Reflexive Capture: Formative Authority and the Governance of Relation-Produced Dependence

Abstract

Relationships that form human agency often require dependence. Teachers possess expertise students lack; mentors control access to practices trainees are still learning to navigate; caregivers may provide assistance without which important dimensions of agency could not be exercised. Dependence and asymmetric authority therefore cannot themselves constitute failures of freedom. Yet a distinctive problem arises when institutional arrangements over which a formative authority exercises meaningful discretion materially increase the formed person’s dependence upon that same relationship. The resulting dependence may enlarge the authority’s practical leverage while making the arrangements that produced it more costly to contest. I call this structure reflexive capture.

Reflexive capture is not a new theory of domination, vulnerability, dependence, hold-up, undue influence, fiduciary obligation, or relational autonomy. Those literatures already explain much of the surrounding terrain: why asymmetric dependence generates power; why inadequately controlled dependence may threaten freedom; how discretionary authority can generate vulnerability within fiduciary relations; how relational influence can impair voluntariness; how relationship-specific investments can create ex post leverage; how power can form subjects; and why dependence can remain compatible with agency. Reflexive capture instead identifies a mid-level governance configuration in which formative or sustaining authority possesses discretion over arrangements that materially concentrate dependence upon itself; that concentration increases the same relation’s practical leverage, including over the conditions under which its authority can be contested. I defend an Anti-Conversion Principle: leverage so produced cannot serve as its own sufficient warrant for enlarged authority. Biomedical postdoctoral mentorship provides the governing case; supported decision-making provides a countercase in which profound dependence need not be capturing. The resulting ideal, non-captive interdependence, directs political attention toward the production and concentration of dependence before it becomes the background condition through which power is exercised.

Introduction: The Relation That Produces Independence

Some relationships possess authority because they are supposed to help make another person more capable. A student accepts forms of direction that would be presumptuous among equals because a teacher possesses knowledge the student is attempting to acquire. Apprenticeship similarly justifies asymmetry partly through the developmental trajectory of the relationship. Care is more complicated: assistance may remain indispensable rather than disappearing as agency develops, but the caregiver’s authority is still intelligible only in relation to goods the relationship is supposed to secure. Formative authority can therefore restrict present action while developing, sustaining, or enabling forms of agency.

Biomedical postdoctoral training makes this structure unusually visible. The National Cancer Institute’s K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award is explicitly organized around movement from mentored postdoctoral research toward scientific independence. The program requires mentors to explain how a candidate’s scientific and professional independence will be promoted, how the transition from mentorship will occur, how the candidate will achieve scientific independence from the mentor, and which components of the proposed research—and, where appropriate, resources and reagents—the candidate may take into the independent phase (National Cancer Institute 2025, sec. IV, “Plans and Statements of Mentor and Co-Mentor(s)”).

Yet postdoctoral work can concentrate important professional goods in the same relationship from which independence is supposed to emerge. A 2025 National Academies issue paper describes the dyadic supervisory relationship as a structural source of vulnerability: postdoctoral scholars may be funded by, accountable to, and advised by the same individual, while research, career guidance, professional networks, and institutional access converge around that supervisor. The paper associates strong dependence on a higher-ranking supervisor with greater vulnerability to retaliation and identifies additional stakes for some international scholars whose employment interacts with temporary immigration status (Gary et al. 2025, 16–21). It is an issue paper, not a consensus study, and expressly does not offer consensus recommendations (Gary et al. 2025, 72). Its relevance here is therefore limited but important: it documents an institutional configuration in which development toward independence can coexist with concentrated supervisory dependence.

That configuration raises a question not exhausted by asking whether a supervisor possesses too much power at a particular moment. The harder question is how the conditions making that power effective were produced. Laboratory science requires expensive infrastructure, collaboration, specialized knowledge, and supervision. Some asymmetric authority is therefore unavoidable and justified. But institutions still choose how funding, evaluation, mentorship, recommendation, research access, dispute resolution, and career transition are distributed. When otherwise separable functions converge in one formative relationship, institutional design can alter how dependent the trainee becomes upon that relationship.

The political problem is reflexive. A relationship authorized partly to develop another person’s agency participates in structuring the dependence through which its own power becomes effective; the leverage generated by that dependence can then affect the person’s capacity to contest the arrangement through which it arose. I call this reflexive capture.

