A Law with No Guarantor

Kant set the Critique of Practical Reason a question: can pure reason be practical on its own — can it, borrowing no empirical motive, determine the will by itself? His answer was not a deduction. The consciousness of the moral law he called “the fact of reason”; its objective reality, he said plainly, no deduction can prove; it stands firm on its own. SAE: The Second Critique inherits Kant’s move, not his conclusions: turn a capacity around and examine its own validity. What it examines is not pure practical reason but the law a person gives himself.

So the question runs: a law a person gives himself has no outside guarantor, issues no orders to anyone else, and can be revised by its maker at any time — by what does its cannot-not bind the lawgiver himself, how far does that binding reach, and what is its relation to the cannot-nots of others? By what, how far, in relation to others: entitlement, boundary, universality. The three words come from Action Theory. That series spent nine papers on how a person acts on a cannot-not, and then said it does not prove whether these cannot-nots ought to be so — a cannot-not, “with its standing, its boundaries and its relation to universality, is the business of the Second Critique.” It handed itself over for examination; this book takes that up.

The book opens with a single question: by what does a law bind the one who made it? It says at once whose words are on trial: “It is our own words that are examined. The heaviest cuts fall on the earliest of them, the ones we said with the most force.” And it says what it will not do: the reader will find no ought here addressed to him; what he will find is where each law stands.

The First Opponent Is the Power to Revise

Inside the question lies a difficulty Kant saw: if the one who binds and the one who is bound are the same person, how is the binding more than an intention that can be withdrawn at any moment? In SAE it is sharper, because the lawgiver’s door to revising his law always stands open. So the first opponent this question meets is not the skeptic. It is the lawgiver’s own power to revise.

The gap has to be divided first. Revising is a change with the books kept: one can say what one held and why one now changes it; the stretch the old law governed still counts as governed by it, and the new law runs from the moment of the change. Publicly renouncing a law that was wrong is also revising. Dropping is quietly setting a law down when that is convenient: no books are kept, and the old law simply stops counting.

A person who holds fast to his own law may be showing autonomy, or obsession; besides these there is a third shape, which the book calls fickleness — stopping whenever stopping is convenient, changing the law without keeping the books on the change. How the three are told apart comes later (Essay 09). For now one division is enough: revising is not dropping. A law that can be revised is not therefore a law that binds nothing; Essay 11 will show how far the binding runs.

No Exemption

Then a question falls back on the book’s own head. This critique is, in its turn, one of the framework’s self-given laws: by what right would it be exempt from the same examination? The answer is the one the First Critique gave at its outset: no exemption. The book has to make it good in three places.

The first place. The framework has said: “Cannot not legislate only for oneself.” Yet that sentence is itself said to other people. One’s Own Law, the paper that first said it, already ran into this, and answered that the sentence’s immunity is “not a logically absolute immunity, but a pragmatic one: whoever takes it and legislates for others immediately knows they are overstepping.” It calls itself “SAE’s anti-ethics chapter” and adds: “It is a bulkhead, not a door.” The book takes this answer over and pushes it no further. What a bulkhead cannot hold back, the paper’s own close shows: “everyone should be their own philosopher-king.”

The second place. The book does not legislate for the reader. Every cannot-not in it is either something said to ourselves or hangs on a condition: if someone stands here, then for him … The cost is stated up front: this book cannot, on its own authority, tell anyone how to act. A reader hoping to carry off an ethics for legislating on others’ behalf will not find one. What it can do is make every sentence bear one question: is this issuing an ought to someone?

The third place. An earlier paper in the framework already called itself a critique: One’s Own Law: The SAE Critique of Ethics and Morality. The book reads it both as a forerunner and as something under examination: the forerunner is not spared for calling itself a critique, and this book is not spared for coming later. Where it holds, the book keeps it — the imperative “as direction rather than rigid rule”; “Evil is not a positional identity; it is the direction of regression and suppression”; asked what SAE’s ethics is, “the answer is one word: none.” Its other sentences are taken apart in the next essay.

Two Oughts

The same word ought may say two different things. One is my using my law to make demands of you — the lateral ought. SAE does not discuss it: a person’s law going beyond his own boundary to make demands of others is exactly what One’s Own Law calls “ethics” and sets out to dismantle. The other is a person’s being unable, within his own law, to do otherwise — the inside-out ought, which is the cannot-not. This book examines the second: the cannot-nots stated across the framework, which kind each is, by what it binds, and how far.

The examination is conducted from outside. Some papers in the framework write that a question “goes to the Second Critique.” That is the paper’s own arrangement for itself. The book examines what it wrote; it does not finish its sentences, and it does not take the arrangement as work it is bound to do. “The text under examination has its own voice, and the examiner does not speak in its place.”

One of the book’s house rules puts this in so many words: what a text says it has handed over, and where it says it sent it, is recorded and audited, not adopted as the book’s own debt; the book does not fill in its entries, does not bring them into line, and does not choose among them on its behalf. A critique that quietly finished other people’s sentences would already be doing what it will later diagnose.

Laws Kept in the Open

Before the first chapter, the book lists the laws it writes under. “Only when the law is in the open does interrogation have a handle.” Two voices: an objective voice for outside objects such as Kant, the first person for the framework’s own words, and “we” for what is undertaken or withdrawn. No backstage. No self-praise: the book issues itself no certificates of virtue. Metaphor carries no definitions.

Two kinds of sentence: recording sentences that register the text under examination, and law sentences that state the laws we keep — a law sentence is law only for those who keep it, and is not laid on the reader; that rule is itself a recording sentence. Definitions, not standards: a definition says what a word means here and is no yardstick for people, so a sentence like “that is simply how high the bar is” the book does not say. Rule out; never rule in. Diagnosis reads structure, not the heart. A level records one operation, by moment and domain, never a person.

A rule of wording follows from all this. The common Chinese word usually rendered “recognition” is allowed only inside quotations, because it blurs two acts the book keeps apart: concession, what an act aimed at another’s will hands over in its very performance, and adoption, setting non dubito — the default that asks for no proof — as a premise of one’s own law. The list ends: “If the reader catches this book breaking these laws, that is precisely the use these laws were made for.”