After the Six

This essay was written last, as its paper was written after the seven papers: a conversation can only be had once one’s own object stands. The six essays named no outside theorists; the tradition was kept for here. Each conversation takes four steps — the question both sides really share; whether they mean the same thing; how far agreement goes and where it parts; and the strongest objection from the other side, drafted here to hit where that side is strong, with the series’ reply. The schools are interlocutors, not premises; nothing here says the series corrects anyone, or that anyone anticipated it. Kant, Xunzi and Huang Zongxi are quoted from their texts; Rawls, Miller, Habermas, Pettit, the capability approach, Honneth and Searle are only paraphrased from reliable reference works, going no further than those works go; Hirschman comes by way of the Action Theory’s interface paper.

Several of the differences fall on the same two lines. The first: to whom the ought is addressed. Some traditions address institutional demands to persons — citizens, officials, participants; some take as their unit the whole scheme a society’s major institutions make up. This series speaks only to the construct — every one with institutional identity, a mill and a school included, bad ones included — and writes no ought for persons. The second: how far, on the side of cultivation, it reaches. Some give institutions a result or a list to achieve — a threshold of capabilities, a form of ethical life in which people are at home. This series asks the construct to provide, and to explain, conditions people can actually use; outcomes serve only as clues. (That is not to say a construct answers for no outcome: protection must be real, a channel must actually work.) The two lines are this essay’s gathering, not anyone’s own division.

The sixth essay’s question — the conditions of being questioned cannot be withdrawn, a local completion is not permanent exemption, survival proves nothing — finds no one among the nine on the other side; Huang Zongxi, refusing to let laws be vouched for by the ancestors who made them, stands on the same side. So it is not used to measure the schools. It is turned on the series itself, under the rule the First Critique set for whoever questions: “the same rule questions itself, and posits no exemption for itself.”

With Kant: What the Outside Can Reach

Kant separates two kinds of duty: “The duty of virtue is essentially distinguished from the duty of justice in this respect; that it is morally possible to be externally compelled to the latter, whereas the former rests on free self-constraint only.” The reason lies in ends: “I may be forced by others to actions which are directed to an end as means, but I cannot be forced to have an end; I can only make something an end to myself.” The first essay said a construct may require a position to do something, not a person to think something, and that a person’s being cultivated cannot be compelled. Both cut along one seam: from outside, one can reach actions, not ends. Kant gives coercion a shape, too — “an obstacle of the obstacle” to freedom — and the guarding of the third essay has that shape: it blocks one person’s crossing of another’s line. And the kingdom of ends is his name: “the union of different rational beings in a system by common laws,” and “It is certainly only an ideal.” The sixth essay said it is a direction, not a state to sign off.

The likenesses are of shape; the differences are four. The addressee: Kant’s duties of right are still a person’s duties, compellable from outside but borne by a person; this series does not address even that outer layer to persons — a position takes accountability, the ought goes only to the construct. The line he draws inside one person’s duties, outer and inner, this series draws between addressees. That is the first line. Ends: right abstracts from ends, yet the third and fourth oughts concern them — conditions for cultivation, room for it. They are neither right nor virtue (a construct has no inner self-constraint); they are demands on an arrangement. Coercion: the series borrows only the shape, to describe guarding, not its justification — guarding must itself be a limit, and what makes coercion legitimate is the Theory of Government’s business. The kingdom: Kant has it realized “if they were universally followed”; this series presupposes mixed reality, takes the First Critique’s layer — the kingdom made by ends recognizing and questioning one another — and does not speak of common legislation.

The strongest objection. An ought presupposes a will that can be bound; a construct has none. Either this is really an ought for the people who run things, or a technical appraisal, like “a knife ought to be sharp.” The reply. It is not a command to a will: a construct has no first person and is the address of attribution, and the ought sets a standard at that address. It is not an ought for managers: what reaches them is their position’s accountability, and their own law stays theirs. Nor is it a technical appraisal, which measures by the user’s purposes; the measure here is “a human being is an end in itself,” and the question is what the construct owes those inside it, not whether it is useful. The step from a person’s standing to demands on a construct is stated as an openly undertaken stance, not derived from the concept of a will.