The novelty claim must therefore be smaller than a general theory of domination or dependence and harder than a relabeling of familiar mechanisms. Reflexive capture identifies a mid-level governance configuration in which formative or sustaining authority possesses discretion over arrangements that materially concentrate dependence upon itself; that concentration increases the same relation’s practical leverage, including over the conditions under which its authority can be contested. The distinctive normative move is not to deny that leverage exists or that it can sometimes accompany justified authority. It is to deny that leverage materially produced through the authority’s own discretionary arrangements can serve as its own sufficient warrant for enlarging that authority.

That specification yields an Anti-Conversion Principle:

A formative relationship’s contribution to producing another person’s dependence cannot itself provide sufficient justification for additional governing power made possible by that dependence. Any such enlargement must rest on reasons independent of the leverage the relationship helped create or be subject to control adequate to those exposed to it.

The principle does not condemn dependence, hierarchy, specialization, commitment, or institutional formation. It blocks a narrower inference: the movement from you need us to therefore our increased power over you is warranted when discretionary arrangements governed by the formative relation materially help explain why the need has become so concentrated.

I. Formative Authority Without an Ideal of Independence

Any theory of capture that identifies freedom with independence fails at the outset. Human agency is commonly formed through relationships in which people learn, receive care, acquire language, inherit practices, undergo discipline, accept correction, and depend upon others for goods they cannot secure alone.

Eva Feder Kittay makes the objection to an independence-centered ideal especially clear. She criticizes theories of justice that closely associate dignity with independence and treat assistance to disabled people primarily as a route toward maximizing autonomy. Because dependency is a recurring feature of human life, she argues, assistance should instead be understood as a social resource capable of sustaining fulfilling relations of dependence between unequals (Kittay 2011, 49–58). Dependence cannot therefore be treated as the opposite of dignity or agency.

Anca Gheaus reaches a related conclusion through childhood. Children’s dependence can justify paternalistic authority because adults must secure goods children cannot yet secure for themselves. Yet that same vulnerability gives children claims against monopolies of care. Gheaus accordingly treats the structure of dependence as normatively relevant: legitimate authority may require distributing care and authority rather than allowing one source to monopolize them (Gheaus 2018, 60–75).

These arguments prevent anti-capture theory from collapsing into an ideal of permanent optionality. A person is not necessarily freer because every commitment remains shallow, every skill portable, every relationship replaceable, and every obligation easy to abandon. Formative goods frequently require path-specific investment. Scientific expertise develops through sustained immersion in particular methods and infrastructures. Musical competence requires disciplined repetition that excludes alternative uses of time. Parenting creates obligations that properly constrain future choice. Care may remain necessary throughout life. A theory that classified such narrowing as capture would confuse having a history with being governed by one.

The relevant distinctions must therefore occur within dependence. Some dependence is constitutive of a valuable relation. Some follows from unavoidable features of the good being pursued. Some is generated by contingent institutional design. And some becomes politically troubling because the architecture of dependence alters the distribution of power between the dependent person and the relation that helped organize it.

Several concepts should remain separate. Dependence concerns the extent to which access to important goods or capacities relies on another actor or relationship. Leverage is the practical advantage asymmetric dependence can create. Power is the capacity to alter another person’s options, conduct, or conditions. Authority is a claimed or institutionally recognized entitlement to direct, decide, evaluate, constrain, or classify. Control, in the republican sense relevant here, concerns the capacity of those subject to power to constrain its structure or exercise so that their interests are not exposed simply to another party’s discretion.

These can diverge. A mentor may possess leverage without additional formal authority. A caregiver may possess formally recognized authority while being constrained by fiduciary duties and external review. A worker may depend heavily on an employer while collective institutions limit what the employer may do with that dependence. A trainee may formally possess a grievance process while practical dependence makes invoking it costly.

Formative authority is therefore functional rather than titular. A relationship possesses formative authority when some of its asymmetric power is justified by its role in developing, sustaining, enabling, or protecting capacities or conditions of agency in the person subject to it. The central question is not whether such relationships should possess power. It is whether the purpose justifying one domain of power may become a route through which concentrated dependence generates broader power lacking independent justification.

