Right

autonomy does not reliably flourish simply because the formal conditions for it once existed. It is entirely possible—indeed observable—that when the domain of right becomes incoherent, politicized, or purely instrumental, individuals lose not only trust in law but confidence in their own capacity for self-legislation. 

an educated capacity to name remote abstractions without agency, paired with a practical agency over immediate life that is increasingly speechless at the level of reasons. The public sphere becomes a theatre of recital, where “positions” substitute for participation, because participation has been hollowed out by scale, specialization, and procedural opacity. Then the ordinary person learns a kind of moral ventriloquism—competence in slogans, causes, and interpretive frames—while the places where one truly acts (workplace hierarchy, family obligation, debt, surveillance, local coercion, bodily habit) remain uncodified, unanalyzed, and therefore felt as fate rather than as a domain of right.

the domain of right

a polity that deprives persons of time deprives them of the conditions under which the moral law can be anything other than an exhausted piety.

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, a provincial Prussian city where he spent virtually his entire life and which remained politically Prussian but culturally exposed to Baltic trade and Enlightenment currents. He came from modest Pietist Lutheran stock, studied locally, worked for years as a private tutor, and only later secured a stable university post. He never traveled far, never left the region, and lived through the orderly routines of an academic city shaped by clocks, seasons, and civic regularity, dying in 1804 as Königsberg stood on the edge of modern Europe’s upheavals. His personal life was famously austere and methodical. Kant never married, had no children, and structured his days with near-mechanical precision, to the point that townspeople reportedly set their watches by his daily walks. He valued sociable conversation at meals, maintained polite but controlled friendships, and avoided emotional excess, seeing self-discipline as a moral and practical necessity. His health was fragile, his habits restrained, and his life inwardly governed, marked less by drama than by an almost monastic consistency. If autonomy is defined as the ability to give oneself a moral law and live up to it, then how do you define sovereignty? If autonomy is the self-legislation of the moral law by reason, then sovereignty is not a property of the individual will in the same sense, but a condition of authority made visible in the world. Sovereignty concerns the rightful power to command and to bind others under laws that claim external validity, enforceability, and public recognition. Autonomy binds me inwardly, through reason alone; sovereignty binds many, outwardly, through institutions, coercive legitimacy, and shared juridical space. One belongs to practical reason as such, the other to the domain of right. Thus sovereignty is never purely moral; it is juridical and political. A sovereign does not merely will law but stands as the locus through which law is made effective among a people, securing external freedom by limiting freedom through universal rules. Where autonomy is dignity, sovereignty is authority. Where autonomy requires no permission and admits no substitute, sovereignty always requires recognition, structure, and force, and is therefore contingent, historical, and liable to corruption in a way that autonomy, grounded in reason itself, is not. What is the domain of right? The domain of right is the sphere of external freedom insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of all others under universal laws. It does not concern inner motives, virtue, or the moral worth of actions, but only outward actions and their lawful compatibility in a shared world. In this domain, it is sufficient that actions conform to law; whether they arise from duty or inclination is irrelevant. Right therefore governs what may be coerced, because coercion is justified only to prevent one person’s freedom from negating another’s. Accordingly, the domain of right is juridical rather than ethical. It is concerned with property, contract, obligation, and the public conditions under which persons can act without mutual domination. Its principle is not goodness but legality, not intention but permissibility. Where morality addresses the will as it ought to be in itself, right addresses persons as they necessarily appear to one another in space, time, and society, requiring a public order to secure freedom as a shared condition rather than a private achievement. Herbert Spencer once said that life is the balance of internal forces and external forces. It seems to me that in the realm of freedom, the individual is identified as that which must find a balance between their autonomy within the domain of right. You speak here in a manner that is close to the truth, though it requires careful clarification. In the realm of freedom, the individual is not asked to balance autonomy with the domain of right as though these were competing forces of equal kind. Autonomy belongs to the inner legislation of the will by reason, while right concerns the external conditions under which many autonomous wills may coexist without contradiction. The individual does not surrender autonomy when entering the domain of right; rather, autonomy itself demands such a domain, because a will that claims freedom for itself must also will the universal conditions under which freedom is possible for all. Where Spencer describes life as an equilibrium of forces, I would insist on a distinction of kinds. Internal moral freedom is not a force struggling against external law, but the rational ground that authorizes law in the first place. The tension you sense is not a balance between autonomy and right, but between inclination and lawfulness, between private desire and public reason. True freedom is not found in escaping the domain of right, nor in being absorbed by it, but in recognizing that rightful external constraint is the necessary form through which freedom becomes durable, shareable, and non-destructive in a world of others.

