After the Nine

This essay was written after the nine were finished. A conversation can only be held once your own object is fixed: you have to know what you are saying before you can tell where someone else differs from you. The nine essays never name an outside theorist; the tradition was left for here. This essay sets out nothing new, makes no new demand on the reader, and changes no sentence of the nine; the thinkers here are interlocutors, not premises. It does not claim the series corrects anyone, nor that anyone foreshadowed it.

What this machine asks is: what does a person standing before a decision do, in this matter? It asks in the first person, and from a premise: oneself is an end, and others are ends too. It does not ask what makes an event count as an action, nor how habits form or emotions arise; those questions have their own grounds, and the series neither denies them nor answers for them. Nor is it a decision procedure: there is no table where reasons go in at one end and an action comes out of the other. The title names the question that runs through all nine: where judgment sits. The series’ answer: not in rules, not with someone who judges in your place, but in the person himself — where it can be questioned, can be wrong, and can be looked back on afterwards. Nearly every conversation below comes back to it.

Four Steps, and Three Lines

Each conversation takes four steps. First, find a common problem that can be checked. Then see whether the two are talking about the same thing — many resemblances are just two words pointing at two things. Then say how far agreement goes. Last, write the strongest objection from the other side, and the series’ reply. The objection mostly has to be drafted on their behalf — none of these thinkers ever addressed a theory that did not yet exist — and a drafted objection should reach for the other side’s real strength. An exchange that gets only as far as that is not my object shows a division of labour, not an objection answered. Lines often misquoted or misattributed are kept out. Nine conversations go all four steps: Aristotle; Kant; Williams and Frankfurt; Korsgaard; the Stoics; Wang Yangming; the Analects; care ethics; Hirschman. The analytic philosophy of action goes only as far as the boundary.

Written out, the differences are not scattered; they keep falling on three lines. The first: who holds the measure. In quite a few traditions, the measure of whether this time was done right, or whether enough was given, is held by another party, or holds for others as well: the practically wise person, the trainer, the legislator, the response of the one cared for. The series leaves the three — being willing, being suited, the timing — on the other person’s side, and treats whether something goes smoothly as a clue, never as something to judge others by. The second: when is it mine? gets decided. Many accounts place that in the present: identification, wholeheartedness, reflective endorsement, innate knowing. The series says that when for a time one cannot tell, one really cannot tell, and hands the checking to looking back — which can be wrong, and does not rewrite what has happened. The third: how the line not followed, and the time one did not manage it, are entered in the account. One duty limits another and the limited one drops out; principles for non-ideal conditions grant a permission; the legitimacy of staying hangs on speaking up later. The series: the line not followed is not cancelled by that; disagreeing inwardly does not wash away actual participation; the time one could not carry it does not erase the consequences. The three lines are this essay’s own generalization, not any school’s.

Aristotle: Judgment Lies in Particulars

This is the series’ earliest and steadiest meeting with the tradition. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says that how far one may stray from the mean before deserving blame is not easy to mark off in words: such things lie in particular cases, and the judgment rests with perception. The first essay says judgment cannot be done by rules; both put the difficulty in the particular case, not in how many rules there are. There are more contacts. Where doing is up to us, not doing is up to us too answers to the first essay’s writing of not-doing as an act. Of throwing cargo overboard in a storm, he says such actions are more like voluntary ones, since at that moment doing and not doing both lay with the agent — which answers to the line not followed is not cancelled. The mean at the right times, about the right things, toward the right people, in the right way answers item by item to the timing, the person and the manner of the sixth essay.

Where they part, the most important point falls on the first line. Aristotle says virtue lies in a mean relative to us, determined by reason, that is, as the practically wise person would determine it; the good man is the standard and measure in each kind of thing. That is a measure that holds for others too: judge as the practically wise person would. The series does not take it up. And see who fixes the relative to us. His example is the trainer: an amount of food too little for Milo is too much for a beginner, and the trainer sets each person’s portion. The one who sets the amount is the one who gives. The sixth essay says being willing, being suited and the timing lie on the other person’s side; the too much it speaks of is reaching into the other’s share, not giving more than the right amount. So the line it borrowed from the Analects — going too far is as much a miss as falling short — is not another name for the mean: leaving a blank is not giving the right amount; what is left is the other person’s share.