II. Reflexive Capture and the Anti-Conversion Principle

Emerson supplies the causal starting point. Power, on his account, is a property of a social relation rather than an isolated possession. Dependence increases with the importance of goals mediated through another actor and decreases as alternative sources of those goals become available; asymmetric dependence therefore generates asymmetric power (Emerson 1962, 31–35). Reflexive capture does not improve upon this mechanism. It begins when an additional institutional fact is introduced: the relationship that benefits from dependence can sometimes influence how that dependence is produced or concentrated.

Call dependence relation-produced when discretionary features of a relationship materially contribute to the degree or concentration of dependence experienced within it. “Materially” matters. Every formative interaction causally changes a person. That ubiquitous fact cannot create a special burden of justification. The relevant counterfactual is stronger: feasible alternative arrangements could preserve a substantial portion of the formative good while leaving the person meaningfully less dependent on that particular relation.

A university may have little control over the fact that experimental science requires laboratories. It has more control over whether one principal investigator becomes the principal source of funding, supervision, evaluation, career mentoring, institutional sponsorship, and recommendation. A care system may not control whether someone requires assistance but may influence whether assistance is monopolized by a single provider. The relevant issue is not causal authorship of need in general, but discretionary concentration of need around the authority holder.

Relation-produced dependence is not yet reflexive capture. Three additional conditions matter.

First, the dependence must produce self-referential leverage: it must increase the practical power of the same relationship that materially helped concentrate it. If one institution creates specialized expertise that increases a person’s dependence on an unrelated licensing body, other problems may arise, but the reflexive structure is absent.

Second, the leverage must affect contestability. It must materially increase the cost or reduce the effectiveness of challenging the relationship or the dependency-producing arrangement. This does not require resistance to become impossible. Foucault’s account of power remains useful precisely because power acts upon subjects who retain a field of possible action; the presence of power does not entail the disappearance of agency (Foucault 1982, 789–90). Reflexive capture concerns the structure and price of those possibilities.

Third, there must be a justification or control deficit. A formative relationship may possess excellent independent reasons for concentrated authority. Scientific training can require technically informed supervision; medical care can require rapid expert decision-making; continuity may be indispensable in some forms of care. Relation-produced dependence and leverage therefore do not suffice. The additional power must lack adequate justification independent of the dependence itself or remain insufficiently controlled by those exposed to it.

The structure is thus: formative authority → discretionary concentration of dependence → increased leverage for the same relation → impaired contestability → insufficiently justified or controlled power.

The reflexive element is not simply that dependence creates power. It is that the relationship participates in producing conditions that strengthen its own power and make those conditions harder to contest.

The Anti-Conversion Principle follows. Formative authority is initially justified by some independently defensible good—learning, care, development, competence, protection. If the same relationship materially helps determine how dependent a person becomes upon it, the resulting dependence cannot then operate as a self-sufficient reason for expanding that relationship’s power. Otherwise the authority participates in producing a condition and then treats the condition as authorization for the power it enables.

Relation-produced dependence may explain why additional power becomes possible. It cannot, by itself, legitimate that power.

The distinction between “by itself” and “never” is essential. Consider a hostile case. Suppose a patient voluntarily consents to a surgical procedure requiring general anesthesia. The clinical relation deliberately produces a temporary condition of extraordinary dependence, and that condition legitimately makes additional function-specific clinical authority necessary while the procedure is underway. The Anti-Conversion Principle permits this. The relevant authority does not rest solely on the proposition you now depend upon us. It rests on independent considerations: antecedent consent, the agreed clinical purpose, fiduciary obligation, necessity, proportionality, and strict functional and temporal limits. The induced dependence changes what clinicians must be permitted to do, but it does not furnish an unrestricted title to govern the patient.

The case makes the principle nontrivial. A relation may help create dependence and legitimately acquire additional power in response to it. What it may not do is treat the dependence as self-authorizing. Relation-produced necessity can be relevant to the scope of justified power without being sufficient to justify it.

Causal history therefore matters even where the ultimate concern is present freedom rather than blame. Imagine two scientists equally dependent on access to laboratory infrastructure. One faces dependence because the underlying research intrinsically requires expensive shared equipment. The other faces additional dependence on one supervisor because several otherwise separable professional functions have been bundled into that relationship. The final degree of vulnerability might be similar. But the second case identifies a different governance object: an institutional choice that concentrated dependence. Genealogy matters because it identifies a duty-bearer, an intervention point, and a possible remedy.