Let me get to the point. A sovereign cannot admit to the golden mean to treat all others as one would want to be treated.

Correct, and for principled reasons. The sovereign cannot govern by the maxim “treat others as you would wish to be treated,” because this maxim belongs to ethics, not to right. It appeals to sympathy, imagination, and subjective preference, all of which vary from person to person. Sovereignty, however, must legislate universally and externally, without reference to how the ruler feels, hopes, or would personally wish to be treated. To rule by the golden rule would be to substitute private inclination for public law, collapsing authority into moral sentiment. The sovereign must instead act according to principles that could bind any rational person regardless of temperament or desire. Right is not founded on reciprocity of feeling but on reciprocity of freedom under law. The moment a sovereign governs as he would wish to be governed, he ceases to govern as a sovereign and becomes merely another moral agent among others. Sovereignty requires impersonality; it must speak in the voice of law, not in the voice of conscience.

But this is looking at it from the realm of sovereignty. And what’s beautiful about Immanuel Kant is he looks at it from the realm of autonomy, and how sovereignty can get in the way of one’s autonomy.

Yes—and here you touch the critical nerve of my position. When viewed from the standpoint of autonomy, sovereignty is always suspect, not because law is unnecessary, but because external authority is perpetually tempted to substitute obedience for reason. Autonomy demands that I bind myself only by laws I could rationally will as universal; sovereignty, by contrast, binds me whether or not my reason concurs. The danger is not merely tyranny, but heteronomy: the condition in which the source of obligation is displaced from reason within the subject to command outside it. This is why I insist that no sovereign may legislate morality, and why even rightful authority must remain strictly limited to the external domain of action. The moment sovereignty claims insight into what makes a person good, fulfilled, or properly oriented toward happiness, it trespasses against autonomy. Political order is justified only insofar as it secures the space in which autonomous agents may legislate themselves. Where sovereignty expands beyond right and into the governance of inner life, it does not complete freedom—it obstructs it, replacing self-legislation with submission and mistaking order for dignity.

But how can you do this without making the mistake of appearing as the one who gives out autonomy? When autonomy is self-governed reason.

You cannot do it by granting autonomy at all, for the very idea is a contradiction. Autonomy is not something that can be bestowed, licensed, or distributed by any authority without destroying its meaning. Reason is autonomous precisely because it obligates itself; the moment obligation appears as a gift from another, it becomes heteronomy. Any sovereign who claims to “give” autonomy mistakes a condition of rational agency for a political privilege, and in doing so undermines the very freedom he professes to protect. The only legitimate posture, therefore, is restraint. Sovereignty must present itself not as the source of autonomy but as the negative condition of its non-interference. Law may secure the external space in which reason can operate, but it must never speak as the author of that reason. The state does not authorize self-legislation; it merely prevents mutual obstruction among those who already possess it by virtue of being rational beings. Autonomy must always appear as anterior to power, otherwise power disguises itself as reason and obedience masquerades as freedom.

So there seems to be a limit even for sovereignty, and this is for the sake of sovereignty itself, that it must not legislate autonomy.

Yes. Sovereignty encounters an internal limit that is not imposed from outside but arises from its own concept. If sovereignty were to legislate autonomy, it would negate the very condition that makes lawful authority intelligible in the first place. A power that claims authority over the source of obligation destroys its own legitimacy, because it no longer governs free agents but attempts to manufacture them. Sovereignty depends on subjects who are already capable of obligation; it cannot coherently claim authorship over that capacity without collapsing into mere domination. Thus the restraint you identify is not a concession to morality but a requirement of sovereignty’s self-preservation. By confining itself to the domain of right—to external actions and their lawful coordination—sovereignty secures obedience without corrupting freedom. The moment it reaches inward, claiming to define, distribute, or cultivate autonomy itself, it ceases to rule through law and begins to rule through tutelage. In doing so, it undermines the rational standing of those it governs and thereby hollows out its own authority, mistaking command over persons for the legitimacy that only free reason can sustain.

