The Normativity of Self-Legislation in Intimate Relationships - Freedom, Morality, and Justice

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Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice — Paper III

The Normativity of Self-Legislation in Intimate Relationships: Freedom, Morality, and Justice

On a Lover’s Vow, the Rights-Order It Institutes, and the Conditions under Which It Becomes Domination

Wanhong Huang

huangwanhong.g.official@gmail.com

June 5, 2026

To the one I love, who taught me that to keep a vow is not to hold a course against her, but to keep, between us, the room in which she may always answer.

I take your hand, and with you I will grow old. — from the (Book of Songs)

It rises from feeling, and comes to rest in what is right. — after the (Great Preface to the Book of Songs)

Abstract

Consider a lover who legislates for himself an unconditional law: whatever happens, however the beloved feels, I will keep loving her. This paper subjects such a vow to a three-layered normative analysis, and uses it as a lens on a general structure: the conditions under which the self-legislation of a shared life is free, the conditions under which it is just, and the conditions under which it silently becomes domination or exploitation.

The argument is integrative. (1) On freedom: the vow is exemplary Kantian autonomy, but Kant’s own apparatus, the fact of reason and the noumenal self, cannot tell us when a self-legislation is free; a compatibilist, reasons-responsive criterion can, and on it the vow’s freedom turns out to be conditional on its remaining responsive to the beloved as a source of reasons. (2) On morality: the vow is admirable as constancy, yet its content, what loving her means, is left to the lover alone to fix, in tension with the responsiveness that the philosophy of love takes to be constitutive of love. (3) On justice: drawing on republican non-domination and a Hohfeldian analysis of the rights-order a vow institutes, the paper argues that a unilaterally legislated law over a two-person life cannot be just, because justice between two agents is modally, not merely actually, a matter of each retaining the standing to contest the terms.

A dedicated section on the constitution of the legislating subject (structuralist and feminist) shows why the injustice is not idiosyncratic but structurally produced: the “self” that legislates is itself constituted by a historically gendered order, so that a sincere, universalizable vow can reproduce that order’s subordinations. Integrating Marxian and social-reproduction theory, the paper distinguishes the conditions under which the vow institutes a legitimate rights-order from those under which it institutes exploitation, the appropriation of another’s unrecognized relational and reproductive labour under an ideology that presents the appropriation as love. Against the objection that turning to relationality merely relocates the problem, since recognition can itself be ideological, it argues that the operative criterion is the live contestability of the terms, not their de facto endorsement. The conclusion is an isomorphism: the micro-order of a vow and the macro-order of a political economy share a structure, and in both the standing of the legislation rests not on the purity of the legislator but on the irreducible, modally robust standing of the other to answer.

Keywords

self-legislation; autonomy; reasons-responsiveness; non-domination; recognition; ideological recognition; Hohfeldian rights; social reproduction; exploitation; relational autonomy; justice in intimate relationships.

Contents

• 1 Introduction: A Vow and Its Puzzle
  • 1.1 The Thesis and the Isomorphism
  • 1.2 Method and Scope
• 2 Kantian Self-Legislation and the Problem of Its Authority
  • 2.1 The Fact of Reason and the Circle of Authority
  • 2.2 The Noumenal Refuge
  • 2.3 Korsgaard’s Half-Step
• 3 When Is a Self-Legislation Free? From the Noumenal to the Reasons-Responsive
  • 3.1 Two Compatibilist Resources
  • 3.2 Applying Reasons-Responsiveness to the Vow
  • 3.3 The Hole Both Theories Share
• 4 The Moral Layer and the First Crack
• 5 The Justice Layer: Non-Domination and the Limits of Unilateral Legislation
  • 5.1 Why Procedure Cannot Certify Content
  • 5.2 Non-Domination as the Operative Conception
  • 5.3 Three Vectors of Domination
• 6 The Vow as the Institution of a Rights-Order
  • 6.1 What the Unilateral Vow Distributes
  • 6.2 Order versus the Mere Imposition of Order
• 7 The Constitution of the Legislating Subject: Structuralist and Feminist Considerations
  • 7.1 The Subject as Effect, Not Origin
  • 7.2 The Structure Is Gendered Subordination
  • 7.3 Why This Does Not Collapse into Determinism
• 8 Rights-Order or Exploitation? The Political Economy of the Vow
  • 8.1 Exploitation, Formally
  • 8.2 Love as the Site and the Mask
  • 8.3 The Line
• 9 The Objection from Ideological Recognition
  • 9.1 Contestability, Not Endorsement
  • 9.2 The Honest Residue
• 10 The Vow Re-Grounded: Relational Co-Legislation and Generative Justice
  • 10.1 From Self-Legislation to Co-Legislation
  • 10.2 Generative Justice
• 11 Conclusion: The Isomorphism of the Vow and the Order
• Acknowledgements
• References

1. Introduction: A Vow and Its Puzzle

Consider a lover who, reflecting on the precariousness of feeling and the contingency of circumstance, resolves upon a law for himself:

Whatever happens, however she feels toward me, I will keep loving her.

The resolution is not a prediction about how he expects to feel. It is a self-imposed principle, a law the agent gives himself and intends to govern his conduct regardless of what the world, or the beloved, does. It is, in the most literal sense, an act of self-legislation: the will binding itself to a maxim it has authored. Such vows are among the most admired achievements of a loving life. And yet, examined closely, the vow harbours a puzzle, and the puzzle, once unfolded, turns out to be a window onto a structure far larger than itself.

On the one hand, the vow is a triumph of freedom: it liberates the lover’s love from bondage to the beloved’s moods, to reciprocation, to the favourable alignment of fortune. On the other hand, the very structure that wins this freedom, the love’s unconditionality, its insulation from how the beloved actually responds, raises a worry not about freedom at all, but about justice. A relationship is not a solitary undertaking; it has two parties; and a law that one party legislates unilaterally, however lovingly, governs a shared life the other has had no hand in authoring. Stated at its sharpest: the vow institutes, between two people, an order, an arrangement of who may expect what, who owes what, who may alter the terms. The question this paper pursues is when such an order, unilaterally legislated, is free, when it is just, and when it silently becomes something else, an order of domination, even of exploitation, wearing the face of love.

1.1 The Thesis and the Isomorphism

The thesis has a layered form. (i) The vow is exemplary self-legislation and, in the Kantian sense, an exercise of freedom; but Kantian freedom cannot say when a self-legislation is free, and a more operable, compatibilist criterion reveals the vow’s freedom to be conditional. (ii) The vow can be morally admirable, but its admirable form is silent on its content, and the unilateral fixing of that content is already in tension with what love is. (iii) The vow cannot, in its unilateral form, be just, because justice between two parties is constitutively a matter of each retaining a modally robust standing to contest the terms, which a unilateral law by construction withholds. (iv) The injustice is not the failing of a bad lover but a structural product: the legislating “self” is itself constituted by a historically gendered order, so that even a sincere and universalizable vow can reproduce subordination. (v) There is a determinate line between the vow that institutes a legitimate rights-order and the vow that institutes exploitation; the line is drawn by whether the other retains co-authorship over the terms of what is given and demanded, or is instead enclosed, under the ideology of love, as the unrecognized provider of relational labour. (vi) The remedy is not a purer legislator but a relational re-grounding in which the other’s standing to contest is constitutive; and the criterion that keeps this from collapsing back into ideology is live contestability rather than endorsement.

The deepest claim is an isomorphism. The micro-order a lover institutes by a vow and the macro-order a political economy institutes by its distribution of rights and labour share a structure. In both, a legislation that looks self-grounded is in fact grounded in relations that precede it; in both, procedural correctness on the legislating side cannot certify justice; in both, what distinguishes order from domination is whether those bound by the law retain a real, not merely nominal, power to contest it. The intimate case is the clearest lens on this structure because its two-person character is vivid and because the lover’s sincerity strips away any suspicion of mere bad faith: if even this can be domination, the diagnosis cannot be dismissed.

1.2 Method and Scope

The vow is treated as a first-person practical datum, in the manner of Frankfurt (2004) and Velleman (1999), rather than as a third-personal object. The lover is assumed sincere, reflective, and well-meaning throughout; the argument is most secure precisely in that best case. The paper integrates traditions that rarely appear together, Kantian autonomy, compatibilist free-will theory, republican non-domination, analytic jurisprudence, structuralist and feminist accounts of subject-formation, and Marxian social-reproduction theory, but it does so under the discipline of a single spine, stated above, so that the integration is argumentative rather than encyclopaedic. Two limitations are flagged at the outset. First, the paper takes from Marx the formal structure of exploitation and the thesis of ideological masking, while remaining agnostic about the labour theory of value; nothing in the argument requires that theory to be true. Second, the constructive criterion offered at the end, live contestability, is defended as the right criterion, not as an algorithm; its residual hard cases are acknowledged rather than concealed.

The plan follows the spine. Section 2 reconstructs Kantian self-legislation and exposes its internal difficulty about the grounds of obligation. Section 3 asks when a self-legislation is free and develops a reasons-responsive criterion. Section 4 treats the moral layer and the first crack. Section 5 develops the justice layer through non-domination. Section 6 analyses the vow as the institution of a Hohfeldian rights-order. Section 7 examines the constitution of the legislating subject. Section 8 draws the line between rights-order and exploitation. Section 9 meets the objection from ideological recognition. Section 10 reconstructs the vow. Section 11 states the isomorphism.

2. Kantian Self-Legislation and the Problem of Its Authority

The vow’s claim to be an exercise of freedom rests on the Kantian distinction between autonomy and heteronomy. A will is heteronomous when determined by something external to its own rational legislation, by inclination, desire, circumstance, or the anticipated favour of others; it is autonomous when the law it follows issues from itself, when the will is “a law to itself” (Kant 1997b, 4:440). Autonomy is not the absence of law but the presence of self-given law; freedom is not doing whatever one is moved to do, which is precisely the condition of being moved by alien causes, but acting on principles one has authored as a rational agent.