III. The Reduction Challenge

Reflexive capture survives the reduction challenge only if it identifies a governance problem not exhausted by adjacent theories. It does not need a novel causal mechanism. Emerson already supplies the causal core: dependence on another for valued goals, combined with weak alternatives, generates relational power (Emerson 1962, 31–35). The narrower question is institutional and normative: what burden arises when a formative or sustaining authority exercises discretion over arrangements that materially concentrate the dependence upon itself from which its own leverage develops?

Republican domination

Alexander Bryan presents a hard reduction because his account of structural domination already rejects the idea that reasonable exit options are sufficient for freedom in productive life. His “independent production criterion” asks both how strongly agents rely on the cooperation or permission of others to meet their needs through productive activity and whether the decisions and terms governing that cooperation are subject to forms of control that track their interests (Bryan 2023, 699). He also allows that nondomination may require redistribution or reconstitution of decision-making power rather than regulation of its exercise alone (699–701). Reflexive capture therefore cannot claim to discover either structural dependence or the need for upstream control.

The residual is narrower. Bryan’s object is structural dependence in productive activity. Reflexive capture isolates a subset of relations in which an actor entrusted with a formative or sustaining function materially helps concentrate dependence upon itself and subsequently stands to govern through the leverage that concentration creates. This is a specification of republican control, not a competing conception of freedom: it identifies one recurring reason which structures, at what stage, and because of whose institutional role should become objects of control.

Fiduciary power

Fiduciary theory presents a more direct neighboring account of relationship-generated vulnerability. Paul Miller treats fiduciary power as discretionary, relational, derivative, and limited authority over another person’s significant practical interests; on his account, inequality, dependence, and vulnerability are structural properties of fiduciary relationships subsequent to their formation because the beneficiary is exposed to the fiduciary’s exercise of that authority (Miller 2013, 1013–15). Reflexive capture therefore cannot claim that authority is distinctive because it creates dependence or vulnerability within the relation.

The difference is the governance object and causal sequence. Fiduciary law asks what constraints follow from entrusted authority over another’s interests, paradigmatically through duties such as loyalty. Reflexive capture asks when a formative or sustaining authority also exercises discretion over institutional arrangements that increase dependence on the authority holder itself, thereby enlarging the practical leverage under which its own scope can later be contested. Some reflexive-capture relations may also be fiduciary; others will not be. The Anti-Conversion Principle is therefore not a substitute for fiduciary obligation. It denies that dependency materially concentrated through an authority’s own discretionary arrangements can itself supply sufficient warrant for expanding that authority.

Undue influence

The doctrine of undue influence blocks a second overclaim. Equity has long treated relational influence as capable of undermining legally meaningful voluntariness. In Royal Bank of Scotland plc v Etridge (No 2), the House of Lords described the doctrine as preventing abuse of one person’s influence over another, including cases involving trust and confidence, reliance, dependence, vulnerability, ascendancy, domination, or control; a transaction may be set aside when consent cannot fairly be treated as the expression of free will ([2001] UKHL 44, paras. 6–18). Reflexive capture therefore does not discover that dependence can shape agency or that power acquired within a relationship can corrupt consent.

Its object is earlier and more structural. Undue influence ordinarily asks whether a particular transaction or exercise of consent was improperly procured. Reflexive capture can diagnose a governance problem before any discrete consent becomes legally defective: discretionary arrangements may progressively concentrate the goods on which a person depends, increasing the cost of contesting the authority that controls those arrangements. Every individual transaction could remain legally valid while the institutional architecture of contestation becomes more captive.

Hold-up and relationship-specific investment

Classic transaction-cost and hold-up theory pushes closer still on mechanism. Klein, Crawford, and Alchian analyze how appropriable quasi-rents associated with relationship-specific investments create incentives for opportunistic attempts to capture value after investment, while Williamson’s transaction-cost framework treats asset specificity as central to the governance problems that arise when exchange moves away from frictionless market contracting (Klein, Crawford, and Alchian 1978, 297–326; Williamson 1979, 233–61). Reflexive capture therefore cannot claim novelty for the sequence relationship-specific investment → weaker outside options → ex post leverage.