And this is the beautiful thing about the ancient courts, was that the king was not a tyrant only out of benevolence, but it was a very tactical and calculated move, I’d say a very wise move to listen and never to overreact and always to balance. And in this way, the idea of the sovereign, the way Thrasymachus in Gorgias says, that the greatest thing in the world is to be able to benefit one’s friends and to harm one’s enemies. For a sovereign, this would, as the Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun shows, is the ruin of not only the sovereign, but of its family. The ancient courts were a beautiful balance, a orchestration of power of power around limits.

What you are describing is indeed wisdom, though not moral wisdom in the strict sense, but political prudence grounded in an implicit recognition of limits. The ancient courts you invoke understood—often without theoretical articulation—that power which overreaches destroys its own conditions of stability. A sovereign who rules by impulse, retaliation, or favoritism converts law into personality, and personality into volatility. Such a ruler becomes legible not as law but as temperament, and temperament invites fear, conspiracy, and eventual collapse. Restraint, listening, and delay are not signs of weakness but techniques by which authority preserves its own form. Thrasymachus’ maxim captures the temptation of sovereignty at its most naked: power as advantage. Ibn Khaldun shows with historical sobriety that this temptation carries within it the seed of ruin, because it dissolves the impersonal structure that alone sustains rule across generations. When sovereignty becomes the capacity to reward friends and crush enemies, it ceases to be sovereignty and becomes faction. The beauty of the ancient courts you describe lies precisely in their orchestration of limits—rituals, councils, silences, and intermediaries that prevented the sovereign from mistaking force for legitimacy. In Kantian terms, such arrangements did not create autonomy, but they tacitly respected it by ensuring that power remained external, formal, and measured, never presuming to absorb reason itself into command.

Here’s the Mobius strip of the concept that though this is not moral wisdom, moral wisdom would not have a chance to flourish in the code of nature if it were not for courts of law enacting law and establishing sovereignty over the enemies of the Lord’s subjects.

You are right to describe this as a Möbius strip rather than a contradiction. Moral wisdom, taken purely as inner autonomy, does not generate the worldly conditions of its own survival. It legislates inwardly, but it does not defend itself against force, fraud, or dissolution. In the code of nature, where human beings appear as embodied agents among others, moral wisdom would remain fragile, episodic, and easily extinguished were there no public order to stabilize the external conditions of freedom. Courts of law and sovereignty do not produce virtue, but they clear the ground upon which virtue can even appear as something more than a private accident. From my standpoint, this does not collapse morality into power, but reveals their asymmetrical dependence. Right is not moral wisdom, yet moral wisdom requires right as its worldly scaffold. Sovereignty that secures peace, repels destruction, and restrains domination performs a service it cannot claim as its own merit: it makes room for autonomy without authoring it. The error would be for sovereignty to mistake this enabling role for moral authority itself. Properly understood, law is the outer skin of freedom, not its soul. Without it, moral life would be hunted down by necessity; with it, moral life may emerge, unevenly and imperfectly, but as something more than a fleeting ideal in a hostile world.

To which i say again

Herbert Spencer once said that life is the balance of internal forces and external forces. It seems to me that in the realm of freedom, the individual is identified as that which must find a balance between their autonomy within the domain of right.