Two more partings, one in habit and one in the starting point. Aristotle says legislators make citizens good by habituating them; the fourth essay says only that habit changes the cost of not-doing, and that a law is held in place by habit and can be swapped out in habit too. The two structures differ over who completes the last step. His deliberation presupposes an affirmed end, and every pursuit points finally to happiness; the series’ two negations need no affirmed goal first. That is not a repair but a different starting point. The strongest objection from his side, drafted here: without the practically wise person as an outside measure, one’s own law cannot be told apart from caprice. The reply: caprice is exactly what can be cancelled at any moment, while someone standing on the premise cannot cancel the layer that regards people as ends; the layer of what to do this time can be questioned and can be wrong, and correction comes from checking facts, from others’ questions and from looking back — not from someone who judges in his place. The price is admitted: no procedure can stand in for judgment and guarantee it will not err.

Kant: One Lineage, Six Departures

SAE comes from Kant’s lineage, and this is the longest conversation. They meet in several places. Judgment cannot be taught: in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant says that general instructions for bringing cases under rules would need yet another rule, which would itself need judgment, without end; judgment cannot be taught at all, only practised, and the capacity to use rules rightly must belong to the pupil himself. Ought is the sentence form of a command: the Groundwork says that for a holy will ought is out of place; the first essay says ought is itself a command, and this is its ground in Kant. Enlightenment is negative: what really constitutes it is something merely negative; and the string in What Is Enlightenment? — a book that has understanding for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who judges my diet for me — answers to the second and third essays. The perfection of others: to require me to do what only he himself can do is a contradiction; the sixth essay says what another gains, once his own law owns it, is his. The reasons are almost the same in structure: that step can only be taken by the person himself.

The departures are six. The source: Kant’s autonomy takes universal legislation as its form; one’s own law governs only oneself, and two people who both treat people as ends can judge differently. The sentence form: a conditioned cannot-not is not a hypothetical imperative — its condition is a position, the facts in front of one and this judgment, not a desired end; nor categorical — it holds only within the position already taken; nor the necessity of a holy will — what is removed is the command form, not human finitude. A rule for judgment: in the practical domain Kant gives judgment a rule, the so-called Typic; the series gives none, and runs no universalization test on maxims. The line not followed: Kant lets wide duties limit one another, and the limited one drops out this time; the series says it is not cancelled — the third line. Others’ perfection, same reason, different conclusion: Kant infers that promoting it is not my duty; the sixth essay writes cultivation as a direction that cannot be cancelled, and that necessarily leaves a blank. Ought and can: ought implies can is not Kant’s phrase; in the gallows example he says a man judges that he can do something because he is conscious that he ought — the direction runs from ought to can. The series infers no can from ought; it admits the real cannot. And the gallows example asks only that the man acknowledge refusing is possible, not that he die — on that point it meets the seventh essay.

The strongest objection from his side, drafted here: a conditioned cannot-not makes morality hypothetical, and has nothing to say to anyone not standing on the premise. The reply: the antecedent of the shared layer is an acknowledgment, not a desire; one cannot stand there and cancel it at once. Speaking only to those on the premise is a domain, not a concession; the series issues no universal decree, and does not deny that one may have grounds of its own. How to face those not on the premise, and the workings that treat people as means, is what the seventh essay is about; how institutions restrain that power belongs to the theory of government.

Cannot, and When It Counts as Mine

On meeting cannot-not, most readers think first of two people. Bernard Williams writes of practical necessity: when a person says I must or I cannot, the necessity comes from himself, not from an outside command. Harry Frankfurt writes of volitional necessity: what a person cares about lies closer to his will than his decisions do, and is generally not under his immediate voluntary control. In placing cannot-not in the agent, the three stand closest. Williams also names a regret he calls agent-regret, which a person can feel only towards his own past actions; the lorry driver who, through no fault of his own, runs over a child feels differently from any bystander. That lights up the third and fourth essays: looking back does not rewrite what has happened; the time one could not carry it does not erase the consequences.