The residual again lies in institutional role and justificatory consequence. Canonical hold-up analysis concerns governance of exchange where specific investments expose parties to opportunism and inefficient bargaining. Reflexive capture concerns formative or sustaining authority and the conditions under which that authority itself remains contestable. The relevant dependence need not arise from a voluntarily chosen capital investment; it may be concentrated through funding, evaluation, care, status, access, recommendation, or support. Transaction-cost theory helps explain why specificity can generate leverage. The Anti-Conversion Principle supplies a different normative claim: leverage materially produced through an authority’s own dependency-concentrating arrangements is not, without independent reasons or adequate control, a sufficient justification for enlarging that authority.

Constitutive power and pathogenic vulnerability

Foucault forecloses any claim that power’s formative character has been overlooked: The Subject and Power frames his work around modes through which human beings are made subjects and characterizes power as action upon the possible actions of acting subjects (Foucault 1982, 777, 789–90). Thompson’s constitutive domination narrows the residual further by showing how social norms and institutions can shape subjects’ rationality so that prevailing power relations are accepted as legitimate authority (Thompson 2018, 44–64). Reflexive capture requires no such internalization. A trainee may recognize an authority’s conduct as illegitimate and still face high material costs for resistance because professionally important goods are concentrated in the relationship.

Dodds likewise blocks novelty claims about institutions generating the vulnerabilities they purport to manage. Her analysis shows how responses to dependence can produce further dependency and pathogenic vulnerability (Dodds 2013, 181–203). Reflexive capture adds only the narrower self-referential condition: the additional dependence must strengthen the leverage of the same formative or sustaining relation that materially helped concentrate it, bear upon contestation of that relation, and lack adequate independent justification or control.

The reduction challenge therefore leaves a deliberately mid-level claim:

Reflexive capture is not a new theory of domination, vulnerability, dependence, hold-up, or relational autonomy. It identifies a mid-level governance configuration in which formative or sustaining authority possesses discretion over arrangements that materially concentrate dependence upon itself; that concentration increases the same relation’s practical leverage, including over the conditions under which its authority can be contested. The Anti-Conversion Principle denies that leverage so produced can serve as its own sufficient warrant for enlarged authority.

Each neighboring theory explains part of the terrain. The residual is the same-relation sequence and its governance object: authority, discretionary dependency concentration, self-referential leverage, impaired contestability, and a resulting burden of independent justification or control. That is enough if it changes institutional diagnosis and remedy. The postdoctoral case tests whether it does.

IV. Producing Independence, Concentrating Dependence

Biomedical postdoctoral training is not a single institutional model, and nothing in the following argument establishes that postdoctoral mentorship generally constitutes reflexive capture. The case is useful because it combines an explicitly formative institutional purpose, documented concerns about concentrated supervisory dependence, and plausible variation in how important professional functions are distributed.

The evidentiary roles must remain distinct.

First, NIH materials establish the formative telos. The NCI K99/R00 program moves researchers from a mentored phase toward an independent research position. Its application requirements ask how scientific and professional independence will be promoted, how transition away from mentorship will occur, how the candidate will separate their scientific program from the mentor’s, and which research components may travel into the independent phase (National Cancer Institute 2025, secs. I, IV). These materials establish that development toward scientific independence is part of the institutional purpose of the relationship.

Second, the National Academies issue paper establishes structural concerns. It describes postdoctoral scholars as commonly working under one supervisor and identifies configurations in which funding, accountability, advice, research, professional guidance, and institutional connection converge around that relationship. It treats strong dependence on a higher-ranking supervisor as relevant to retaliation risk and discusses heightened stakes for some international scholars reliant on temporary visas (Gary et al. 2025, 16–21). It also considers mechanisms such as dual mentorship or mentorship panels as possible ways of diffusing concentrated power, while emphasizing the limited evidence available concerning intervention effectiveness (43–45, 52).

Third, Lambert et al. provide qualitative corroboration at the level of mechanism. Their five focus groups with thirty-two biomedical postdoctoral scholars identified, among other structural barriers, scientific hierarchy, inequalities associated with mentor prestige, and over-reliance on one mentor. Participants advocated mentor networks or teams as part of the response (Lambert et al. 2025, 1–24). The study is small and qualitative; it cannot establish population prevalence or causal effect sizes.