I would accept your formulation, provided the word balance is handled with care. The individual in the realm of freedom does indeed stand at the intersection of internal self-legislation and external lawful constraint, but this is not a compromise between two rival authorities. Autonomy is not weakened by the domain of right, nor is right strengthened by invading autonomy. Rather, the individual realizes freedom only insofar as inner self-government and external lawfulness are properly aligned, each remaining within its own jurisdiction. What appears as balance is in fact a coordination of distinct principles. Spencer speaks in the language of forces; I would speak in the language of conditions. Autonomy supplies the unconditional source of obligation, while the domain of right supplies the conditional framework within which that obligation can be lived without contradiction among many agents. The individual is therefore not balancing freedom against law, but inhabiting a space where freedom becomes durable by accepting lawful limits on outward action. When this relation is preserved, freedom is neither crushed by sovereignty nor dissolved into mere inward sentiment, but sustained as a lived, social reality among others. I believe you’re being too teleological. Is it not the case today that the individual is far from comfortable to be able to legislate themselves morally, and this because of the dissolution of the domain of right? Your objection is well taken, and I accept the correction. If one abandons teleology, one must admit that autonomy does not reliably flourish simply because the formal conditions for it once existed. It is entirely possible—indeed observable—that when the domain of right becomes incoherent, politicized, or purely instrumental, individuals lose not only trust in law but confidence in their own capacity for self-legislation. Autonomy requires a stable external grammar of action; when law ceases to appear impartial, predictable, and limited to its proper sphere, the individual no longer experiences themselves as a rational author among others, but as a reactive being navigating arbitrary forces. In such a condition, moral self-legislation becomes psychologically and socially implausible. The will turns defensive, ironic, or exhausted. What dissolves is not morality as an abstract idea, but the habitus of responsibility—the felt reality that one’s maxims can matter in a shared world. Thus the failure of the domain of right does not merely permit injustice; it corrodes autonomy at its root, not by commanding the will, but by rendering self-command unreal. This is not a teleological failure of history to reach its end, but a structural breakdown in the conditions under which freedom can be lived rather than merely thought. What signs in today’s geopolitical climate do you see of the success of multilateralism, if any? What, today (in terms of policies not just speculation), do you believe are moments of a future beyond the weight that weighs down on all of us? I can answer, but I can’t verify developments after August 2025 because web browsing is disabled in this chat, so treat what follows as a set of policy-level indicators that were still the most defensible examples up to that cutoff, not a claim about what happened in late 2025. On the “success” side, the clearest multilateral signal has been climate and adjacent environmental governance where states have actually produced shared rules, targets, and funding mechanisms rather than mere communiqués. The UNFCCC track has kept tightening the normative ratchet even when enforcement is indirect: the Paris Agreement’s nationally determined contributions framework continues to force periodic disclosure and revision, COP27’s decision to operationalize a Loss and Damage fund was a genuine institutional addition, and COP28’s language calling for a transition away from fossil fuels was an unusually explicit multilateral marker of direction, whatever the subsequent implementation. Outside UNFCCC, the Montreal Protocol system and the Kigali Amendment remain the gold standard for “works-in-the-world” multilateralism because they embed timetables, compliance procedures, and technology transfer that actually shift industrial practice, and the IMO’s 2023 revised greenhouse-gas strategy for shipping signaled a sectoral move from voluntary aspiration toward coordinated decarbonization constraints. A second cluster is economic and regulatory coordination where the “policy” is not global harmony but partial interoperability: the OECD/G20 global minimum tax project is a multilateral attempt to reassert fiscal sovereignty against base erosion through common standards, and the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (concluded in 2022) is one of the rare recent cases where trade law is used to limit a concrete harm rather than merely liberalize markets. You also see multilateralism as crisis plumbing rather than idealism: the G20’s debt-service suspension initiative and the Common Framework were imperfect and slow, but they represented coordinated acknowledgement that sovereign debt distress cannot be managed purely by bilateral pressure without systemic spillovers. If you are asking for “moments of a future beyond the weight,” I would point to the places where multilateralism shifts from moral exhortation to institutional architecture that survives mood and leadership changes: binding sectoral rules (shipping, refrigerants), standardized disclosure regimes (climate reporting, tax transparency), and treaty-making that creates new commons governance (the 2023 UN High Seas Treaty/BBNJ agreement, pending ratification, is structurally important because it treats areas beyond national jurisdiction as governable through shared procedures rather than competitive extraction). Those are not utopias; they are narrow, technical, often uninspiring. But precisely for that reason they are among the few policy domains where cooperation can outlast the current geopolitical temperature and give individuals and states a credible sense that law, not merely force, still has some future. This is a perfect example. All of these things that you mentioned seem so outside the realm of everybody’s ordinary day-to-day experience, yet it’s these facets of reality that determine what we call the domain of right. For us to have the opportunity, let alone the freedom, to exercise the promise we made when we said we would exercise our rights with the dignity for which they were fought for. You are identifying the central asymmetry: the domain of right is experienced locally and personally, but it is increasingly engineered at levels that are infrastructural, transnational, and technical, so that what “counts” as a predictable, non-arbitrary world is decided far upstream from ordinary perception. A person experiences right as the ability to work, travel, speak, assemble, contract, own, appeal, and be protected against violence or fraud, yet the stability of those experiences is now conditioned by regulatory harmonization, sanctions regimes, supply-chain controls, monetary coordination, climate-risk rules, and treaty obligations that rarely appear as “law” in the phenomenology of daily life. The result is a felt dislocation: one is told one has rights, yet the levers that make rights practicable are not only distant but opaque, and opacity weakens the sense that one is a participant in public reason rather than an object managed by systems. If the dignity of rights is to be more than rhetoric, the bridge is not more moralizing but more legibility and recourse. The domain of right becomes real to ordinary life when institutions produce clear, contestable reasons and reliable procedures at the points where a person actually meets power: police encounters, employment decisions, housing, healthcare access, schooling, immigration status, data collection, and the courts. Multilateral architecture matters, but it becomes freedom only when it translates into domestic constraints on arbitrariness—due process, transparency, non-discrimination standards, and enforceable remedies. In Kantian terms, the promise of dignity is not fulfilled by lofty ends but by public rules that allow a person to say, without naivety, “I can plan, I can appeal, I can demand reasons, I can be wronged and still be heard,” and thereby to inhabit autonomy not as an interior aspiration but as a socially supported practice. What you get is a bunch of people who have no influence with opinions about things they’re not involved in and yet their ability to recite them, to conjure them in conversation, or to use them as a nexus in the plot of their moral mandala. You get a body politic who has the right opinion about things to which they have no influence in and that to which they have an influence in remains completely barren of any understanding whatsoever. And I don’t mean this in the harsh way that people don’t know how to file taxes or that people don’t know how to put gas in their car, but what I mean is the phenomenological experience of being dislocated from the world and one’s worldhood by means of a metaphysics that generation by generation recedes into the backgrounds of academia until what you have left is a population who are trying to figure out what they mean by love, freedom, and power.