This yields the apparent paradox that self-binding is freedom. The agent who acts on whichever impulse is strongest is not free but driven; the agent who binds himself to a self-authored principle achieves a standing independence from the flux of impulse and becomes the author of his conduct rather than its venue. Korsgaard (1996) reconstructs this as the claim that to act autonomously is to act on a law one gives oneself in light of a practical identity, and that this self-legislation is what constitutes one as a unified agent rather than a succession of psychological states; the thought is extended in Korsgaard (2009), where agency itself is an achievement of self-constitution under self-given principles.

Applied to the vow: the lover who loves only while loved in return, only while moods are favourable, only while circumstance cooperates, has a love that is heteronomously conditioned, the dependent variable of factors outside his legislation. The vow severs these dependencies. In resolving to love “whatever happens, however she feels,” the lover withdraws his love from the jurisdiction of mood and reciprocity and places it under his own legislation. On Kantian grounds the vow is therefore not a diminishment of freedom but its fullest expression, and there is a recognizable Kantian thought that conduct from principle has a higher worth than conduct from inclination, the former being the agent’s achievement, the latter a gift of temperament (Kant 1997b, 4:398–399).

2.1 The Fact of Reason and the Circle of Authority

Grant all this, and a question remains that will prove decisive: whence the authority of the self-given law? If the lover is both the author of the law and the one bound by it, what prevents him from repealing it the moment it chafes? A law one can revise at will is no law; yet a law one gives oneself seems to be exactly that. Kant felt the difficulty acutely. In the Groundwork he sought to derive the moral law’s bindingness from the very concept of a rational will, but by the Critique of Practical Reason he rests the matter on what he calls the fact of reason (Faktum der Vernunft): our consciousness of the moral law as binding is a fact that reason simply presents, neither derived from anything prior nor in need of, nor susceptible of, external proof (Kant 1997a, 5:31). The bindingness of self-legislation is thus secured by treating it as a datum rather than a conclusion.

This is the first of two pressure points. To ground the authority of self-given law in a “fact” that reason presents to itself is either to assert what was to be shown, that the self-given law really does bind its author, or to relocate the authority outside the individual will, into “reason” as something the agent does not control and cannot repeal. Kant takes the second route: the law binds not because this individual wills it but because reason, in him, legislates it, and reason is not his to revoke. The move saves the bindingness but at a price we will collect repeatedly: it makes the genuinely authoritative legislator not the empirical person but reason as such, and thereby quietly concedes that the individual, considered as the contingent being he is, is not in fact the self-sufficient source of the law he appears to give himself.

2.2 The Noumenal Refuge

The second pressure point is the home of Kant’s answer to every charge that the legislator is corruptible. Confronted with the worry that an agent’s sense of what reason requires might be distorted by inclination, history, or circumstance, Kant can reply that such distortions belong to the empirical self, the self in the world of appearances, whereas the true legislator is the noumenal self, the rational agent considered as a member of the intelligible order, whose legislation is by its nature untainted by empirical determination. Freedom, on this picture, is a property of the noumenal will; the moral law is what that will gives itself; and the contingencies that might corrupt an actual person’s judgement are, in principle, screened off from the legislating self that matters.

This noumenal refuge is the strongest move available to the defender of pure self-legislation, and much of this paper can be read as the attempt to show that it cannot do the work the intimate case demands of it. Two observations begin that work. First, the refuge is purchased by placing the authoritative legislator beyond the reach of experience, which makes it equally beyond the reach of any operable test: if the question is when, in actual life, a given self-legislation is free rather than driven, just rather than dominating, an appeal to a noumenal self that is by definition never given in experience yields no usable answer. Second, the refuge concedes, in the very act of invoking it, that the empirical legislator, the actual lover making the actual vow, is exposed to exactly the distortions the paper will track; it protects the purity of self-legislation only by relocating it to a self that does no concrete work. We will let the refuge stand for now and return, in Section 7, to dismantle the assumption it most depends on: that there is a legislating self constituted prior to, and independently of, the relations and history in which the empirical person is formed.

2.3 Korsgaard’s Half-Step

Korsgaard’s reconstruction is important here precisely because it takes a half-step away from the noumenal refuge and toward the relational view, without completing it. By grounding obligation in practical identities, the descriptions under which we value ourselves and find our lives worth living, she brings the source of normativity down from the noumenal into the texture of an agent’s actual self-understanding (Korsgaard 1996). Practical identities are largely social: one is a friend, a citizen, a parent, a lover, and these identities, with their attendant obligations, are not legislated ex nihilo by a noumenal will but inherited, adopted, and sustained in a social world. To that extent Korsgaard has already conceded that the legislator is socially constituted. Yet she retains a backstop: beneath all contingent practical identities lies one that is not optional, our identity simply as reflective rational agents, members of the “kingdom of ends,” and it is this that supplies universal moral obligations and rescues the account from relativism. The half-step is therefore arrested: the social constitution of the self is admitted at every level but the last, where a non-relational, universal identity is reinstated to do the grounding work. The argument of this paper presses on exactly that last level. If even the deepest practical identity, the sense of oneself as one who loves, and of what loving requires, is constituted in and by relations that are historically structured, then there is no non-relational floor on which a self-sufficient legislation could stand. Section 7 makes that case; the intervening sections show why it matters.

3. When Is a Self-Legislation Free? From the Noumenal to the Reasons-Responsive

Section 2 establishes that the vow is, in Kantian terms, an exercise of autonomy. But it also exposes that Kantian autonomy cannot answer the question the rest of the paper needs answered: when is a particular act of self-legislation free, and when is it merely a sophisticated form of being driven? The noumenal account locates freedom in a self never given in experience and so offers no operable criterion; the fact of reason secures bindingness by fiat. To make progress we need a conception of freedom that applies to the legislating mechanism as it actually operates. The compatibilist tradition in the theory of free will supplies one.

3.1 Two Compatibilist Resources

Two resources are pertinent. The first is Frankfurt’s hierarchical account, on which an agent is free in the relevant sense when his will, the desire that moves him to act, is one he reflectively endorses at a higher order: the unwilling addict, moved by a first-order desire he repudiates at the second order, is unfree, while the agent whose effective desire is ratified by his higher-order volitions acts of his own free will (Frankfurt 1988). The second, more demanding and more useful here, is Fischer and Ravizza’s account of guidance control, which they analyse as two conditions: the action must issue from the agent’s own mechanism (ownership), and that mechanism must be moderately reasons-responsive, that is, disposed to recognize and respond to a suitable range of reasons, including reasons to do otherwise, across a range of scenarios (Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Notably, their theory is historicist: whether a mechanism is the agent’s own depends on how it came to be his, on the history of its formation, so that a mechanism implanted by manipulation, however well it functions now, does not ground freedom. We will exploit this historicism in Section 7.

3.2 Applying Reasons-Responsiveness to the Vow

On the reasons-responsive criterion, the freedom of the vow is not settled by the bare fact that the lover gave himself the law. It depends on whether the mechanism that now governs his loving remains responsive to the relevant reasons. And here the central reasons are supplied by the beloved: her needs, her changes, her objections, her saying that what he offers as love is not, for her, love. A vow whose whole point is to hold steady “however she feels” is, read in one way, a mechanism engineered to be unresponsive to precisely these reasons, to treat her dissent not as input that could redirect the loving but as weather to be outlasted. To that extent the vow, far from being the height of freedom, approaches the condition of the driven: the lover is moved by a standing resolution that has been insulated against the reasons that ought to be able to move it. The Kantian sees only that the law is self-given and pronounces the vow free; the reasons-responsive criterion sees that a self-given law can be self-given as a cage, and asks the further question the Kantian cannot.

This yields a determinate and somewhat surprising result. The vow is free to the extent that, and only to the extent that, the constancy it institutes leaves the lover’s loving responsive to the beloved as a source of reasons. A constancy of presence and commitment that remains responsive in its mode is free; a constancy that fixes the mode and immunizes it against her is, by the very criterion that makes self-legislation a candidate for freedom, a diminution of freedom dressed as its triumph. Freedom and the seed of the later injustice are thus located at a single point: the responsiveness of the legislating mechanism to the other.

3.3 The Hole Both Theories Share

Reasons-responsiveness is a real advance, but it has a famous limitation that, far from being a defect for our purposes, is the hinge of the whole integration. The criterion is officially neutral about which reasons the mechanism must answer to and about who has standing to supply them; it asks only that the mechanism be suitably responsive to whatever reasons there are. As critics have noted, this leaves the account silent on the sources of the reasons. An agent may be exquisitely responsive to the reasons he recognizes while being systematically closed to a whole class of reasons he does not recognize as reasons at all, for instance, the claims of someone whose standing to make claims he has, without noticing, discounted in advance. Such an agent passes the reasons-responsiveness test on the reasons that reach him, yet is, in a deeper sense, unfree, and, as we will see, positioned to dominate.

This is the same hole, arrived at from the other side, that Kantian universalizability was meant to plug and could not. Kant’s test asks whether one could will one’s maxim as a universal law; the hope was that this formal demand would force the agent to take account of everyone’s standing. Hegel’s objection, that the test screens out only outright contradictions and licenses a wide range of substantively objectionable maxims provided they are described with care (Hegel 1991, §135), is precisely the complaint that universalizability does not in fact secure attention to the other’s standing: a maxim that discounts another’s claims in advance can be universalized without contradiction, because the discounting has already been built into the description of the situation. So the Kantian formal route and the compatibilist reasons-responsive route fail at the same place: neither can, from its own resources, guarantee that the legislating self is open to the other as a full source of reasons and claims. Both presuppose a legislator already disposed to count the other, and neither can supply that disposition. That common gap is where relationality must enter, not as a preference but as the only thing that can fill a hole both leading theories of free and responsible agency leave open. The remainder of the paper is, in effect, the filling of that hole.

4. The Moral Layer and the First Crack

Does the vow’s standing as freedom carry into moral admirability? On several theories, initially yes. On a Kantian reckoning it honours the Formula of Humanity: the lover commits to treating the beloved never merely as a means, to be retained while pleasing and discarded when not, but as an end whose standing does not fluctuate with her usefulness (Kant 1997b, 4:429). There is, too, a venerable view that unconditional commitment is close to love’s essence. On Singer’s bestowal account, love confers a value not earned by the beloved’s merits and so not revoked when they waver (Singer 1991). On Frankfurt’s account, love is a mode of volitional necessity in which the lover comes to be unable to be indifferent to the beloved’s flourishing, and this bondage is the very shape of caring (Frankfurt 2004). By these lights the vow articulates love rather than distorting it.