With Rawls and Miller: What For

Rawls puts the site of justice in a society’s basic structure — constitution, legal system, economy, family — because it distributes the main benefits and burdens and shapes citizens’ prospects and, more deeply, their aims. The contacts are real: weight on institutions rather than single choices; institutions not neutral; the social bases of self-respect, which answers to the prequel’s point that an institution works only in the column of realization; and, since leaving one’s society is no real option for most, staying is not consent — this series likewise lets neither staying nor silence vouch for an institution, and draws inside those who cannot avoid a construct by leaving. The differences: scope — one scheme, a society’s basic structure, against every construct with institutional identity, its interior drawn by entanglement, not citizenship (the first line); source — agreement behind a veil of ignorance against an openly undertaken stance; content — principles of distribution against lines, guarding, conditions, room and a channel, with no judgment of who gets how much. One shape is shared: basic liberties come first for Rawls, and this series’ line is not traded for gains in conditions; but here the line is limit and violation for one person in an actual configuration, not a list of citizens’ liberties.

The strongest objection. Rawls gives three reasons the basic structure must be justified: deep influence, no exit, enforcement. A training program has shallow influence, can be quit, has no such force behind it — why five oughts? The reply. The oughts come from persons’ standing, not from depth of influence. Depth is not lost; it lands in relational thickness, by which the third ought and the room-leaving half of the fourth are measured, so a program that arranges less of its trainees’ lives owes less in conditions — by actual arrangement, not by its name. Harm is not thickness and belongs to the other oughts; being able to leave does not put anyone outside. What does not vary is the rest: no crossing, guarding, being questioned. Shallow influence is no license to cross a line, and no reason to shut the door.

Miller gives institutions a teleological account: joint action directed at a collective end, and, where that end is a collective good, moral rights and duties grounded in it. His example happens to be a factory, where managers and workers have a joint moral right to be paid from what the cars they make bring in — not from contract alone. Both, then, grant that people in a mill have claims beyond contract; this series goes wider, since the household downstream signed nothing and is inside all the same. The differences: an institution, for Miller, is for its own collective end; this series asks what any construct, whatever its proper business, owes those inside it — the same five oughts for a paper mill and a school — and the two questions can stand side by side. And Miller’s claim beyond contract arises from joint production; this series’ oughts presuppose no contribution: the household produced nothing for the mill, and the first ought toward them is undiminished.

The objection — without an institution’s own good there is no evaluating it, and a mill that keeps the five oughts while making nothing useful would count as good — meets a division of labor rather than a rebuttal: the five oughts are a ruler for what a construct owes its people; whether it does its proper work well is for its trade and the particular theories to judge. None of the five oughts can make a mill a good person; nor can they make it a good mill.

With Habermas and Pettit: Crossing and Colonization

A word must be squared first. This series’ “colonization” is narrow: a boundary-crossing disguised as cultivation. Habermas’s is something else: the system — economy and administration, steered by money and power, coordinating action beyond the actors’ awareness — pushing out social integration where action depends on understanding, so that the lifeworld shrinks, with loss of meaning and freedom, crises of legitimation, anomie. The contacts: neither depends on anyone’s intent; money and power entering where understanding should hold resemble the fifth essay’s resources and evaluation turned into conditions; and steering media cannot replace understanding, as an institution can provide its conditions but cannot complete it for anyone — here the two come closest. The differences: one word, two referents; a modern society against one construct (the first line); domains against one person in one configuration.

The objection: narrowing the word blinds the series to the commonest sickness, understanding replaced bit by bit with no line crossed and no disguise. The reply: the narrowing is deliberate, since anti-colonization is itself the construct’s act, and a wide colonization would have the construct policing the ordinary influence and teaching between people, crossing the line itself; much of what Habermas points to meets this series’ checks — conditions turned into compulsion, silence offered as innocence, rules that cross together; a society-wide shrinkage that crosses no single line is outside the series’ range, registered as neighboring ground, not claimed as answered.

