An Easy Formula

The second critique borrows Kant’s title and his move, so the comparison has to be made with care. An easy formula offers itself: Kant’s moral law is universal; SAE’s law is inner. The formula is inexact. Kant himself held that ethical legislation cannot come from outside; “inner” is not where the divide lies.

The book locates the real divide at two places, and finds at a third that the two sides half meet. It also adds two contrasts that are better not called divides at all: what each side sets at the start, and what each does with the gap between what is and what ought to be.

The comparison matters because a reader who carries Kant’s words into SAE — autonomy, duty, universality — will hear them in Kant’s sense. Where the words are the same and the jobs differ, the book says so on the spot, and neither claims that SAE corrects Kant nor that Kant foreshadowed SAE.

The Step to Universal Law

At its close, One’s Own Law criticized Kant: his autonomy “originally meant exactly this — legislating for oneself. But after legislating, he universalized it … Autonomy reverted to heteronomy.” The First Critique later put it more exactly: in Kant, “the form of universal law is not a test appended to self-legislation but a constitutive condition of autonomy” — a maxim that fails the test does not issue from autonomy at all.

SAE changes exactly this step: “withdrawing that test’s exclusive validity is a redefinition of autonomy, not a mere loosening of content: self-given laws of different content (‘do not construct’ is also a law) are not judged wrong, but registered as different branches, each with its conditions and its costs.” The First Critique’s example is Laozi: “Laozi also arrives here in form — he self-legislates, and can stand in mutual recognition with other ends — yet his law is not to construct”; the branch register gives its law a phrase: “precisely not to construct — losing day by day, doing without doing, no chiseling.” Kant’s universal legislation likewise appears in this book as a branch, not as a case of illness.

Action Theory had already listed where it leaves Kant, and three points matter most. On the source: “in this series, one’s own law governs only oneself,” and “to say that one’s own law is Kant’s autonomy would be a mistake.” On sentence form: its cannot-not “is not a hypothetical imperative,” “nor is it a categorical imperative.” On judgment: it gives judgment no rule, and checks maxims by no test of universalization.

Right, and Duties Toward Others

The second divide is duties of right. Kant ties right to the authorization to coerce. SAE takes on no duties of right: Rights Theory deleted the old rule that every right corresponds to a duty, and what remains is one sentence — “SAE’s one duty faces inward.” There is no duty one person owes another.

The third is duties of virtue toward others, and here the two sides half meet. Kant makes the happiness of others an end that is at the same time a duty; Rights Theory’s formula is: “the constraint faces inward, and inward the law already includes the other.” The meeting goes this far: the constraint issues from one’s own legislation, its content includes others, and others cannot coerce me.

And no further. Kant’s duty holds for every rational being, and his duty of respect gives each person a rightful claim on others’ respect. SAE takes on neither: there is one duty, facing one’s own law; that law’s content already includes others, but others cannot on that ground demand anything of me.

Fact, or Postulate

The first contrast concerns the starting point. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant takes the consciousness of the moral law as a fact of reason and seeks no deduction for it. At the same place, this book posits no fact. “A human being is an end in itself” is, in Paper 4, a postulate openly undertaken; it can be refused, and whoever refuses it founds another branch. What follows from it — “within an already specified domain of objects, no appraisal of capacity or of recognition issues a certificate of standing as an end” — Paper 4 marks as a statement of its own practice, “not a claim about what attitude anyone ought to hold.”

Yet across the framework, “the other is an end” is said in six ways. A fact (Value Theory: the other is an end “before I recognized it”); a postulate (the First Critique); a definition (the Methodology Overview defines 15DD by “Not only I am an end”); a choice (Action Theory: the cannot-not “as a person’s own choice”); a structural cannot (Methodology 00); a direction that emerges of itself (Introspection III). Kant’s side has two words as well: the Groundwork, at the step from me to others, notes that the proposition is “here put forward as a postulate,” with its grounds deferred to the last section; the second Critique calls the consciousness of the moral law a fact. The objects and the work of the two places cannot be taken as one on the strength of the words alone.

Are these answers to one question, or do they speak separately of the object, the ground, and the undertaking? The First Critique left a case open here — set at the 16DD station, examining Methodology 00’s argument from “cannot be taken in” to “ought to acknowledge.” The second critique reshapes it into two questions: if the other’s being an end is a fact, can that fact be a person’s reason for entering 15DD? If it is a postulate, who undertakes it? Both are answered in the book’s chapter on validity (Essay 11).

No Postulates of Practical Reason

The second contrast concerns the gap between ought and is. Kant’s answer was a postulate of practical reason: the complete fit of the will with the moral law is holiness, which a finite being attains at no moment, so an endless progress of approach is needed — and for it, the immortality of the soul. The First Critique stopped short here and stated the asymmetry: “we keep the remainder precisely by refusing to register any approach as closure.”

On the practical side the second critique says: no one can accord with 15DD at every moment and in every matter — that is reality, not a consequence of any postulate. The claim has an opponent: the one who says he fits 15DD at all times. He has the same form as the completeness-theorist on the cognitive side; neither can confirm his success from within. The First Critique made “the remainder cannot be eliminated” a postulate; this is its practical counterpart, with its own warrant. Postulates of practical reason, in Kant’s sense, the book does not set up.

The two systems pay different prices, and the book sets them side by side without ranking them. Kant’s law binds even those who refuse it; the price is a law able to bind every rational being, and a starting point that seeks no deduction and stands on its own. The second critique’s law binds no one who refuses it; its price is that it cannot say the refuser is wrong (Essay 12). “Two costs, each on its own books.”