Yet here the first crack appears. The vow’s content is “I will keep loving her”, but this is schematic until we specify what loving her consists in, and the unilateral structure of self-legislation lets the lover, and the lover alone, fill in that content. “Keep loving her” can mean: I will keep willing her good, attending to her as the particular person she is, responding to what she actually needs and asks. Or it can slide, by degrees, into: I will keep doing what I have determined loving her to be, whatever she says about it. The first is responsive; the second, despite its devotion, is imposition.

The philosophy of love supplies the resources to see why the second reading is defective as love. For Velleman, love is a moral emotion, the lover’s response to the beloved as a rational agent, an arresting awareness of her worth as a being with her own will and ends (Velleman 1999). A love whose content is fixed unilaterally and held immune to the beloved’s actual will is in tension with this: it addresses not the beloved as a rational agent with claims of her own, but an image of her, or the lover’s conception of her good, around which the conduct of love is then organized. Kolodny’s relational theory presses the same point: love is grounded in, and answerable to, an ongoing relationship between two people, not in a disposition lodged in one and sealed against the other (Kolodny 2003); and Helm’s account of intimate identification likewise makes the beloved’s own perspective constitutive of the loving, not an optional input to it (Helm 2010). Even Frankfurt’s volitional necessity, properly understood, is a necessity to care about the beloved’s good as she has it, not about the lover’s project of loving.

So the crack is this. Stated abstractly, the vow is admirable; but its abstract statement conceals a fork, and nothing in the form of self-legislation determines which tine is taken, because the form is silent on content. Read responsively, the vow remains love and remains admirable. Read as the unilateral fixing of love’s content, it converts the beloved from the addressee of love into the occasion for the lover’s exercise of a self-assigned role. The question the freedom and morality layers cannot answer is now unavoidable, and it is a question about authority: who decides what loving her means? That is a question of justice.

5. The Justice Layer: Non-Domination and the Limits of Unilateral Legislation

The deepest assessment concerns neither the vow’s freedom nor its moral quality from the lover’s side, but its justice, the standing of the arrangement it institutes between two people. I begin from a deliberately thin and widely shared conception and let it do most of the work, reserving a thicker conception for Section 10.

5.1 Why Procedure Cannot Certify Content

In the moral philosophy descended from Kant there is a standing question whether a correct procedure of legislation guarantees just content. Kant’s wager is that it does: a maxim that survives universalizability, willed by a rational agent treating humanity as an end, is thereby in order, so that one need not consult an independent standard of justice to certify the result. The wager has been contested from two directions. Hegel’s charge of empty formalism, already invoked, is that universalizability screens out only contradictions and permits much that is substantively unjust (Hegel 1991, §135). Rawls, inheriting the Kantian ambition, declined to trust the bare form and instead built a procedure, the original position behind a veil of ignorance, whose design embeds substantive constraints, equality, mutual disinterest, ignorance of one’s place, precisely so that its outputs would be just (Rawls 1971). The lesson is double-edged: a procedure can be made to guarantee just content, but only by loading morally significant conditions into it in advance. Procedure does not generate justice for free.

A further consideration is decisive for our case. Even a procedurally impeccable self-legislation can produce unjust content when the legislator’s own judgement, of what love requires, what a partner owes, what counts as a reasonable claim by the other, has been formed by conditions that systematically under-weight the other’s standing. The procedure then runs correctly on corrupted inputs. In the intimate sphere this is not a remote possibility but the ordinary condition, since everyone’s conception of love is inherited and acculturated; Section 7 shows how. For now the structural point suffices: the lover’s sincerity, freedom, and good will establish that the vow is, from his side, autonomously and even admirably made, but they cannot establish that it is just, because justice between two parties is not the kind of thing one party can confer by legislating well.

5.2 Non-Domination as the Operative Conception

The thin conception I adopt is republican: a relationship is unjust to the extent that one party is subject to domination, understood, after Pettit, as exposure to another’s capacity for arbitrary interference, interference not controlled by, and not answerable to, the affected party’s own avowable interests and voice (Pettit 1997). The decisive feature of this conception, for us, is that domination is modal: one is dominated not only when interference actually occurs but whenever one is exposed to its possibility at another’s discretion. Pettit’s own illustration is the slave of a kindly master: the master who chooses never to interfere still dominates, because the non-interference depends on his continuing goodwill rather than on the slave’s secured standing; the slave lives at discretion, and that is unfreedom even when the discretion is exercised benignly (Pettit 1997). What makes the difference between freedom and domination is therefore not the quality of the treatment but the structure of the power: whether the dominated party has a secured, non-discretionary standing, or merely the good fortune of a benevolent superior.

This is exactly the tool the intimate case requires, because the lover of our vow is, at his best, the benevolent master. His love may be impeccable in its actual exercise; the question nondomination teaches us to ask is whether the beloved’s good treatment is secured by her standing or merely granted by his disposition. A unilaterally legislated law of love, however benevolent, places the beloved in the structural position of one who lives at the lover’s discretion: the terms of the love, what it will demand of her, what it will provide, what it will refuse to hear, are set by him, and her good treatment depends on his continuing to will it rather than on any standing of hers to contest it. That is domination in the modal sense even if the lover never once interferes badly, indeed even if he is, by every actual measure, wonderful. The benevolent-master structure is the precise diagnosis of what is wrong with a vow that is, by hypothesis, made in love.

5.3 Three Vectors of Domination

The general diagnosis resolves into three concrete vectors.

(i) Immunization against voice. The vow’s signature clause is “however she feels.” But the beloved’s feelings are not always weather to be loved through; sometimes what presents as her mood is a claim: I need room; I need you to hear this; something between us is wrong. A vow structured to love on regardless risks converting every such claim into one more contingency to be surmounted by steadfastness, so that the most resolute love becomes the love least able to hear. The lover’s constancy, a virtue from his side, can function from hers as a wall: her dissent is metabolized in advance as something his love is built to outlast. This is the gravest vector, for it disables the very channel through which a domination might be communicated and corrected, and it is the intimate face of the reasons-responsiveness hole of Section 3.

(ii) Non-reciprocity. Unconditional unilateral commitment distorts the economy of giving and receiving a just relationship maintains. A love that gives without condition and without reference to the other’s giving can fix the beloved as the perpetual recipient of something she has not asked for in the form in which it arrives, or license the lover to endure, in fidelity’s name, treatment he ought not to endure, unilaterally setting the terms of sacrifice as well. Reciprocity is not the demand that love be repaid like a debt; it is the condition that the shape of the giving be something both hands touch. Unilateral unconditionality removes her hand from it.

(iii) Definitional capture. Most subtly, the unilateral vow lodges the authority to define what loving her means in the lover. As Section 4 showed, “keep loving her” requires content, and the vow assigns the filling of that content to one party. But what counts as loving this particular person is something over which she has standing to speak; to foreclose that, however lovingly, is to capture an authority that is properly shared, to love her in the third person while addressing her in the second.

None of these requires the lover to be selfish, deluded, or coercive. They are structural, following from the unilateral form of the vow conjoined with the two-person character of what it governs. The vow can be free in the Kantian sense, sincere, constant, devoted, and still institute, through these channels, a quiet domination. The next section makes the structure precise by asking what kind of order a vow institutes.

6. The Vow as the Institution of a Rights-Order

To say a vow “institutes an order” can sound metaphorical. It is not. A vow over a shared life creates, between the two parties, a determinate structure of normative positions, and the most precise instrument for displaying that structure is Hohfeld’s analysis of jural relations (Hohfeld 1919). Hohfeld showed that what we loosely call “a right” decomposes into distinct positions that come in correlative pairs: a claim in one party correlates with a duty in the other; a privilege (liberty) with a no-right; and, at the second order, a power to alter the parties’ positions with a liability to have one’s positions altered, while an immunity correlates with a disability. Crucially, Hohfeld insisted that every such relation holds between exactly two persons: jural relations are irreducibly relational, never a property of one party alone.

6.1 What the Unilateral Vow Distributes

Read through this lens, the lover’s vow is the unilateral institution of a set of Hohfeldian positions governing the relationship. The lover assumes duties (to keep loving, whatever happens), and thereby confers on the beloved corresponding claims. So far the vow looks generous: it loads obligation onto the lover and entitlement onto the beloved. But the decisive positions are at the second order. Who holds the power to alter the terms, to determine what the duties and claims actually are, what “loving her” shall be taken to require and provide? In the unilateral vow, that power is retained entirely by the lover. He defines the content; he may, being its author, redefine it; the beloved holds no correlative power but only a liability, the position of one whose normative situation is determined by another’s exercise of power. And does the beloved hold an immunity against having the terms of the love set without her, correlating with a disability in the lover to set them alone? She does not; the unilateral structure is precisely the lover’s retention of the power and the beloved’s exposure as liability.

This is the Hohfeldian translation of the non-domination diagnosis, and it sharpens it. The vow’s generosity is all at the first order, claims and duties that favour the beloved, while the domination is all at the second order, in the distribution of power and immunity. One can be lavishly endowed with first-order claims and still be dominated, if one holds no power over the terms and no immunity against their unilateral revision. The benevolent master grants generous claims; what he withholds is the power and the immunity. Hohfeld lets us say exactly what a just intimate order would require that the unilateral vow omits: not more generous duties on the lover’s side, but a distribution of the second-order positions, a share of the power to set and revise the terms, and an immunity against their being set unilaterally. Justice in the rights-order is a matter of the second order.