Pettit understands freedom as non-domination: no one able to interfere in your affairs arbitrarily, that is, without control. A slave whose master leaves him alone is still unfree. Hence contestatory democracy, and the warning that laws meant to extend freedom can bring new dependence; and the concern reaches family and workplace. The first and fifth oughts touch the same place: no pressure now is not within the line; contestation needs a place, independent, reachable, free of reprisal; institutions can breed dependence of their own. The difference: Pettit’s one concept holds two things, a capacity to interfere and its being uncontrolled; this series uses two checks against each other — does an act cross the line, by limit and violation; can the construct be questioned independently and without reprisal, by the three conditions. So a democratically passed rule that seals off someone’s exit is still violation, and a discretion that crosses no line but has no independent place of questioning meets the fifth ought. One cell is reached by neither — the line uncrossed, the channel there, and still no real control over the power concerned, as with large discretion within authority — and it is registered as a candidate for research.

The objection: a channel with no teeth leaves people at the mill’s mercy while every item passes. The reply: the conditions are functional — reachable, free of reprisal, independent of the party actually questioned; a channel that takes complaints and gives no answer to the point fails the fifth ought; a sealed road of refusal is a crossing. What the series has not taken over is judging “being at another’s mercy” as one whole state; it reviews act by act and channel by channel, and the remaining cell stays on the books.

With Sen, Nussbaum and Honneth: Conditions and the “We”

The capability approach separates capabilities, a person’s real freedoms to be and do, from functionings, those already achieved; aiming at capabilities favors no particular good life. Nussbaum adds a list of central capabilities, with a threshold the state should bring every citizen up to. The contacts: not choosing the good life for people, though a capability is a real opportunity, not merely an external condition, so the distinction does not map neatly onto conditions and outcomes; the real, not the paper version, as with protection, conditions and channels in this series; and no direction attached. The differences: the list — this series gives none, and asks the construct to say what it gave, why it belongs to the entanglement, where the cost falls (the second line); the unit — a threshold the state owes every citizen, against what this construct owes by its relational thickness (the first line); and cultivation is not capability expansion: a man who learns one more trade has a larger capability set, which need not be cultivation.

The objection: thresholds are the state’s to secure — how do constructs’ local duties add up, and who fills the gap? The reply: each construct owes by how far it organizes a life, and its constraint on its own acts and its being questioned are undiscounted; who fills a gap, by what sharing, is distribution and design, handed to the particular theories and the Theory of Government. The open places on the two sides are not the same, and that is recorded as it is. Nor does the series oppose lists in particular domains, so long as they attach no direction and do not count functionings as cultivation.

Honneth reads three forms of recognition as stages of self-relation — self-confidence in love, self-respect in law, self-esteem in social esteem for achievement — and holds that part of freedom is realized in institutional spheres where people are at home, while warning that recognition can turn into ideology. The contacts: institutions shape how people relate to themselves; and recognition can be ideological, which the fifth essay answers — banners and team-building cannot vouch for a “we,” writing “identify with us” into a requirement oversteps, arrangements can be captured. The differences: this series says an institution cannot produce a “we,” and does not take a shared ethical life as a result institutions must achieve on the side of cultivation (the second line); whether that truly collides with “the sphere where freedom is realized” is not declared here. On self-respect and standing, two questions are kept apart before any conflict is claimed: legal respect affects self-respect, which the series grants; what it refuses is letting that effect issue certificates of standing — and the source consulted does not say Honneth holds otherwise.

The objection: without an ethical substance to be at home in, the series is left with lines and channels, negative freedom only, which breeds social pathology. The reply: the third and fourth oughts are positive, and the main line says “strives for cultivation”; institutions may organize and support shared practice; what is denied is that an arrangement can substitute for actual mutual recognition, or certify a “we” by joint participation. The wariness about ideological recognition is written into the ought itself.

With Hirschman: Voice from the Institution’s Side

Hirschman asked how members respond when an organization declines: by exit, or by voice — any attempt to change, rather than escape, an objectionable state of affairs — both mechanisms that restore the organization. The contacts: voice needs somewhere to go, which is what the sixth essay’s channel is; and what he calls “the member-of-the-team trap,” officials asked to act as team members surrendering their strongest weapon in advance, matches the second essay’s rule that a configuration may not leave an executor unable to refuse and with no route to review: an organization can use roles to take dissent away before it is spoken. The differences: this series does not ground the channel in recovery — a mill whose results are rising owes it all the same, and survival is no reason to close it; and it does not say the people inside ought to ask, only that the construct may not shut the door (the first line).

