From the time you were small, people installed a lot of "shoulds" in your head. You should appreciate your parents. You should think of the bigger picture. You should care about how others feel. Then you grew up and encountered more sources: bosses, friends, the internet, books, people you admired. Each one brought its own "should."

The question isn't whether those shoulds are right or wrong. The question is: which ones are yours, and which ones aren't?

Most people never ask this question. They mix all the shoulds together, feel generally oppressed or anxious, but cannot say where the different demands come from. This analysis begins by separating three terms that often overlap.

A terminological note: the three-way distinction below is a stipulation within the Self-as-an-End framework, not the only standard usage in English or in the history of philosophy. In ordinary and academic language, morality and ethics often overlap, and ethical traditions include much more than the target criticized here.

Three Words, Three Different Things

Law, in this essay, means an external rule enforceable by public authority: violation carries institutional consequences. Many modern systems of positive law recognize that their rules are human-made and revisable. Natural-law, divine-law, and religious legal traditions, however, have explicitly claimed an origin beyond human convention. The structural distinction here is therefore not how every law justifies itself, but external enforceability versus a subject's internal legislation.

Morality, in this essay, means an internal law a subject can recognize as their own: it is not followed merely because punishment threatens, but owned as something for which the subject is answerable. "Grows" does not mean untouched by education, relationships, or history. It means that outside influence must pass through scrutiny and self-legislation. The process is more like water reaching a phase transition under specified pressure; the boiling point is not always 100°C, because conditions belong to the structure too.

Ethics, in this essay's technical usage, means an external demand disguised as the subject's own morality. It extrapolates one person's or community's law into a conclusion everyone must already own: "You should be like this," "Good people do this," "This is the right way." This is not a dictionary definition of the whole discipline of ethics; it names the colonizing operation criticized here.

Chinese often compounds ethics and morality as “伦理道德.” This essay treats that overlap as an analytic entry point, not as evidence of a deliberate two-thousand-year sleight of hand. The character “伦” carries senses of relationship and order, which can direct attention toward interpersonal norms; here, “morality” is stipulated more narrowly as the relation between a subject and a law they can recognize as their own.

Every Philosopher Thought They Stood Outside All Levels

For two thousand years, many ethical systems have tried to argue that a moral landscape visible from one position is universally binding across people and times. Other traditions have doubted universalism or emphasized situation, relationship, virtue, and difference. The target here is the argument that hides its own position by presenting itself as a view from nowhere.

This need not be reduced to the arrogance of individual philosophers. The universalizing ethics criticized here implicitly assumes a level-independent position from which all moral phenomena can be described. This essay rejects that assumption. Everyone speaks from a position: you can see landscapes you have traversed, but you cannot directly see positions you have not reached.

Within this framework, Kant's deontology can be read as a genuine experience from a particular developmental height — "cannot not" is what obligation can feel like there. The question begins when this first-person necessity becomes a universal demand on every rational being. The essay need not declare all Kantian ethics false; it asks whether that universalizing step conceals its own position.

Within this framework, utilitarianism's appeal to the greatest happiness of the greatest number can be read as a genuine moral intuition from a group-oriented vantage point. The problem begins when its calculation is presented as the single level-independent standard.

Within this framework, virtue ethics asks what kind of person is good and develops a picture of character. This essay questions the promotion of any one such picture, without further argument, into the human standard for all people and times.

This essay preserves insights from all three traditions at their respective positions while refusing to promote any one of them, without further argument, into the only level-independent standard.

Nietzsche Saw Half of It

Nietzsche was among the sharpest thinkers to expose the relation between moral genealogy and power, though hardly the first person in history to doubt universal morality. He saw that extrapolating one's morality into demands on others can also be an act of power. His diagnosis of ressentiment and value-creation opens the target while retaining blind spots of its own in the opposition between strong and weak.

Within this framework, Nietzsche pushed the direction of critique too far: he located the problem in morality itself and responded through the language of overcoming morality, will to power, and the Übermensch.

This essay proposes a different cut. The problem is not the “morality” a subject can recognize as their own law, but the extrapolation of one morality into compulsory demands on others. Under that technical distinction, Nietzsche treated both together and therefore missed the difference this essay wants to preserve.

He saw the colonizing structure of ethics. He just didn't see that morality and ethics are not the same thing.

Real Morality Is Arrival, Not Installation

Dismantling ethics is not entering nihilism. Quite the opposite — what is dismantled is the law others made for you; what is revealed is the law of your own existence.

Morality is not a module installed from outside and then executed unchanged. It is what outside experience, relationship, and education become after a subject scrutinizes them and accepts answerability for a law. Keep the phase-transition metaphor, but keep its conditions too: water changes state at a boiling point set partly by pressure. Likewise, a subject never "arrives" outside conditions, yet conditions cannot perform self-legislation on the subject's behalf.

This is why you can feel that some moral standards are real while others are not. The real ones: you arrived there. The unreal ones: they were installed. The installed ones carry a faint sense of foreignness when you execute them — you are carrying out a law, but you are not that law.

Real morality is not execution. It is becoming.

You don't obey the law. You are the law.

Good and Evil Are Directions, Not Identities

Good and evil are not two kinds of people. They are the relationship between one person and the law at their own stage. Alignment is moral; deviation is immoral.

The same action, viewed from different levels of development, flips in moral judgment. This is not moral relativism — not "everything is relative so no one can judge anyone." Evil is real. Suffering is real. A person being suppressed is not less harmed because the one doing the suppressing has limited vision.

The distinction is this: not having arrived is not evil. Someone who hasn't yet developed to the point where they can see the harm in something is not evil — they just haven't arrived yet. But actively pushing back — taking something that was unfolding and forcing it back — that applied force is evil.

"Not yet arrived" is a position. "Pushing back" is a direction. Evil is a direction, not a position.

Morality Is Not Transmitted. It Resonates.

Among the "shoulds" that were installed in you, some came from people you genuinely admired. You saw them, and you were moved. That feeling was real. But its structure is different from ethics.

Ethics says: I arrived here, so you should arrive here too.

Being moved says: your law and mine happen to be vibrating at similar frequencies, and the energy amplified.

This is resonance, not transmission. Two independent subjects, each holding their own law, each unfolding, neither demanding anything of the other. But when the two frequencies come close, they amplify — you feel that interior vibration. Not judgment. Not learning. Not submission. Two freely vibrating subjects that happened to enter the same frequency.

Resonance cannot be forced or designed. The only thing you can do is get your own vibration right.

Conversely, absence of resonance is not grounds for moral blackmail. You and someone else not resonating does not mean they are immoral — that would be measuring them by your law, which is ethics again. You can dislike it, keep your distance, oppose it. But "if you don't act this way you are immoral" — that sentence is the thing you just argued against.

The Only Minimum Requirement

Everything this essay says can be compressed into one sentence: legislate for yourself, and only for yourself.

But there is one practical minimum requirement, more basic and more operational than "don't overstep": don't lie. Say what you did. Say for whom you did it.

Colonization is not the greatest evil. Colonization in the name of love is. Naked "I want you to be this way" at least preserves the other person's chance to recognize the pressure — you know you're being required, you can refuse. But the packaged version — "I say this for your own good," "doing it this way is really taking responsibility for yourself" — takes even that away. You were required, but you thought it was care; your space was compressed, but you thought it was love.

This minimum sounds low enough that most people could meet it. In practice, interest, fear, and self-flattery violate it often.

Knowing what you're doing, and then saying so honestly — that is the most basic moral condition there is.

Han Qin · Full academic paper (SAE Theory) · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19037566