6.2 Order versus the Mere Imposition of Order

The analysis also clarifies what is right about the impulse to vow. Some institution of an order is not optional in a shared life; two people who coordinate at all stand in jural relations, and the alternative to an order is not freedom but chaos, in which neither can rely on anything. The question is never whether to have a rights-order but how the power to constitute and revise it is distributed. A vow that institutes an order while reserving all second-order power to its author has not done something gratuitous by instituting an order; it has done something unjust by monopolizing the constituent power. This distinction, between the institution of an order and the monopolization of constituent power over it, is exactly the distinction we will need at the largest scale, and it is the bridge to the political-economic register: the same structure by which a benevolent legislator can institute an order that dominates those it generously binds recurs from the intimate dyad to the polity. Before drawing that isomorphism, we must ask how the legislator who monopolizes constituent power comes to do so without noticing, which returns us to the constitution of the legislating self.

7. The Constitution of the Legislating Subject: Structuralist and Feminist Considerations

Every layer so far has deferred a question to this section. The Kantian noumenal refuge (Section 2) presupposed a legislating self constituted prior to and independently of its relations. The reasons-responsiveness hole (Section 3) turned on a legislator already disposed, or not, to count the other as a source of reasons. The corrupted-inputs problem (Section 5) and the monopolized constituent power (Section 6) both pointed to a legislator whose sense of what love requires is given from somewhere. This section asks where, and the answer dismantles the assumption on which the purity of self-legislation depends. The argument runs as a chain: the legislating subject is not the origin but an effect (structuralism); the effect is produced by a determinate, historically gendered order (feminist political theory); therefore a sincere unilateral vow is liable to encode and reproduce that order’s subordinations, which is why the three vectors of Section 5 are structurally expectable rather than personal lapses.

7.1 The Subject as Effect, Not Origin

The structuralist insight, in the form most useful here, is that the subject who appears to be the source of meaning and law is itself produced by structures that precede it. Althusser’s account of interpellation holds that individuals are constituted as subjects by being “hailed” by ideology: one becomes a subject by recognizing oneself in the positions a social order addresses to one, so that the very interiority from which one seems to legislate is an effect of one’s having been addressed and having answered (Althusser 1971). Lacan’s parallel claim is that the subject is an effect of its insertion into the symbolic order, the system of language and law that pre-exists it; the “I” that speaks and wills is constituted in and by a field of signifiers it did not author (Lacan 2006). One need not adopt the whole of either system to take the structural point: the self that legislates the vow does not bring to the vow a conception of love minted by its own spontaneity; it brings a conception it has received, in which it has been formed as the kind of subject that loves in certain ways and expects certain things.

This is where the historicism of the reasons-responsiveness account (Section 3) returns with force. Fischer and Ravizza make the freedom-conferring character of a mechanism depend on how it was formed: a mechanism instilled by manipulation does not ground freedom even if it now functions well (Fischer and Ravizza 1998). The structuralist claim is that the mechanism of the loving self is always formed by a process the self did not control, the process of subject-constitution itself. This does not by itself defeat freedom, on pain of making freedom impossible; but it means that whether the lover’s legislating mechanism is genuinely his own, in the sense that grounds freedom and underwrites just authority, cannot be assumed and must be asked, and the asking requires examining the content of the formation. What, concretely, is the historical structure that forms the subject who vows to love?

7.2 The Structure Is Gendered Subordination

For intimate partnership the answer is supplied by feminist political theory, and it is specific: the order that has historically constituted the loving subject is one of gendered subordination, and it has done so through the very institutions, marriage, the family, romantic love, that present themselves as the home of free and mutual affection. Pateman’s analysis of the sexual contract argues that the social-contract tradition’s story of free and equal individuals contracting into civil society conceals a prior, sexual contract through which men secured a patriarchal right over women, and that the marriage contract in particular has been not a paradigm of free agreement between equals but a form of the subordination contract, in which one party contracts into a subordinate status under the language of consent (Pateman 1988). Okin’s analysis of justice, gender, and the family shows that the family, far from lying outside the scope of justice as a haven of spontaneous affection, has been a primary site of injustice, structured by a gendered division of labour and vulnerability that theories of justice, by exempting the family from scrutiny, helped to naturalize (Okin 1989). And Young’s account of the faces of oppression insists that domination and oppression are not, in the first instance, matters of distributive shortfall or of individual ill will, but structural: they operate through the normal, often well-intentioned processes of ordinary life, including the everyday workings of intimate and familial roles (Young 1990).

Put the structuralist mechanism and the feminist content together and the chain closes. The subject who legislates the vow has been constituted, as a loving subject, within a historically gendered order; the conception of love he brings to the vow, what love is, what it provides, what it may demand, what counts as the beloved’s good, is not minted by his spontaneity but received from that order; and that order is one of subordination presenting itself as mutuality. Therefore the three vectors of Section 5 are not the idiosyncratic failings of a particular lover but the structurally expectable output of a sincere subject legislating from a constituted standpoint he mistakes for a neutral one. Immunization against voice, non-reciprocity, and definitional capture are exactly what one would predict from a subject formed to experience a gendered allocation of emotional provision and authority as the natural shape of love. The lover need not be a patriarch in intention; he need only be a competent product of the order that formed him, legislating in good faith from inside it. This is why the noumenal refuge fails not merely as an epistemology but as a description: there is no constituted-independently legislator to retreat to, because the very capacity to legislate a conception of love is a deposit of the order under examination.

7.3 Why This Does Not Collapse into Determinism

It must be said at once what this argument does not claim, on pain of proving too much. It does not claim that the subject is wholly determined and incapable of legislating anything not dictated by the order that formed it; that would make critique, including this paper, impossible, and would dissolve the very agency whose freedom Section 3 took seriously. The claim is weaker and more exact: there is no guaranteed-pure standpoint, no noumenal refuge or non-relational practical identity, from which a self-sufficient and self-certifying legislation could issue. The capacity for critical distance is real but it is not the spontaneity of an uncaused legislator; it is itself a relational achievement, won through encounter with what does not fit the inherited conception, paradigmatically through the resistance of the other who says that what is offered as love is not, for her, love. This is the positive seed: if the formed subject cannot certify its own legislation from within, the correction can only come from without, from the standing of the other to contest, which Section 10 will make constitutive. First, though, we can now state precisely the line between a vow that institutes a legitimate order and one that institutes exploitation.

8. Rights-Order or Exploitation? The Political Economy of the Vow

We can now answer the question that motivates the political-economic register: when does the self-legislation of a shared life institute a legitimate rights-order, and when does it institute exploitation? The materials are in hand: the second-order analysis of constituent power (Section 6) and the constituted, gendered subject (Section 7). What remains is to import, carefully, the formal structure of exploitation.

8.1 Exploitation, Formally

I take from the Marxian tradition the form of exploitation while remaining agnostic about the labour theory of value, which the argument does not need. Formally, exploitation obtains when (a) one party systematically appropriates the benefit of another’s contribution or labour, (b) the appropriating party, not the contributing one, controls the terms under which the contribution is rendered and counted, and (c) the arrangement is sustained by a representation that makes the appropriation appear natural, voluntary, or even loving, so that it is not experienced as appropriation at all (on the form of appropriation and its mystification, see Marx 1976, esp. the analysis of the wage form). Condition (c), the ideological masking, is not incidental; it is what distinguishes exploitation from open coercion and what makes it stable. Marx’s point about the wage form, that it presents as an equal exchange (a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work) a relation in which surplus is appropriated, has its exact analogue in the intimate sphere, where the language of love presents as the free overflow of affection a relation in which one party’s relational labour is appropriated without recognition or reciprocal power.

8.2 Love as the Site and the Mask

The feminist development of this analysis, in social-reproduction theory, supplies the intimate content. The work of sustaining persons emotionally and materially, care, attention, the management of feeling, the labour of keeping a relationship and a household going, is labour, even though it is performed outside the wage and is therefore, in the theory’s terms, not exploited in the strict wage sense but expropriated: necessary work that is unpaid, undervalued, and rendered invisible by being recoded as the natural expression of love or femininity (Federici 2012; Fraser 2016). Federici’s central claim is exactly that housework and care were made to appear as expressions of love rather than as work, and that this recoding is the mechanism of their expropriation (Federici 2012). Hochschild’s analysis of emotional labour names the further dimension: the management of one’s own feeling to produce a required emotional state in another is work, and it is distributed unequally, with one party characteristically assigned the open-ended task of sustaining the relationship’s emotional weather (Hochschild 1983). Social-reproduction theory’s distinction between exploitation and expropriation, and its insistence that the sphere of love and care is where capitalism offloads the costs of reproducing people, give the intimate analysis its political-economic depth (Bhattacharya 2017).

Now the unilateral vow can be located precisely on this map. A vow that reserves second-order power to the lover, made by a subject constituted within a gendered order, and expressed in the language of unconditional love, satisfies all three conditions of the formal structure of exploitation when it operates so as to enclose the beloved as the unrecognized provider of relational and reproductive labour. (a) The benefit of her sustaining labour is appropriated, the relationship is kept going, the lover is emotionally and materially sustained, while (b) the terms, what counts as love, what is owed, what may be asked, are controlled by him through his retained constituent power, and (c) the whole is masked as love, indeed as his love for her, so that her labour is recoded as the natural expression of her affection and disappears as labour. The very unconditionality that made the vow look like the height of devotion is, on this analysis, the perfect ideological form: it presents as pure gift a structure of appropriation, and it does so most effectively precisely when the lover is sincere, because his sincerity is the surface under which the structure operates unseen.

8.3 The Line

This yields the determinate line the section promised. The self-legislation of a shared life institutes a legitimate rights-order when the other retains co-authorship over the second-order terms, the power to set and revise what is given and demanded, and an immunity against having those terms fixed unilaterally; under those conditions the labour of sustaining the relationship is rendered and counted on terms the contributor co-controls, and is recognized as contribution. The same self-legislation institutes exploitation when the other is enclosed as the provider of unrecognized relational labour under terms she does not co-control, with the enclosure masked by the language of love. The line is not drawn by the warmth of the feeling, the generosity of the first-order provisions, or the sincerity of the legislator, all of which are compatible with exploitation and indeed are its most effective cover. It is drawn, exactly as in the political-economic case, by the distribution of constituent power and by whether the contributor’s labour is recognized as such or recoded as natural devotion. The intimate and the political-economic are here not analogous but, in the relevant structural respect, identical: in both, the difference between a just order and an exploitative one is whether those whose labour sustains the order retain the power to set its terms and the standing to have their contribution recognized.

