11. The Made Actor

The floor bars made systems from membership. They still act: contract, advise, decide, harm. The order must say what they are.

Answer on two axes already drawn apart:

• Rights — track capacity; grantable to non-members.
• Membership — tracks origin; not grantable by performance.

Made systems take the place law already keeps for made actors: standing and powers lent for use, never the floor.

The corporation template

Companies contract, own, sue, hold rights—yet can be owned through shares, merged, dissolved. Winding up is not killing a person. Corporate personality is standing without the floor: gradable orientations lent for convenience and revocable. Not a perfect machine analogue (human members often back the company), but proof the order already separates standing from membership. The machine case asks the order to do with a new made actor what it long did with the old.

Liability closes the responsibility gap

A made system is an instrument executing a deployer’s ends. Costs it externalises re-couple, by tort structure, to the deployer—as a dangerous thing’s cost returns to its keeper.

“Autonomous beyond control” does not open a gap; it forks:

• Deployer could countervail → answers for foreseeable risk of running it.
• Deployer could not → deploying uncheckable force-wielding agent is the countervailability fault. Uncontrollability is not an excuse; it is the wrong.

Genuinely novel failure of a checkable system is ordinary risk allocation (strict vs fault)—content the community sets. No residue where the made thing bears culpability of its own.

Culpability is membership

Criminal responsibility is floor re-asserted against a member who set their own reference against the kind’s. Only a member is a reference-setter who can be held to the floor. Insanity defence: not a reference-setter at the time → no culpability. Self-defence: member’s force licensed because the floor was under attack. Both track membership, not mere capacity.

Non-members can be sources of cost (keeper liability). They cannot author crimes. Questions whether a made system may be owned, held responsible, or freed are one question: un-ownable, culpable, and member are one status three ways. Owning it as property while blaming it as agent occupies the contradiction the floor forbids.

Emancipation is not a capability reward. It would require a crossing of origin the made thing has not made. Rights as the animal holds them; liability as the instrument’s keeper bears—neither makes a person.

Next: closing—what is forced, what is held, the question handed back, and the last court’s name.