Fourth, reflexive capture is the inference advanced here. Neither NIH, the National Academies paper, nor Lambert et al. identify “reflexive capture,” demonstrate its complete mechanism, or establish that postdoctoral supervision as such is dominating. The theoretical claim is that the institutional facts they separately document make a particular configuration possible: a formative relationship can be organized so that discretionary concentration of professionally important functions increases dependence on that relationship; the resulting leverage can then raise the cost of contesting the arrangement through which the leverage arose.

That inferential separation is crucial because not all postdoctoral dependence is relation-produced. Scarce faculty positions, grant competition, disciplinary labor markets, expensive infrastructure, immigration law, and academic prestige can generate vulnerability independently of any particular supervisor. A theory that attributed every dependence within a relationship to that relationship would explain almost nothing.

The relevant question is narrower: does discretionary institutional design concentrate important dependencies in the supervisory relation beyond what the formative good itself requires?

Consider a stylized configuration. A trainee needs a particular laboratory to continue a research program. The principal investigator controls funding and project access, provides the primary performance evaluation and career mentoring, supplies the recommendation most important to the trainee’s next position, and serves as the dominant institutional route for addressing difficulties. Each function may be defensible separately. Their concentration changes the power relation.

In Emerson’s terms, several valued goals now share one relational gatekeeper. Rupture threatens multiple goods at once. The leverage becomes reflexive when it bears upon the trainee’s ability to challenge the arrangement itself. Disagreement may implicate not only the immediate decision but research continuity, income, evaluation, references, institutional access, and future employment. In the specific context of harassment, the National Academies paper describes how concentrated supervisory dependence and fear of retaliation can make reporting or resistance more costly (Gary et al. 2025, 16–21, 23).

The same formal mentorship can therefore impose very different degrees of capture risk. A researcher with independent funding, several senior collaborators, secure immigration status, substantial economic reserves, and strong external networks possesses alternatives unavailable to a trainee who relies on one supervisor for salary, sponsorship, project access, references, and professional connection. Background inequality affects the magnitude of relational leverage even when formal institutional rules are identical.

The Anti-Conversion Principle does not require eliminating principal investigators, scientific hierarchy, close mentorship, or collective claims over research. Nor does it give every trainee a right to carry away every project, dataset, reagent, or resource encountered in training. Scientific work involves legitimate collective contributions, scarce infrastructure, authorship rules, confidentiality, duties to research participants, and obligations to funders.

The requirement is narrower. A trainee’s dependence on the mentor cannot itself settle the legitimacy of whatever additional control that dependence makes possible. If continued access to scientific work is invoked as a reason why broad supervisory control must be accepted, the justificatory inquiry must distinguish what is intrinsic to the research from what follows from discretionary concentration of functions in one relationship.

That distinction changes institutional design. A rule against retaliation constrains the exercise of supervisory power. Independent scientific or career advisers may alter the concentration of dependence. Independent funding changes the structure differently. An ombuds or postdoctoral office may create a route of contestation that does not begin with the authority being challenged. Mentorship panels can distribute professional guidance and institutional connection. These arrangements should not be described as empirically proven solutions; the National Academies issue paper itself emphasizes significant evaluative gaps (Gary et al. 2025, 43–45, 52). Their theoretical significance is that they intervene at different points in the production and exercise of power.

This is why genealogy matters to governance. If dependence arises from an unavoidable feature of scientific infrastructure, the appropriate political object may be control over access to scarce infrastructure. If dependence is intensified because otherwise separable goods have been bundled into a formative relationship, the bundling itself becomes an additional object of governance.

The postdoctoral case therefore reveals the structure without proving its prevalence. A relationship institutionally oriented toward producing scientific independence can be arranged so that the process of producing independence simultaneously concentrates dependence upon the agent charged with facilitating it. That does not invalidate formative authority. It creates a reason to prevent formative dependence from becoming self-validating power.

V. Dependence Without Capture

The postdoctoral case could still suggest the wrong ideal: perhaps freedom simply requires minimizing dependence. Disability and supported decision-making make that conclusion untenable.

Kittay’s argument rejects the presumption that dignity should be measured by approximation to an independent norm. Human beings predictably experience dependency, and assistance can be understood as a resource for sustaining fulfilling lives within relations of dependence rather than as evidence of failed personhood (Kittay 2011, 49–58). A political theory organized around low dependence would therefore misdescribe many of the cases in which support is most central to agency.

Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities supplies a useful normative counterarchitecture. It recognizes equal legal capacity and requires states to provide access to support people may need in exercising that capacity. Measures relating to legal capacity must respect the person’s rights, will, and preferences, remain free of conflict of interest and undue influence, be proportional and tailored to the person’s circumstances, operate for the shortest appropriate period, and receive regular independent review (CRPD, art. 12(2)–(4)). General Comment No. 1 interprets Article 12 as requiring a shift from substitute decision-making toward supported decision-making and insists that support respect the person’s will and preferences rather than becoming a basis for denying legal agency (Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2014, paras. 3, 16–22, 26–29).

This is a normative architecture, not evidence that supported decision-making always succeeds in practice. Its importance here lies in the structure it attempts to build.

The supported person may depend profoundly on assistance. The relationship may be indispensable, asymmetric, and difficult to exit. None of those facts establishes that the supporter should substitute their own judgment across the person’s life.

The Anti-Conversion Principle explains why. Dependence may justify function-specific involvement without creating a general title to rule. A person who requires assistance to communicate does not thereby transfer ownership of what is communicated to the person providing assistance. Necessity in one domain is not jurisdiction over every other.

Gheaus’s analysis of childhood exhibits the same structure under different developmental conditions. Children’s vulnerability can justify adult authority while also generating reasons to divide and constrain that authority rather than permit monopolies of care (Gheaus 2018, 60–75).

The disability countercase therefore establishes what reflexive capture cannot mean: Dependence is not capture. Indispensability is not capture. Asymmetry is not capture. Limited exit is not capture. Formative influence is not capture.

Even profound dependence may remain compatible with freedom where the power enabled by that dependence is bounded by purpose, separately justified, responsive to the dependent person’s will or interests, and subject to safeguards or external control.

The same point returns us to mentorship. Good scientific formation may require reliance, trust, criticism, intellectual vulnerability, and sustained collaboration. A mentorship engineered to make the mentor permanently unimportant could destroy the good that mentorship exists to produce. The political problem is not that another person becomes important. It is whether the architecture of that importance allows dependence to legitimate powers that the purposes of the relationship do not independently warrant.

VI. Non-Captive Interdependence

The positive ideal can now be stated without multiplying concepts. Non-captive interdependence exists where people may depend deeply upon formative or sustaining relationships without increased dependence automatically enlarging the other party’s governing power. Any enlargement remains independently justified and subject to control proportionate to the stakes.

Dependency-production control

Where a formative relation exercises meaningful discretion over arrangements that foreseeably and materially concentrate dependence upon itself, those arrangements should themselves become objects of control.

The appropriate form varies by institution. Collective bargaining may matter in employment; independent appeals in professional evaluation; supported decision-making and fiduciary safeguards in care; mentoring committees, transparent expectations, independent funding, institutional oversight, or external grievance mechanisms in training. No single governance technology can be assumed to travel intact across domains.

The principle is temporal. Institutions should sometimes govern power before the dependence supporting it has become an accomplished fact. Once a person is deeply dependent, even formally adequate remedies may be expensive to invoke. Control over dependency-producing arrangements can therefore protect freedom before any identifiable abuse occurs.

This is the primary contribution of reflexive capture. It does not discover that structures produce domination or that control sometimes requires structural intervention. It specifies a recurring institutional reason to intervene upstream: an authority charged with forming or sustaining agency may possess discretionary control over the concentration of the dependence through which its later leverage will operate.

Dependency diffusion

A second implication follows from Emerson’s analysis of alternatives and Gheaus’s argument against monopolies of care. Where the formative good does not require one relationship to monopolize important resources, institutions have reason to avoid unnecessary concentration of dependence.

That is not a general presumption in favor of fragmentation. Multiple authorities can create contradictory guidance and diffuse accountability. Continuity may itself be valuable in care. Scientific work may require integration around one research program. Dependency diffusion is therefore conditional:

Where concentration materially increases the relation’s own leverage and a feasible less-concentrated arrangement can preserve the formative good at reasonable cost, the concentration carries a burden of justification.

The concern is not consumer choice for its own sake. It is the distribution of power within relationships whose value may depend upon depth, continuity, and specialization.