9. The Objection from Ideological Recognition

The argument now points unmistakably toward a remedy: make the vow relational; distribute the second-order power; give the beloved constitutive standing to contest and co-author what loving her means. But the most serious objection to that remedy comes from within the very traditions, recognition theory and relational autonomy, on which it draws, and it must be met before the remedy can be stated, on pain of the remedy’s being hollow.

The objection is that relationality is no guarantee of justice, because recognition can itself be ideological. Honneth, whose theory makes love the first sphere of recognition, the sphere in which basic self-confidence is formed, and recognition the medium of self-realization (Honneth 1995), is himself the source of the difficulty. He observes that subjects can derive genuine self-worth and stable identity from recognition conferred within, and securing their consent to, a subordinate position (Honneth 2007). The devoted partner may attain a robust sense of identity and esteem precisely by fulfilling a role that subordinates her; her recognition is real and her endorsement sincere, yet the arrangement she endorses is one we have reason to call unjust. “Ideological recognition” names the cases where being recognized, and welcoming it, coexists with and even cements domination. Pressed against relational autonomy, the point becomes a dilemma: Khader (2020) argues that the social embedding relational theories celebrate is also what can produce a person’s sincere attachment to conditions that diminish her, the problem of adaptive preferences (cf. Khader 2011). Applied to our case: the lover opens the terms to co-authorship, and the beloved, formed by the very gendered order Section 7 described to ask for little, co-authors terms that subordinate her and cherishes them. The relationship is now relational, recognitional, co-authored, and unjust, the more insidiously because it wears the appearance of mutual endorsement.

This is a genuine knife at the throat of the remedy, and it is sharpened by the present paper’s own Section 7: if the subject is constituted by a gendered order, why expect the beloved’s constituted preferences to be any purer a touchstone than the lover’s constituted conception? I do not blunt the objection by denying its force. Turning the vow relational does not, by itself, secure justice. If the criterion of a just relational order were de facto endorsement, that both parties in fact accept the terms, ideological recognition would defeat the remedy outright, since de facto endorsement is exactly what the contented subordinate supplies.

9.1 Contestability, Not Endorsement

The answer is that the operative criterion is not de facto endorsement but live contestability, and this is where the republican analysis of Section 5 pays off. Recall that domination is modal: it concerns not whether interference actually occurs but whether one is exposed to its possibility at another’s discretion (Pettit 1997). Transpose this to recognition. What makes a relational order just is not that its terms are in fact accepted, but that each party retains a modally robust standing to contest and revise them, a standing tested not by whether dissent actually occurs but by what would happen if it did. The contented subordinate’s situation is unjust, on this criterion, not because she fails to object, she does not wish to, but because, were she to object, her objection would carry no weight; the order is structured so that her dissent would not move it. Endorsement under conditions where dissent is foreclosed is not the kind of endorsement that confers justice. Contestability asks the counterfactual, modal question, is dissent live, weighty, efficacious across the relevant range of circumstances?, and that question discriminates between recognition that secures standing and recognition that merely secures consent to its absence. This is precisely why de facto endorsement fails as a criterion and modal contestability succeeds: the former is a fact about the actual world that ideology can manufacture, the latter a fact about the structure of power across possible worlds that ideology cannot, by manufacturing actual consent, satisfy.

Two clarifications fortify the reply. First, contestability is not satisfied by a merely formal permission to object. A relationship in which the beloved is “allowed” to disagree but in which her disagreement is structurally inert, always outlasted, always reframed, never able to change anything, fails the test as surely as one that forbids objection outright; this is the relational analogue of Hohfeld’s point that a nominal claim without a correlative power is no protection. Live contestability requires that dissent be able to make a difference, a fact about the distribution of second-order power and of responsiveness, not about the presence of a nominal right. Second, following Ricoeur, contestability presupposes a proper distance between the parties: a relation close enough for intimacy yet preserving the irreducible separateness of the other, so that the beloved remains an other who can say no rather than being absorbed into the lover’s conception of the shared good (Ricoeur 2005). Recognition collapses into ideology precisely when this distance collapses, when the other is so identified with the relationship, or with the lover’s image of her, that there is no standpoint from which she could dissent. Proper distance is the structural condition that keeps contestability live, and it connects back to the constitution of the subject: the maintenance of a standpoint from which the other can contest is what prevents her constituted preferences from being simply the internalized echo of the lover’s, or of the order’s.

9.2 The Honest Residue

In keeping with the standard of not over-claiming, the limits of the reply must be stated. Contestability is not an algorithm and not a guarantee. There are hard cases in which it is genuinely unclear whether dissent is live or foreclosed, and cases in which a deeply internalized subordination corrodes the very capacity to conceive of dissent, so that the counterfactual test threatens to return indeterminate, the standpoint of contestation having been, as it were, colonized in advance. I do not claim that contestability dissolves the problem of ideological recognition. I claim that it locates justice in the right place, in the modally robust standing to contest rather than in the fact of consent, and that it does decisively better than de facto endorsement, which ideology defeats immediately. Where the capacity to contest has itself been damaged, the requirement of proper distance and the relational achievement of critical standpoint (Section 7) become the site of repair, slow, uncertain, and never to be presumed complete. A criterion can be correct and still leave a residue of hard cases; epistemic honesty requires naming the residue rather than papering over it.

10. The Vow Re-Grounded: Relational Co-Legislation and Generative Justice

We can now reconstruct the vow so as to preserve the goods established along the way, the freedom of Section 3, the moral worth of Section 4, while closing the gap diagnosed across Sections 5–8 and surviving the objection of Section 9. The reconstruction does not repudiate the original vow. Its core, that love should not be the hostage of mood or the dependent variable of reciprocation, is worth keeping; it is what made the vow an achievement of freedom. What must change is not the constancy but the unilaterality, not the first-order devotion but the monopoly of second-order power.

The original vow was: Whatever happens, however she feels, I will keep loving her. The reconstructed vow is closer to:

I will keep loving her, and what loving her means, here and now, I hold open to her: to her voice, her dissent, her revision. My constancy is that I will not make my love hostage to her mood or contingent on her return; but my constancy does not stand above her standing to contest what my love does to her and asks of her. The terms of our love are hers to set with me, and never mine to set alone.

The first clauses preserve the freedom layer: the love remains self-legislated, withdrawn from the jurisdiction of mood and reciprocity. The reasons-responsiveness criterion of Section 3 is now satisfied rather than violated, since the mechanism is explicitly held open to the beloved as a source of reasons. The final clauses close the justice gap by relocating the second-order power (Section 6) from the lover alone to the two together: constancy is retained as a property of the lover’s commitment to remain and to keep willing her good, while what is surrendered is the monopoly over the interpretation of that good. The three vectors are addressed at their root: voice is constitutively admitted, not immunized against; the shape of giving becomes something both hands touch; the definition of loving her is restored to shared authority. And because the operative criterion is live contestability rather than endorsement, the reconstruction does not collapse into ideological recognition: the test is not whether she accepts the terms but whether her dissent remains live, weighty, and able to move them, across the proper distance that keeps her an other who can say no. The political-economic line of Section 8 is thereby crossed back to the right side: with second-order power shared and her sustaining labour recognized as contribution rather than recoded as natural devotion, the order ceases to be exploitative and becomes a genuine rights-order.

10.1 From Self-Legislation to Co-Legislation

Mark what has happened to the concept of self-legislation. We began with a self-standing rational agent giving himself a law. We end with a law that governs the lover’s love and is not, and cannot be, his alone, a law that is, at its base, co-legislation. This is not a concession forced from outside onto an otherwise solitary act; Section 7 showed that the solitary act was never solitary, that the legislating self was constituted relationally all along. The reconstruction does not add relationality to a self-sufficient legislation; it brings the legislation’s own grounds into view and aligns the form of the vow with the truth of its origin. The Kantian picture presupposed a legislator constituted prior to and independently of relations; the relational ontology that this paper has progressively established, through the failure of the noumenal refuge, the historicism of agency, and the structural constitution of the subject, holds instead that the loving subject is in part generated in the relation: his sense of what love is, what the other is owed, what he himself wants and is, takes shape in and through the relationship he proposes to legislate over (Nedelsky 1989; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000; Helm 2010). “Self”-legislation in the intimate sphere was always a moment within the ongoing co-constitution of two subjects by each other.

10.2 Generative Justice

This licenses, at the end and not before, a conception of justice thicker than the non-domination floor that did the diagnostic work. If the subjects are generated in the relation, then justice between them is not merely the absence of domination but the positive maintenance of conditions under which each can continue to become who they are in the relation without that becoming being captured or foreclosed by the other. Call this generative justice: justice measured by whether the relation keeps open the conditions of each party’s ongoing self-formation, including, centrally, the standing to contest the terms of the relation itself. Non-domination and live contestability are the floor; generative justice is the substantive ideal they point toward, and it is the proper aim of the reconstructed vow. The reason to introduce it only here, rather than to build the whole argument on it, is methodological honesty: the diagnosis and the reply stand on the thin, widely shared notion of non-domination alone, and do not require the reader to accept the thicker, relational-ontological conception. Generative justice names what the reconstructed vow is for; non-domination and contestability are what it must, at minimum, secure.

11. Conclusion: The Isomorphism of the Vow and the Order

This paper began with a lover’s vow and has arrived at a structure that the vow shares with orders far larger than itself. The vow, taken as an instance of the self-legislation of a shared life, was shown to be an exemplary exercise of Kantian freedom whose freedom, on any operable criterion, is conditional on its remaining responsive to the other; a morally admirable form whose content is silent and capturable; and, in its unilateral version, an institution of domination in the modal sense, a benevolent-master order generous at the first order and dominating at the second. A Hohfeldian analysis located the wrong precisely in the monopolization of second-order constituent power; an account of the constituted subject showed why a sincere legislator reproduces that wrong without intending it; and the political economy of social reproduction drew the line between the vow that institutes a rights-order and the vow that institutes exploitation, the appropriation of unrecognized relational labour under the mask of love. The remedy is not a purer legislator but a relational co-legislation whose justice rests on the other’s modally robust, live standing to contest, and whose aim is the generative justice that keeps open each party’s becoming.