The objection: a channel useless for recovery is a cost, and will be clogged with trivia. The reply is the sixth essay’s: what continues is not one matter asked forever, a matter can be closed, and being questionable is not change for change’s sake; effectiveness belongs in the design of a channel, not in deciding whether there is one.

Governing Law and Governing Persons

An old question: does a place govern well because of its law, or its people? Xunzi: “there are persons who govern well, but no law that governs well of itself,” for “law cannot stand on its own.” Huang Zongxi turned it round nearly two thousand years later: “only where there is law that governs well are there persons who govern well.” The contacts with Huang are many. Law made by rulers who feared their line would not last was “the law of one family, not the law of all under heaven”; this series, too, will not let a construct’s survival vouch for it. Under such law “the law grows ever denser, and the disorder of the realm arises right within the law”: the sixth essay said answering by re-dividing leaves new residue, and the second that rules fine one by one can cross together. He wanted the Son of Heaven to submit “his right and wrong to public judgment in the schools,” and saw the court first co-opt the schools and then contend with them for mastery: the party under review first takes over its reviewer, then suppresses it — what the channel’s independence guards against. And he dismissed vouching for laws by the ancestors as “the parroted talk of vulgar scholars”; this series lets no forebear vouch for today’s law.

The differences are as clear. Huang joins name and legitimacy in the one word “law” — after the Three Dynasties, he says, there has been no law, and asks of later law, “can this still be called law?” This series keeps the two apart: classification issues no legitimacy, so the ought is said to bad institutions too (the first line). His measure is the benefit of the realm; this series sets the line for each person inside and trades no one for a group. He traces disorder to law made for one family; here every division leaves its own residue, law made for all under heaven included, with no one’s ill will required. He would restore, with adaptation, the forms of the Three Dynasties; this series has no golden age and holds to the ought, not a structure — though his schools are themselves continuing deliberation. His assemblies were for gentry, scholars and the aged; the household downstream must be able to reach this series’ channel. And between law first and persons first this series takes neither side: the construct has its account and persons theirs, and the ought comes from persons’ standing, not from any governor’s virtue (the first line).

Xunzi’s objection — the five oughts, said to a construct with no first person, cannot carry themselves out — was granted at the start: the construct does not act. What the series does is set the standard at the address of attribution, so that neither the mill’s name nor its failure hides or shifts anyone’s own account, and it does not make the ought wait for a good governor to appear. Whether anyone can carry it out is for the particular theories; where it cannot yet be done, the ought stands.

Where It Stops

The machine is itself a construct, and its divisions — where the interior runs, how the oughts are ordered, how the three layers split — are demarcations with their own shortfall. What it leaves is registered: relational thickness has a structural reading and no common scale; which baseline is right for combined crossings is not settled; what the three divisions leave behind is not fully counted. With Searle, whose status functions take the form X counts as Y in context C, there is only a meeting at the border: what an institution is belongs upstream, and where rights come from belongs to Rights Theory, though the series has said that basic rights are not created by institutions and standing is not issued by them. The accounts are settled by discharge, public reassignment or public withdrawal, and a clear address is not a closed account. The construct’s half of the normative question How Is Institution Possible handed on is discharged by the six essays; the person’s half goes to the Critiques; how-to, feasibility, design, the weight of accountability, the legitimacy of coercion and the final bearer go to the particular theories and the Theory of Government; conflict between institutions and war, to the Theory of the State. Some conclusions are limits, not unfinished work: an institution cannot produce a “we”; the institutional layer cannot reach the pure kind of cultivation; questioning does not settle division.

The title asked where the ought is placed. The schools place it at different levels — the addressee, the unit of scrutiny, the ground or the aim. This series’ ought is not placed on persons’ duties; its unit is not only the whole scheme of a society’s major institutions; and it takes as its ground or aim neither a collective good, nor a list of capabilities, nor an ethical life in which people are at home, nor the virtues of anyone who governs. It is placed on the construct, the address of attribution; it stands for every person inside; and it can always be questioned. Back at the river, then: the five oughts are said to the mill — not to the monitoring technician, not to the household downstream. They are said for them. Whether to ask, and whom, is still theirs.