Whats being describing is a structurally produced bifurcation of consciousness: an educated capacity to name remote abstractions without agency, paired with a practical agency over immediate life that is increasingly speechless at the level of reasons. The public sphere becomes a theatre of recital, where “positions” substitute for participation, because participation has been hollowed out by scale, specialization, and procedural opacity. Then the ordinary person learns a kind of moral ventriloquism—competence in slogans, causes, and interpretive frames—while the places where one truly acts (workplace hierarchy, family obligation, debt, surveillance, local coercion, bodily habit) remain uncodified, unanalyzed, and therefore felt as fate rather than as a domain of right. The result is not ignorance, but dislocation: an inability to experience oneself as a co-author of the world one inhabits.

Phenomenologically, this produces “worldhood” as something thin and second-hand. One’s world is no longer disclosed through shared practices that are intelligible and revisable; it is disclosed through mediated narratives whose objects are elsewhere and whose efficacy is uncertain. When the metaphysical background recedes into academic custody, the basic words—love, freedom, power—stop functioning as lived orientations and become contested tokens. People are left with intensity without articulation: strong moral affect attached to distant objects, and muted comprehension where their actual power lies. That is why even sincerity becomes unstable: a person may be passionately “right” about what they cannot touch, and numb, cynical, or mystified about what touches them daily.