The deepest yield is the isomorphism the introduction promised. The micro-order a lover institutes by a vow and the macro-order a political economy institutes by its distribution of rights and labour are, in the structural respects that matter, the same. In both, a legislation that presents itself as self-grounded is in fact grounded in relations and a history that precede it. In both, procedural correctness on the legislating side, sincerity, universalizability, good will, generous first-order provision, cannot certify the justice of the order, because justice is a matter of the second order, of who holds the power to set and revise the terms and whether those bound retain the standing to contest them. In both, the difference between a legitimate order and domination or exploitation is not the benevolence of the powerful but the secured, non-discretionary standing of those whose participation and labour sustain the order. And in both, the ideology that most effectively masks domination is the one that recodes appropriation as gift, whether as the wage form’s “fair exchange” or as love’s “unconditional devotion.”

That a lover’s most earnest vow and a political economy’s distribution of rights should share a structure is not a deflation of love to economics, nor an inflation of economics to romance. It is a claim about normativity as such: that the standing of any law over a shared life, from the smallest dyad to the largest polity, rests not on the purity or the goodwill of its author but on the irreducible standing of those it binds to answer it. The lover who understands this does not love less freely or less faithfully. He loves, for the first time, justly, having understood that the law of a shared life was never his to give alone, and that the deepest constancy is not the will that holds its course against the beloved, but the will that keeps, between them, the room in which she may always answer.

What is built between two people, an order, a vow, a shared life, is never neutral and never merely given: it either secures for both the standing to remake its terms, or it quietly fixes those terms as one party’s gift and the other’s fate. To keep loving, then, is not to hold the order steady against her, but to keep handing back to her, again and again, the power to make it ours.

Acknowledgements

This paper is the third in a series on the philosophy of intimacy and the theory of justice. The lover and beloved discussed here are kept deliberately anonymous, and the case is presented as a constructed one, so that the argument may stand on its structure rather than on any private history.

My deepest gratitude is owed to the one I have loved all along, the “forest girl” to whom the first paper of this series was already devoted: pure and natural in spirit, good-hearted, resilient, and wise, carrying within her a quiet sense of mission toward the world. She is the motivation for the writing of this paper, as she has been for so much else. The vow examined in these pages was occasioned by what she awakened; and the paper’s conclusion, that the deepest constancy is not the will that holds its course against the beloved, but the will that keeps open the room in which she may always answer, is the form in which I renew that vow to her: that I will not fail her, to the end of our days.

In the interest of transparency, I note that an AI assistant was used in preparing this manuscript, as a tool for drafting, structuring, and refining the argument and its prose; the ideas, commitments, and final judgements are my own, and I take full responsibility for the content.

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• Singer, Irving (1991). The Nature of Love, Volume 1: Plato to Luther. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Velleman, J. David (1999). “Love as a Moral Emotion”. In: Ethics 109.2, pp. 338–374.
• Young, Iris Marion (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

中文

亲密关系的哲学与正义理论 —— 论文之三

亲密关系中自我立法的规范性：自由、道德与正义

论一个爱者的誓言、它所设立的权利秩序，以及它沦为支配的条件

Wanhong Huang

huangwanhong.g.official@gmail.com

2026年6月5日

致我所爱的人，是她教会我：守住一个誓言，并不是固执地与她相抗，而是在我们之间守护出那一处空间，使她始终得以回应。

执子之手，与子偕老。——出自《诗经》

发乎情，止乎礼义。——本于《诗大序》

摘要

设想这样一个爱者：他为自己立下一条无条件的法则——无论发生什么，无论那被爱者作何感受，我都将继续爱她。本文对这样一个誓言进行三层规范性分析，并以之为透镜来审视一种普遍的结构：一种共同生活的自我立法在何种条件下是自由的，在何种条件下是正义的，又在何种条件下悄然沦为支配或剥削。

本文的论证是整合性的。(1) 就自由而言：该誓言堪称康德式自律（autonomy）的典范，然而康德自身的理论装置——理性的事实（the fact of reason）与本体的自我（the noumenal self）——却无法告诉我们一种自我立法何时是自由的；一种相容论的、回应理由的（reasons-responsive）判准则能够做到这一点，而依此判准，该誓言的自由原来取决于它是否始终回应那作为理由之来源的被爱者。(2) 就道德而言：该誓言作为一种恒久不渝（constancy）固然令人钦佩，然而它的内容——爱她究竟意味着什么——却被全然交由爱者一人来确定，这与爱的哲学所视为爱之构成要素的回应性（responsiveness）相抵牾。(3) 就正义而言：本文借助共和主义的非支配（non-domination）观念，以及对誓言所设立之权利秩序的霍菲尔德式（Hohfeldian）分析，论证一条单方面立法、施加于一种两人生活之上的法则不可能是正义的，因为两个行动者之间的正义在样态上（modally）、而非仅仅在现实上（actually），关乎双方各自保有对相关条款提出异议的资格。

一个专门讨论立法主体之构成（结构主义与女性主义的）的章节表明，何以这种不正义并非个人特异，而是结构性地被生产出来的：那进行立法的”自我”本身就是由一种历史地性别化了的秩序所构成的，以至于一个真诚的、可普遍化的誓言竟可能再生产那一秩序的种种从属关系。通过整合马克思主义理论与社会再生产理论，本文区分了誓言设立一种正当权利秩序的条件，与它设立剥削的条件——所谓剥削，即在一种把这种占有呈现为爱的意识形态之下，对他人未被承认的关系性劳动与再生产劳动的占有。针对这样一种反驳——即转向关系性不过是把问题挪了个位置，因为承认（recognition）本身也可能是意识形态性的——本文论证：真正起作用的判准是相关条款的鲜活可争议性（live contestability），而非它们事实上被认可。结论是一种同构性：一个誓言的微观秩序与一种政治经济的宏观秩序共享同一种结构，而在两者之中，立法的正当地位都不取决于立法者的纯粹，而取决于他者那不可化约、在样态上稳健的回应资格。

关键词

自我立法；自律；回应理由；非支配；承认；意识形态性的承认；霍菲尔德式权利；社会再生产；剥削；关系性自律；亲密关系中的正义。

目录

• 1 导论：一个誓言及其困局
  • 1.1 论旨与同构性
  • 1.2 方法与范围
• 2 康德式的自我立法及其权威性问题
  • 2.1 理性的事实与权威的循环
  • 2.2 本体的避难所
  • 2.3 Korsgaard 的半步
• 3 一种自我立法何时是自由的？从本体的到回应理由的
  • 3.1 两种相容论的资源
  • 3.2 将回应理由应用于誓言
  • 3.3 两种理论共有的缺口
• 4 道德层面与第一道裂痕
• 5 正义层面：非支配与单方面立法的限度
  • 5.1 何以程序无法为内容背书
  • 5.2 作为操作性构想的非支配
  • 5.3 支配的三个向量
• 6 作为权利秩序之设立的誓言
  • 6.1 单方面誓言所分配的东西
  • 6.2 秩序与纯粹的秩序强加之别
• 7 立法主体的构成：结构主义与女性主义的考量
  • 7.1 作为结果而非源头的主体
  • 7.2 这一结构乃是性别化的从属
  • 7.3 何以这并不坍缩为决定论
• 8 权利秩序还是剥削？誓言的政治经济学
  • 8.1 剥削的形式刻画
  • 8.2 爱作为场所与作为面具
  • 8.3 那条界线
• 9 来自意识形态性承认的反驳
  • 9.1 可争议性，而非认可
  • 9.2 诚实的残余
• 10 誓言的重新奠基：关系性的共同立法与生成性正义
  • 10.1 从自我立法到共同立法
  • 10.2 生成性正义
• 11 结论：誓言与秩序的同构性
• 致谢
• 参考文献

1. 导论：一个誓言及其困局

设想这样一个爱者，他在省思情感之无常与境遇之偶然之后，为自己立下一条法则：

无论发生什么，无论她对我作何感受，我都将继续爱她。

这一决意并不是对他预期自己将有何种感受的预测。它是一条自我施加的原则，一条行动者赋予自身、并意图用来支配自己行为的法则，而无论世界、或那被爱者，作何举动。在最字面的意义上，它是一桩自我立法的行动：意志把自己束缚于一条由它自己制定的准则之上。这样的誓言，跻身于一种爱的生活所最受推崇的成就之列。然而，一经细察，这一誓言却暗藏一个困局，而这个困局一旦展开，竟成为通向一种远比其自身宏大得多的结构的窗口。

一方面，该誓言是自由的一桩凯旋：它把爱者之爱从对被爱者情绪的束缚、从对回报的束缚、从对命运之有利眷顾的束缚中解放出来。另一方面，恰恰是那赢得此种自由的结构——该爱的无条件性，它对被爱者实际作何回应的隔绝——所引出的忧虑，却根本不关乎自由，而关乎正义。一段关系并非一项孤身的事业；它有两方当事人；而一方所单方面立下的一条法则，无论多么充满爱意，所支配的乃是一种共同生活，而另一方在这种生活的制定上却毫无参与。把话说到最尖锐处：该誓言在两人之间设立了一种秩序，一种关于谁可期待什么、谁亏欠什么、谁可更改条款的安排。本文所追问的问题是：这样一种单方面立法的秩序，何时是自由的，何时是正义的，又何时悄然沦为某种别的东西——一种支配的秩序，乃至剥削的秩序，戴着爱的面孔。