But they are not the same thing. Neither necessity is limited in content: Williams says practical necessity is not peculiar to ethics; Frankfurt grants that wholehearted caring can be directed at something very bad. The series’ cannot-not holds only in the position oneself is an end, others are ends too; and it admits that a felt cannot-not may come straight out of colonization. Nor is cannot one thing: both describe an incapacity in the agent — he cannot bring himself to it; the cannot be cancelled of the series’ shared layer says that standing in this position and cancelling it are two sentences that do not fit in the same person. A person can leave the position. They would call restricting the domain a cheat — a wholehearted wrongdoer has his cannot-not too; the reply is that the series does not deny that phenomenon, and only says for whom its sentences hold. The often-cited line of Luther’s, Here I stand, I can do no other, appears in the sources in later printed versions, not in records made at the time; this essay does not use it as Luther’s words.

Among contemporary Kantians, Christine Korsgaard places normativity in the structure of reflection. She says the normative question is one that arises in the heat of action: an impulse comes, and I back up and bring that impulse into view — whether it counts as a reason is mine to endorse. The third essay meets this step: something entering one’s heart does not make it one’s law. The most important parting is timing, on the second line. For Korsgaard, is it mine? is settled in the present of deliberation; in the series it often cannot be answered in the present, and telling comes by looking back. A person who has taken an outside standard as his own will be endorsed by his own reflection in the moment; colonization goes deepest exactly where the colonized, reflecting in the present, says this is mine. Answering the charge that Kant leaves us powerless in the face of evil, she proposes a double-level theory: in dealing with evil we may depart from this ideal, under lower-level principles. The seventh essay sets no lower-level principles; what the situation changes is how one can act, not the edition of a person is an end. That falls on the third line.

What Is Up to Us: The Stoics and Wang Yangming

The place the fourth essay asks about — the line is clear and he does not walk by it — calls up two traditions first. Epictetus’s Handbook opens: Of all the things there are, some are up to us, and some are not up to us. The closest point is the Epictetus reported by Gellius: when something sudden and frightening happens, even the wise man’s mind is moved for a moment, contracts, turns pale — but he does not assent. The fourth essay says body, emotion and ability can enter a judgment as facts and reasons without deciding for a person what his law is: tired is not unwilling, afraid is not disowning. Both separate a reaction that rises in a person from whether he assents.

Here the partings matter more. For Epictetus what is up to us comes down to judgment and will; body, property, reputation are on the other side. The fourth essay lets body, emotion, habit and hesitation all enter action: the man who makes reports in these essays, running a fever that day, could not go; the law is still there, and he records it as it was, without rewriting it. Less smoothable still is other people. The Handbook teaches one to be ready to say, of what is not up to us: It is nothing to me. The sixth essay says that when one really treats a person as an end, whether his law can grow is something the one standing there will think about, and cannot treat as nothing to do with himself. Taken literally, the two sentences are exact opposites. In fairness: the Stoics are not callous — Epictetus says he is not to be unfeeling like a statue, but to keep up his relationships; only, in his ledger of good and evil, others’ fortunes are not my good or evil. And one thing needs saying plainly: when Epictetus says again and again that the door is open, by context he means leaving life. The seventh essay’s exit is something else; it speaks of bearing risk — not of proving by dying, nor of exiting by dying.

For Chinese readers, the same place most likely calls up Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting. Both refuse the order know first, then act: wait until one truly knows before acting, and one will not act all one’s life, and so will also not know all one’s life; both refuse to let fixed principles from outside take judgment’s place: that bit of innate knowing of yours is your own standard. But at the most crucial point they run in opposite directions. Wang grants that knowing but not doing happens, yet will not call it knowing: This has already been cut off by selfish desire; it is no longer the original substance of knowing and acting … Knowing and not acting is simply not yet knowing. Knowing without acting is renamed not-yet-knowing, traced to selfish desire, treated with the medicine of restoring the original substance. The fourth essay takes the gap as real: judged and not done, the law is still there; afraid is not disowning, and not another name for selfish desire; hesitation includes judged but not yet moving; it prescribes no discipline as medicine, and hands what cannot yet be told to looking back.