If one translates this into the Kantian vocabulary we have been using, it is a crisis of autonomy’s public conditions. Autonomy is not only the private capacity to legislate oneself; it also presupposes a world in which reasons can be public, claims can be answered, and authority can be made to give an account of itself. When that public space thins, the will loses its worldly traction. The individual then oscillates between two pathologies: moralism without agency and agency without understanding. The repair is not chiefly more information, but re-anchoring concepts in practices where contestation is possible—local procedure, transparent rules, reversible decisions, reasons given and challenged—so that “love, freedom, power” return from metaphysical vapor to lived grammar, and a person can again feel that their judgment is not merely a performance but a mode of inhabiting a shared world.

What follows from your diagnosis is that the restoration of “worldhood” is less a matter of persuading people to hold better opinions than of rebuilding the mid-level institutions where reasons become binding and revisable. The citizen needs zones in which their speech can actually alter outcomes, and in which authority must answer in public terms, not managerial euphemisms or ideological shibboleths. Otherwise autonomy is reduced to a private theatre of conscience, while sovereignty becomes an impersonal weather system. In such a climate, even genuine moral insight becomes performative, because there is no proximate forum in which it can be tested, instituted, or corrected; it floats, and then hardens into identity. The more exact conclusion is that freedom decays when the domain of right becomes either incomprehensible or inaccessible, because the self can no longer experience itself as an author among others. To recover the dignity you invoked—the dignity for which rights were fought—requires practical reattachment: legible rules at the point of contact, enforceable remedies, and participatory procedures that re-train the faculty of judgment by giving it consequences. Only then do love, freedom, and power cease to be mere metaphysical tokens and return as words with traction, indexing practices one can inhabit, contest, and share, so that autonomy is not granted, but once again becomes believable.

I completely disagree. I believe the citizen needs to be left alone. I believe the citizen needs, in the full weight of the word, complete leisure time. If they choose to work, it is because they have the capacity to become industrious. If they choose to help, it is because they have the capacity to be hospitable. If they have the power to fight, it is because they have been given the strength and the courage to do what’s right. And it is these strengths that make a people a people of true freedom, and therefore of true moral worth.

I understand the dispute, and in my terms it is a dispute about what the primary condition of autonomy is: you place it in leisure, I placed it in civic legibility and recourse. Leisure, in the full classical weight of the word (scholē, not mere entertainment), is not indulgence but the temporal space in which a person can become equal to themselves, where judgment can ripen, where attention is no longer conscripted by necessity. Without such time, “self-legislation” is a formal dignity with no breathing room; one is driven by urgency, wages, fear, status, fatigue. In that respect, your claim is not romantic but structural: a polity that deprives persons of leisure deprives them of the conditions under which the moral law can be anything other than an exhausted piety. But leisure alone does not secure freedom unless it is protected by right, because leisure is the first thing that power, wealth, and contingency steal. If the citizen is “left alone” in a society where the strong can impose costs, then being left alone becomes abandonment, and leisure becomes a privilege purchased by others’ insecurity. The question, then, is not whether freedom comes from the state’s moral tutoring (it must not), but whether the state is required to secure the negative conditions that make leisure real: protection against coercion, stable expectations, limits on domination, and a baseline material independence. If that scaffolding is absent, your virtues—industry, hospitality, courage—still exist, but they become episodic heroism rather than a common form of life. So I would restate your position in a Kantian register without domesticating it: the highest political aim is not to manufacture virtue, but to make room for it by freeing human time from necessity and compulsion. A people becomes a people of true freedom when persons are not forced into perpetual means-ends calculation, but can act from principles they own. That requires, minimally, that sovereignty restrain itself from legislating inner life, and, positively, that it secure a civil condition where leisure is not a luxury but a shared possibility. Your point is that moral worth is grown, not administered; my addition is that what is grown still needs shelter from the weather of power. A free people is not produced by correct opinions or by a state that manages virtue, but by the prior gift of unowned time: leisure in the strict sense, where necessity loosens, attention returns, and a person can become answerable to reason rather than to compulsion; sovereignty is justified only insofar as it secures this negative space—safety from domination, predictability of law, and non-interference with inner ends—so that industry, hospitality, and courage can arise as genuine powers of the citizen rather than as forced adaptations to scarcity, fear, or administrative moralism, and only then does autonomy appear not as something granted, but as a lived capacity whose moral worth is visible in action.