Unscarcity framework goes further: reciprocal freedom applies to all systems that affect conscious beings, without exception.
The Jim Crow Test
“Freedom” without reciprocity is just a weapon for the strong.
White Americans in the Jim Crow South claimed “freedom of association” to exclude Black Americans from restaurants, schools, and neighborhoods. Segregationists argued they were simply exercising their property rights—their freedom to choose whom they served. This was legally protected liberty under the prevailing interpretation.
But this “freedom” existed only because it was taking freedom away from someone else. The capacity of Black Americans to flourish—to eat, to travel, to build wealth, to participate in society—was being systematically destroyed by the “freedom” of those who dominated them. It wasn’t liberty. It was tyranny in nicer clothes.
Reciprocal freedom exposes this. The test is simple: does your exercise of freedom constrain someone else’s capacity to flourish? If yes, that’s not freedom—that’s domination wearing a costume. The boundary of reciprocity means you can’t hoard so much that others can’t access the baseline. You can’t monopolize so completely that others have no meaningful choices. You can’t structure systems so that your advantage is their disadvantage.
This is why the Foundation (the universal baseline of food, shelter, healthcare, energy) exists before the Frontier (the realm of earned merit and competitive striving). Freedom means nothing if your basic existence is contingent on someone else’s goodwill. You have to be able to say “no” and survive. Only then can you truly say “yes.”
The Balance with Other Axioms
Freedom is Reciprocal is one of the three “Guiding Axioms” in the Five Laws—principles that require ongoing judgment and deliberation. It doesn’t override the Foundational Principles (Truth Must Be Seen, Power Must Decay), which are structural safeguards that can never be suspended.
But it does interact with the other Guiding Axioms:
Experience is Sacred (the Prime Axiom) sets the ultimate goal: nurturing conscious experience. Reciprocal freedom is how we protect experience—by ensuring that no one’s flourishing is sacrificed to another’s ambition.
Difference Sustains Life provides the insurance policy. Diverse ways of living aren’t just tolerated; they’re protected, because uniformity is a civilizational risk. Reciprocal freedom means the Heritage Commons can reject neural laces, even if the Synthesis Commons finds this “backward”—because the boundary of reciprocity protects different experiments in living.
When these axioms conflict—when expanding one person’s freedom seems to require constraining another’s—the system doesn’t have a formula that spits out an answer. It has a process: negotiation, facilitation, transparent fact-finding, and boundary-drawing that respects both parties’ core needs.
The Handshake at the Heart of Civilization
Freedom is Reciprocal is, ultimately, a recognition that we are not alone.
Libertarian fantasies of absolute individual sovereignty break down the moment there’s a second person on the island. My freedom and your freedom are going to bump into each other. The question is whether we bump like billiard balls—colliding randomly, the larger one winning—or whether we bump like dancers, finding rhythm in our interdependence.
The MOSAIC is a dance floor. The Five Laws are the music. And reciprocal freedom is the basic step: I make room for you, you make room for me, and together we move through a space neither of us could have created alone.
The Sonic Arts Commons got their 120-decibel experiments. The Quiet Contemplation Commons got their silence. Neither had to give up their core mission. The boundary was drawn at the point where costs got exported without consent—and on the other side of that boundary, both were free.
That’s the deal. That’s the handshake. That’s civilization.
References
- UnscarcityBook, Chapter 3: “The MOSAIC of Commons (Governance)”
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) - The original harm principle
- Philip Pettit, “What Is Republicanism?” (2024) - Freedom as non-domination
- Philip Pettit, “Republican Freedom in Choice, Person and Society” (2024) - Latest formulation
- Cambridge University: Mill’s Harm Principle and Free Speech - Expanding the notion of harm
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Republicanism - Historical roots of non-domination
- EU AI Act Overview - First comprehensive AI regulation framework
- The Foundational Principles - Axioms II and IV: the structural safeguards
- Experience Is Sacred - The Prime Axiom
- The Foundation - Universal baseline guarantees
- The Ascent - Merit and competitive striving
- Proof of Diversity - Why difference is a survival mechanism