The measure should be recorded too: Wang himself called the unity of knowing and acting medicine for an illness, aimed at the habit of his day of splitting knowing and acting in two and never acting. They see different illnesses: he guards against knowing and acting split in two and a lifetime of not acting; the fourth essay guards against rewriting a person’s real limits as a verdict on his law. A line often quoted as from the Chuanxilu — where a thought stirs, that is knowing and that is acting — is not in it; this essay does not use it.

Cultivation: The Analects and Care Ethics

In Reading the Analects Through Self-as-an-End the author drew out one sentence — ritual is the theory of action of humaneness — and diagnosed his own system: SAE, like Kant, is strong on ends and law, and weak on how the law actually unfolds before the body, time and other people. The fourth and sixth essays walked into exactly that gap. The series did not add a code of ritual; it writes the unfolding as description, not procedure — and keeps precisely the sentence the legitimacy of ritual lies outside ritual. The two meet in this: ritual needs a subject who judges. If a man is not humane, what has he to do with ritual? Practising humaneness comes from oneself; how could it come from others? — which answers to the second essay: another’s share can be set only by him. But withdrawing is not invisibility: when the Way prevails, show yourself; when it does not, withdraw is about serving or staying out of office, assigned by whether the state has the Way; the seventh essay’s invisibility stays inside the institution and withholds strength wherever it can from colonizing others, and is not assigned by the names of institutions.

The sixth essay borrowed one line: going too far is as much a miss as falling short. In the original, Zigong asks whether Zizhang or Zixia is the better, and Confucius says Shi goes too far; Shang falls short; the judge is the teacher. The sixth essay uses it for the cultivator’s own act this time: reaching into the other’s share is too far; judging that one should give and then not giving is too short. So here it does not mean moderation in all things. Two other passages appear in the sixth essay only in plain words. Zilu and Ran You ask the same question and get opposite answers — Qiu holds back, so I urged him forward; You has the energy of two men, so I held him back — which lights up the person. I do not open the way for one who is not struggling to understand, nor prompt one who is not struggling to speak; if I hold up one corner and he does not come back with the other three, I do not go on lights up timing, and that what is left is the other’s share. I do not go on needs the sixth essay’s other half: not cultivating this time is no failure, but not closing off the other’s ways to refuse, revise, leave or change course cannot be cancelled. All three are borrowings; this essay does not claim Confucius meant cultivation and colonization.

Care ethics is a debt being settled. Value theory, in its own interface paper, noted that judgment had not appeared once in its seven papers, so it was not yet on the same ground as care ethics, and handed the matter to action theory; the prequel logged it as the one line still owed, addressed to this paper. Both refuse to let rules judge the case. Both also see that well-meant giving can become domination: Uma Narayan points out that the colonial enterprise was once seen as for the good of, and as promoting the welfare of the colonized, that care discourse can work to justify or conceal relationships of power and domination, and reminds us to ask who defines these often contested terms. The sixth essay says that with the wrong time, person or manner, cultivation can become a kind of colonization. Of the nine this is the most direct match; it is care ethics’ criticism of itself, not a defect the series points out for it.

What can least be smoothed over is completion against the blank: they run in opposite directions. Nel Noddings writes the response of the cared-for into the conditions of care: Without an affirmative response from the cared-for, we cannot call an encounter or relation caring — a response that can be as simple as a baby’s smile. The sixth essay does not settle accounts in thanks, obedience or joining: whether it took is a matter inside the other’s own law. In care ethics paternalistic care is bad care, still within care; in the sixth essay, the moment one reaches into the other’s share it is already a kind of colonization. So not colonizing is not one quality within care; it is cultivation’s boundary. When the sixth essay calls dependence the mild form of colonization, it means leaning on the giver for one’s judgment; the dependence Eva Kittay put at the centre of a theory of justice is the dependence and care every human life needs, and the series does not call that colonization.

