domination

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Domination is the systematic subordination of some beings’ agency to the projects of others within an enduring arrangement of power. It treats those who bear a regime’s burdens as material for its projects rather than as participants with a claim on the world being made. It is therefore more specific than constraint, unequal influence or power understood simply as capacity for effects.

Explanation

AB distinguishes enabling constraint from domination and places domination among the negative limits of the World-Making Imperative. The issue is not the absence of every limit, but whether the arrangement preserves others as co-authors or systematically reduces their agency to the service of another trajectory.

RB3 emphasizes that all regimes select and exclude possibilities, while domination secures some projects through the subordination of others. Its constitutional formulation pairs this limit with irreversible harm and capture of judgment. Emergency triage cannot turn domination into a permissible default or a supposedly lesser harm.

PB preserves the substantive prohibition in its ethical formulations and offers a separate formal representation among the red lines. That model does not replace the ethical concept or prove its binding force. Conditional discussion of future artificial beings likewise does not establish that present AI systems possess the standing under discussion.

Scope and attribution

Preserve the proposed ethical entry and the source’s explicit threshold rather than expanding it to all asymmetry.

AB — The Actual Book

Domination subordinates agency and denies co-authorship, unlike constraint as such.

Occurrence locators: 172, 174, 178, 182, 183, 191, 193; Glossary: 225; Notes: 249; Appendix: 280, 281, 285, 287, 288.

PB — The Possible Book

The ethical red line and its formal representation remain distinct.

Occurrence locators: 34, 38, 64, 65, 106, 143, 155, 156, 175, 180, 181.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Systematic subordination distinguishes domination from every regime’s selection of possibilities.

Occurrence locators: 191, 192, 196, 198, 199, 211, 220, 221, 223, 224, 228, 230, 234, 241, 243, 254, 256, 259, 262, 266, 267, 290, 298, 299, 307, 317, 318, 321; Living in a World of Relations: 345.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.