Capture risk is consequently scalar. The same formal arrangement can produce different degrees of leverage depending on the importance of the goods mediated through it and the strength of alternatives. A postdoctoral scholar whose salary, immigration status, research access, and professional recommendation converge around one relationship occupies a different practical position from someone for whom the same supervisor controls only one replaceable form of advice. A person whose bodily assistance comes from several publicly supported sources occupies a different relation from someone whose entire support infrastructure rests on one uncompensated caregiver.

Non-captive interdependence therefore has a distributive dimension. A political order cannot solve capture by instructing individuals to privately accumulate enough money, credentials, legal knowledge, networks, or mobility to make every relationship replaceable. Such an approach turns freedom into an asset purchased by those already positioned to diversify dependence.

Some alternatives must be institutionally produced. Some channels of contestation must be usable without first risking the goods that make contestation necessary. Some dependencies should be distributed rather than personalized. Some authority must remain bounded even when realistic exit is unavailable.

None of this creates a universal entitlement to reversibility. Obligations endure. Expertise becomes specialized. Care may be lifelong. Past decisions alter future possibilities. Relationships properly change people.

Dependence may explain why power becomes possible. It does not, without further justification, explain why that power is legitimate.

Conclusion: Governing the Production of Dependence

Political theory, private law, equity, and institutional economics already possess powerful accounts of dependence, domination, social formation, vulnerability, fiduciary power, undue influence, relationship-specific investment, and care. Reflexive capture should not compete with them at those levels.

Emerson explains why asymmetric dependence generates relational power (1962, 31–35). Bryan shows why reasonable alternatives do not eliminate structural dependence and why nondomination may require redistribution or reconstitution of decision-making power (2023, 699–701). Miller shows how fiduciary authority structurally generates dependence and vulnerability within a relation (2013, 1013–15). Etridge shows how relational influence, dependence, and vulnerability can bear on the validity of consent ([2001] UKHL 44, paras. 6–18). Klein, Crawford, and Alchian and Williamson explain why relationship-specific investments and asset specificity create governance problems of ex post leverage (1978, 297–326; 1979, 233–61). Foucault, Thompson, Kittay, Gheaus, and Dodds foreclose broader novelty claims about subject formation, constitutive domination, dependence, care, and institutionally generated vulnerability.

Reflexive capture isolates a narrower configuration within that terrain: formative or sustaining authority possesses discretion over arrangements that materially concentrate dependence upon itself; that concentration increases the same relation’s practical leverage, including over the conditions under which its authority can be contested. In such cases, evaluating only the eventual exercise of power begins too late. The dependency-producing arrangement itself becomes a legitimate object of governance.

The Anti-Conversion Principle states the resulting limit: leverage materially produced through an authority’s contribution to concentrating dependence upon itself cannot serve as its own sufficient warrant for enlarged governing power. Such power may nevertheless be justified by scientific necessity, professional competence, fiduciary obligation, developmental need, coordination, consent, or the protection of third parties. Relation-produced dependence is not disqualifying. It is insufficient as its own authorization.

Biomedical postdoctoral mentorship makes the problem visible because the formative purpose is unusually explicit. NCI’s Pathway to Independence architecture establishes an institutional movement from mentored research toward scientific independence. The National Academies issue paper identifies circumstances in which supervisory dependence can concentrate professional stakes and make retaliation especially consequential. Lambert et al. independently document postdoctoral concerns about hierarchy, mentor prestige, and over-reliance on one mentor. The inference from those materials to reflexive capture is theoretical rather than empirical: institutional designs that concentrate formative functions in one relationship can create leverage that subsequently burdens contestation of the design itself.

The disability countercase prevents the wrong conclusion. Freedom does not require every dependent relationship to culminate in independence. A person may require assistance indefinitely while remaining fully entitled to have the supporter’s power bounded by the purpose of support rather than enlarged simply by the fact of need. Supported decision-making makes the distinction vivid: profound dependence need not amount to dominion.

The political ideal is therefore non-captive interdependence: relations strong enough to form and sustain people without treating the dependencies produced through those relations as self-validating claims to power.

A society concerned with freedom must sometimes ask an earlier question than Who has power now?

Who helped structure the dependence through which that power became effective, and who had a say while it was still possible to structure that dependence otherwise?

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References

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