The strongest objection, drafted here: if the other’s response is not the test, cultivation becomes a monologue, and the blank becomes irresponsibility. The reply: the other’s response is material here, not settlement; willingness, suitedness and timing show themselves from the other’s side to begin with, the cultivator must look and cannot answer for him, and looking wrongly is judging wrongly, which can be revised. The blank is not doing less; judging that one should give and not giving is a failure too. What divides the two is not whether to look at the other person, but what the looking is for: for judging — not for certifying whether a relationship has taken. The place value theory stepped back from is settled here.

Mixed Reality: Hirschman, and a Boundary

Albert Hirschman asked how members respond when firms, organizations and states decline. He separated exit from voice — any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs; his third concept was loyalty: As a rule, then, loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice. The seventh essay writes how a person can act in inversion: compromise, invisibility, exit, protection, resistance. Both ask: does someone who disagrees stay or leave, and if he stays, what does he do? Hirschman writes of a public official required to act as a member of the team, who is thereby made to give up in advance his strongest weapon; the seventh essay writes that compromise slides — after some years of handing in the sheets, when he himself looks at a person he first thinks of where that person ranks.

They part in several places. Hirschman starts from decline, and exit and voice are mechanisms for restoring an organization; the seventh essay starts from workings that treat people as means, which can come with rising results, and what it guards is people, not an organization’s survival. Invisibility fits none of the boxes: not exit — he stays in the company; not voice — it is not defined by changing the organization; not the neglect later research added, passively letting things deteriorate — invisibility has a direction: the job is done, and strength is withheld only at the point where it would help colonize others. Nor is compromise loyalty. Hirschman says long staying can have a social use, provided it turns into spine (voice) at the decisive moment: the legitimacy of staying hangs on voice later. The seventh essay says disagreeing inwardly does not wash away actual participation; by the same reasoning, later voice does not countersign earlier participation. That falls on the third line.

The analytic philosophy of action goes only to the boundary. Frankfurt asks where lies the contrast between what an agent does and what merely happens to him; Davidson holds that explaining an action by reasons is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The series asks something else. What the first essay denies is a calculus from reasons to action, not the causal role of reasons; on whether reasons are causes, it can live with either side. The one place it truly touches: among a person’s many reasons, what makes one of them the one he acts on? The series goes only as far as it is his line, and no further; it logs this as a remainder, not as answered.

Where Judgment Sits

This essay settles an account of its own. The forward pointers handed down to action theory were settled in public in the prequel; the one left owing, care ethics, is paid here — and how well, readers of both sides can check for themselves. Three things are handed on: the standing of cannot-not and its relation to universality, to the second critique; the standing of one person to judge another’s case and ask him to agree, to the third critique; what institutions can guard mutual recognition once formed, who questions power, and exits offered in form but sealed in practice by ruinous costs, to the theory of government. A clear address is not a settled account.

The whole series can be gathered into four sentences. When a person makes a decision, what he does is negate: not-doing, cannot-not-doing, and the line not followed is not cancelled by that. A cannot-not hangs on conditions, and ought is not written; the shared layer cannot be cancelled while one stands on the premise, and the layer of this time is judged by the person himself, can be questioned, and can be wrong. Hold to anti-colonization inwardly, strive for cultivation outwardly; cultivation is a direction, and it necessarily leaves a blank. In a mixed reality, what the situation changes is how one can act, not a person is an end.

Where judgment sits: this was asked in nearly every one of the nine conversations. It is not in rules, not with the practically wise person or the trainer, not in the carer’s assessment of whether a relationship is complete, and not in an endorsement a single reflection in the moment can complete; it is in the person standing before the decision — and it can be questioned, can be wrong, and can be looked back on afterwards. The thinkers are interlocutors, not premises; questions outside the series’ reach have their own grounds, and it neither answers them on their behalf nor denies them. The man who makes reports in the nine essays judged for himself each time he stood before a decision; what the series wrote down is what he was doing — never a judgment made in his place.