1.1 论旨与同构性

这一论旨具有一种分层的形式。(i) 该誓言是自我立法的典范，并且在康德的意义上是一桩自由的运用；但康德式的自由无法言说一种自我立法何时是自由的，而一种更可操作的、相容论的判准则揭示出该誓言的自由是有条件的。(ii) 该誓言在道德上可以是令人钦佩的，但其令人钦佩的形式对其内容却保持沉默，而单方面地确定那一内容，已然与爱之所是相抵牾。(iii) 该誓言以其单方面的形式，不可能是正义的，因为两方之间的正义在构成上关乎双方各自保有一种在样态上稳健的、对条款提出异议的资格，而一条单方面的法则就其构造而言恰恰扣留了这种资格。(iv) 这种不正义并非一个糟糕爱者的过失，而是一种结构性的产物：那进行立法的”自我”本身就是由一种历史地性别化了的秩序所构成的，以至于即便一个真诚而可普遍化的誓言也可能再生产从属关系。(v) 在设立一种正当权利秩序的誓言与设立剥削的誓言之间，存在一条确定的界线；这条界线由以下区分划定：他者究竟保有了对所给予与所要求之条款的共同制定权（co-authorship），还是反被圈禁起来——在爱的意识形态之下，沦为未被承认的关系性劳动的供给者。(vi) 其补救之道，并不是一个更纯粹的立法者，而是一种关系性的重新奠基，在其中，他者提出异议的资格乃是构成性的；而使这一切不致重新坍缩回意识形态的判准，乃是鲜活的可争议性，而非认可。

最深层的主张是一种同构性（isomorphism）。一位爱人通过誓言所确立的微观秩序，与一种政治经济通过其权利分配和劳动分配所确立的宏观秩序，二者共享一种结构。在两种情形中，看似自我奠基的立法实际上奠基于先于它的关系之中；在两种情形中，立法一方的程序正确性都无法证明正义；在两种情形中，区分秩序与支配的，乃是那些受法律约束者是否保有一种真实的、而非仅仅名义上的抗辩之权。亲密关系的情形是审视这一结构最清晰的透镜，因为其双人性质生动鲜明，也因为爱人的真诚剥除了任何关于纯粹自欺（bad faith）的疑虑：倘若连这种情形都可能构成支配，那么这一诊断便无法被轻易驳回。

1.2 方法与范围

誓言被当作一项第一人称的实践材料来处理，循Frankfurt (2004)与Velleman (1999)之方式，而非作为一个第三人称的对象。爱人自始至终被假定为真诚的、反思的、心怀善意的；论证恰恰在这一最佳情形下最为稳固。本文整合了一些极少同时出现的传统，即康德式的自主（Kantian autonomy）、相容论式的自由意志理论（compatibilist free-will theory）、共和主义式的非支配（republican non-domination）、分析法学（analytic jurisprudence）、关于主体形成（subject-formation）的结构主义与女性主义论述，以及马克思主义的社会再生产理论（Marxian social-reproduction theory），但它是在上述单一脊柱（spine）的约束下进行整合的，从而使整合具有论证性而非百科全书式。在此开篇之初须标明两点局限。第一，本文取自Marx的是剥削的形式结构与意识形态遮蔽的论题，同时对劳动价值论保持不可知的态度；论证中没有任何环节要求该理论为真。第二，文末提出的建构性标准，即活的可抗辩性（live contestability），是作为正确的标准而非作为一种算法来辩护的；其遗留的疑难案例是被承认而非被掩盖的。

行文计划遵循这一脊柱。第2节重构康德式的自我立法，并揭示其在义务之根据问题上的内在困难。第3节追问一项自我立法何时是自由的，并发展出一个回应理由（reasons-responsive）的标准。第4节处理道德层面与第一道裂缝。第5节通过非支配来发展正义层面。第6节将誓言分析为一种霍菲尔德式（Hohfeldian）权利秩序的确立。第7节考察立法主体的构成。第8节在权利秩序与剥削之间划界。第9节回应来自意识形态承认（ideological recognition）的反驳。第10节重构誓言。第11节陈述这一同构性。

2. 康德式的自我立法及其权威性问题

誓言之为一种自由的践行，其主张奠基于康德对自主（autonomy）与他律（heteronomy）的区分之上。当一个意志被某种外在于其自身理性立法之物所决定时，它便是他律的，即被偏好、欲望、境况或对他人青睐的预期所决定；而当它所遵循的法则发自其自身、当意志”自身即为法则”（Kant 1997b, 4:440）时，它便是自主的。自主并非法则的缺席，而是自我给予之法则的在场；自由并非随其所被驱动者而行——这恰恰是被异己原因所驱动的状态——而是依照自己作为理性行动者所撰著的原则而行动。

由此得出一个表面上的悖论：自我约束即自由。那个依照无论哪种最强冲动而行动的行动者并非自由，而是被驱使；那个将自身约束于一条自我撰著之原则的行动者，则获得了一种相对于冲动之流变的稳固独立性，并成为其行为的撰著者而非其发生的场所。Korsgaard (1996)将此重构为如下主张：自主地行动就是依照一条人依其实践身份（practical identity）而给予自己的法则来行动，而这种自我立法正是将一个人构成为一个统一的行动者、而非一连串心理状态的东西；这一思想在Korsgaard (2009)中被进一步推展，在那里，行动主体性（agency）本身即是在自我给予之原则下进行自我构成（self-constitution）的一项成就。

应用于誓言：那位仅在被回报地爱着时、仅在心境有利时、仅在境况配合时才去爱的爱人，其所拥有的爱是受他律所制约的，是其立法之外诸因素的因变量。誓言斩断了这些依赖关系。在下定决心”无论发生什么、无论她作何感受”都去爱时，爱人将其爱从心境与互惠的管辖权之下撤回，并将其置于自己的立法之下。因此，在康德式的根据上，誓言并非自由的削减，而是其最充分的表达；并且存在着一种可辨识的康德式思想，即出于原则的行为比出于偏好的行为具有更高的价值，前者是行动者的成就，后者则是性情的馈赠（Kant 1997b, 4:398–399）。

2.1 理性的事实与权威的循环

纵然承认这一切，仍有一个将被证明为决定性的问题：自我给予之法则的权威从何而来？倘若爱人既是法则的撰著者又是受其约束者，那么什么能阻止他在法则一旦令其不适之时便将其废除？一条人可以随意修订的法则根本不是法则；然而一条人给予自己的法则似乎恰恰就是这样。Kant敏锐地感受到了这一困难。在《奠基》中，他试图从理性意志这一概念本身推导出道德法则的约束力，但到了《实践理性批判》，他将此事安置于他所称的理性的事实（Faktum der Vernunft）之上：我们将道德法则意识为具有约束力，这是理性径直呈现的一个事实，既非从任何先在之物推导而来，亦不需要、也不容许外在的证明（Kant 1997a, 5:31）。自我立法的约束力由此通过将其当作一项材料而非一个结论而得到保障。

这是两个压力点中的第一个。将自我给予之法则的权威奠基于理性向自身呈现的某个”事实”之上，要么是断言了本应被证明之事，即自我给予之法则确实约束其撰著者，要么是将权威重新安置于个体意志之外，置于作为行动者所不能控制、不能废除之物的”理性”之中。Kant采取了第二条路径：法则之所以有约束力，并非因为这一个体意愿它，而是因为理性在他之中将其立法，而理性并非他所能撤销之物。这一步保住了约束力，但代价我们将反复领取：它使得真正具有权威的立法者不是那个经验性的人，而是理性本身，并由此悄然承认，那个个体，就其作为偶然存在者而言，事实上并非他看似给予自己的法则之自足源泉。

2.2 本体界的庇护所

第二个压力点正是康德对每一项指控——即指控立法者是可腐化的——之回应的归宿。面对这样一种忧虑，即一个行动者关于理性所要求之物的感受可能被偏好、历史或境况所扭曲，Kant可以回答说，此类扭曲属于经验性自我，即现象世界中的自我，而真正的立法者乃是本体性自我（noumenal self），即被视为可知秩序（intelligible order）之一成员的理性行动者，其立法就其本性而言不受经验性决定的玷污。在这幅图景中，自由是本体性意志的一种属性；道德法则是该意志给予自身之物；而那些可能腐化某个现实之人的判断的偶然性，原则上被屏蔽于那个真正重要的立法性自我之外。

这一本体界的庇护所是纯粹自我立法的捍卫者可资利用的最强一步，而本文的大部分可被读作如下尝试：表明它无法完成亲密关系情形所要求于它的工作。两点观察开启了这项工作。第一，这一庇护所是通过将权威性立法者置于经验所及之外而换取的，这使其同样置于任何可操作之检验所及之外：倘若问题在于，在现实生活中，一项给定的自我立法何时是自由的而非被驱使的、是正义的而非支配性的，那么诉诸一个按定义从不在经验中被给予的本体性自我，便给不出任何可用的答案。第二，这一庇护所在援引它的同一行动中便承认，那个经验性的立法者，即那位作出现实誓言的现实爱人，正暴露于本文将要追踪的那些扭曲之中；它仅仅通过将自我立法重新安置于一个不做任何具体工作的自我之中，来保护其纯粹性。我们暂且让这一庇护所成立，并将在第7节回过头来拆解它最依赖的那个假设：即存在着一个先于、并独立于经验性之人在其中被形成的诸关系与历史而被构成的立法性自我。

2.3 Korsgaard的半步

Korsgaard的重构在此之所以重要，恰恰因为它朝着远离本体界庇护所、走向关系性观点的方向迈出了半步，却没有完成这一步。通过将义务奠基于实践身份，即我们藉以看重自身、并发现自己生命值得过下去的那些描述之中，她将规范性的源泉从本体界降到了一个行动者实际之自我理解的肌理之中（Korsgaard 1996）。实践身份在很大程度上是社会性的：一个人是朋友、是公民、是父母、是爱人，而这些身份连同其相伴随的义务，并非由某个本体性意志从无中（ex nihilo）立法而出，而是在一个社会世界中被继承、被采纳、被维系的。就此而言，Korsgaard已经承认立法者是社会地被构成的。然而她保留了一道防线：在一切偶然的实践身份之下，潜藏着一个并非可选的身份，即我们单纯作为反思性理性行动者、作为”目的王国”（kingdom of ends）之成员的身份，正是这一身份提供了普遍的道德义务，并将该论述从相对主义中拯救出来。因此这半步被中途叫停了：自我的社会构成在每一层面上都被承认，唯独最后一层例外，在那里，一个非关系性的、普遍的身份被重新确立以承担起奠基的工作。本文的论证恰恰逼向那最后一层。倘若连最深层的实践身份，即一个人作为去爱者的自我感受、以及对爱之所求的感受，都是在历史地被结构化的诸关系之中、并由这些关系所构成的，那么便不存在任何非关系性的地基，可供一种自足的立法立于其上。第7节将提出这一论证；其间各节则表明它何以重要。

3. 自我立法何时是自由的？从本体的到回应理由的

第2节确立了：以康德的术语而言，誓言乃是自主（autonomy）的一种运用。但它也暴露出：康德式的自主无法回答本文余下部分所需要回答的问题——某一特定的自我立法行为何时是自由的，何时只不过是一种被精巧伪装起来的被驱使（being driven）？本体（noumenal）的进路把自由安置在一个从未在经验中被给予的自我之中，因而无法提供任何可操作的标准；理性之事实（the fact of reason）则以独断的方式保障了约束力。要取得进展，我们需要一种适用于立法机制（legislating mechanism）实际运作方式的自由观。自由意志理论中的相容论（compatibilist）传统恰好提供了这样一种自由观。

3.1 两种相容论资源

有两种资源与此相关。第一种是Frankfurt的层级式（hierarchical）说明。依此说明，当一个行为者的意志——即驱动他行动的欲望——是他在更高阶上经过反思而加以认可的欲望时，他在相关意义上便是自由的：那个不情愿的瘾君子，被一个他在第二阶上加以否弃的一阶欲望所驱动，因而是不自由的；而那个其有效欲望得到其高阶意愿（higher-order volitions）批准的行为者，则是出于自己的自由意志而行动（Frankfurt 1988）。第二种资源要求更高，在此也更为有用，即Fischer与Ravizza关于引导性控制（guidance control）的说明。他们将其分析为两个条件：行动必须出自行为者自身的机制（所有权，ownership），并且该机制必须是适度回应理由的（moderately reasons-responsive），也就是说，在一系列情境中倾向于识别并回应某一恰当范围内的理由，包括做出其他选择的理由（Fischer and Ravizza 1998）。值得注意的是，他们的理论是历史主义的（historicist）：一个机制是否为行为者自身所有，取决于它如何成为他的机制，取决于其形成的历史，因而一个由操纵（manipulation）植入的机制，无论它现今运作得多么良好，都不能为自由奠基。我们将在第7节中利用这一历史主义。

3.2 把回应理由性应用于誓言

依照回应理由的标准，誓言的自由并不能仅凭恋人曾把法则授予自身这一赤裸的事实而被确定。它取决于：那个如今支配着他之爱的机制，是否仍然对相关理由保持回应。而在此处，核心的理由是由被爱者所提供的：她的需要、她的变化、她的反对、她说出他作为爱所给予的东西对她而言并不是爱。一项其全部要旨就是要”无论她作何感受”都坚定不移的誓言，从某种角度读来，乃是一个被设计为恰恰对这些理由毫无回应的机制——它把她的异议不视为可能重新引导这份爱的输入，而视为只须熬过去的天气。就此而言，誓言非但不是自由的顶点，反而趋近于被驱使者的处境：恋人被一项常驻的决心所驱动，而这项决心已被隔绝于那些本应能够推动它的理由之外。康德主义者只看到法则是自我授予的，便宣告誓言是自由的；回应理由的标准却看到：一项自我授予的法则可以作为牢笼而被自我授予，并提出康德主义者无法提出的那个进一步的问题。

这便产生了一个确定而又颇为出人意料的结果。誓言之为自由，恰恰在于、且仅仅在于：它所设立的恒常（constancy）使得恋人之爱仍对作为理由之源的被爱者保持回应。一种在其方式上仍保持回应的在场与承诺的恒常，是自由的；而一种把方式固定下来并使之对她免疫的恒常，则恰恰依据那使自我立法得以成为自由之候选者的标准而言，乃是一种被装扮成自由之凯旋的自由之削减。于是，自由与后来不义的种子被定位在同一个点上：立法机制对他者的回应性。

3.3 两种理论共有的漏洞

回应理由性是一项真正的进步，但它有一个著名的局限——这一局限对我们的目的而言非但不是缺陷，反而是整个整合的枢纽。该标准在官方表述上对于机制必须回应哪些理由、以及谁有资格提供这些理由，都是中立的；它只要求机制对于无论存在着什么样的理由都作出恰当的回应。正如批评者所指出的，这使得该说明对于理由的来源保持沉默。一个行为者可能对他所识别的理由有着极为精微的回应，却又系统性地对一整类他根本不承认其为理由的理由封闭起来，例如，对那个其提出主张之资格已被他在不知不觉中预先打了折扣的人的诉求。这样一个行为者，就那些抵达他的理由而言通过了回应理由性的检验，然而在更深的意义上却是不自由的，并且正如我们将会看到的，处在一个足以施行支配（dominate）的位置上。

这正是从另一侧抵达的、康德式的可普遍化性（universalizability）本意要堵上却未能堵上的那同一个漏洞。康德的检验追问的是：人是否能够意愿自己的准则成为一条普遍法则；其希望在于，这一形式上的要求会迫使行为者顾及每个人的资格。Hegel的反对意见——即该检验只筛除彻头彻尾的矛盾，而只要准则被小心地加以描述，便会准许大量在实质上令人反感的准则（Hegel 1991, §135）——恰恰就是这样一种抱怨：可普遍化性事实上并不能保障对他者之资格的关注：一项预先打折他人主张的准则可以毫无矛盾地被普遍化，因为这种打折早已被内置于对情境的描述之中了。因此，康德式的形式进路与相容论的回应理由进路在同一处失败了：二者都不能凭借自身的资源保证立法的自我对作为理由与主张之完整来源的他者保持开放。二者都预设了一个早已倾向于把他者计算在内的立法者，而二者都无法提供这种倾向。这一共同的缺口正是关系性（relationality）必须进入之处——它进入并非作为一种偏好，而是作为唯一能够填补这个被两种关于自由而负责的能动性的主导理论都留作敞开的漏洞的东西。本文余下的部分实际上就是对这一漏洞的填补。

4. 道德层面与第一道裂缝

誓言之为自由的地位，是否会延续到道德上的可敬性（admirability）之中？在若干理论看来，起初是会的。依康德式的核算，它彰显了人性公式（Formula of Humanity）：恋人承诺绝不仅仅把被爱者当作手段——在她令人愉悦时加以保留，在她不再如此时便弃之不顾——而是把她当作其地位不随其有用性而起伏的目的（Kant 1997b, 4:429）。此外，还有一个由来已久的观点认为，无条件的承诺接近于爱的本质。依Singer的授予（bestowal）说明，爱赋予了一种并非由被爱者的优点所赢得、因而也不会在这些优点动摇时被撤销的价值（Singer 1991）。依Frankfurt的说明，爱是一种意志上的必然性（volitional necessity）模式，在其中恋人变得无法对被爱者的兴盛漠然处之，而这种束缚恰恰就是关切（caring）的形态（Frankfurt 2004）。依照这些观点来看，誓言乃是在阐明爱，而非在扭曲爱。

然而第一道裂缝正是在此出现。誓言的内容是”我将继续爱她”，但这在我们尚未明确说明爱她究竟包含什么之前都只是图式性的（schematic），而自我立法的单边结构却让恋人——且唯有恋人——去填充那一内容。”继续爱她”可以意味着：我将继续意愿她的好，留意作为她这一特定个人的她，回应她实际上所需要和所要求的东西。或者它也可以一步步地滑向：我将继续做我所认定为爱她的事情，无论她对此作何言说。前者是回应性的；后者尽管满怀奉献，却是强加（imposition）。

爱的哲学提供了资源，让我们看清为什么第二种读法作为爱是有缺陷的。在Velleman看来，爱是一种道德情感，是恋人对作为理性行为者的被爱者的回应，是对她作为一个拥有自身意志与目的之存在者的价值的一种令人驻足的觉察（Velleman 1999）。一种其内容被单方面固定、并被维持得对被爱者的实际意志免疫的爱，与此是相抵触的：它所面向的不是作为拥有自身主张的理性行为者的被爱者，而是她的一个意象，或恋人对她的好的构想——爱的行止随后便围绕这一意象或构想而被组织起来。Kolodny的关系性理论强调了同一要点：爱奠基于、并须对一段在两个人之间持续进行的关系负责，而非奠基于一种安置于一方之内、对另一方封闭起来的倾向（Kolodny 2003）；而Helm关于亲密认同（intimate identification）的说明同样使被爱者自身的视角成为爱之构成性的东西，而非爱的一项可有可无的输入（Helm 2010）。即便是Frankfurt的意志必然性，若被恰当地理解，也是一种去关切被爱者如其所拥有的那种好的必然性，而非去关切恋人之爱的方案（project）的必然性。

于是，裂缝就在于此。抽象地陈述时，誓言是可敬的；但其抽象的陈述掩盖了一个岔路，而自我立法的形式中并没有任何东西决定走向哪一岔，因为这一形式对于内容保持沉默。以回应的方式读来，誓言仍然是爱，仍然是可敬的。以对爱之内容的单边固定来读，它便把被爱者从爱的受话者转变为恋人去运用一个自我指派的角色的契机。自由层面与道德层面所无法回答的那个问题如今已无可回避，而它是一个关于权威（authority）的问题：由谁来决定爱她意味着什么？这是一个关于正义的问题。

5. 正义层面：非支配与单方立法的界限

最深层的评估所关切的，既不是誓言的自由，也不是从恋人一方而言其道德品质，而是它的正义性，即它在两个人之间所设立的安排所具有的地位。我从一种刻意稀薄且被广泛认同的构想出发，让它承担大部分论证工作，而把一种更为厚实的构想留待第10节。

5.1 程序为何无法担保内容

在承袭自Kant的道德哲学中，存在一个长久未决的问题：一套正确的立法程序是否担保正义的内容。Kant的赌注是它确实如此：一条经受住普遍化检验、由一个把人性当作目的来对待的理性行动者所意愿的准则，便由此处于正当之中，因而人们无需诉诸某种独立的正义标准来核验其结果。这一赌注从两个方向上受到了挑战。Hegel那项已被援引过的空洞形式主义之指控认为，普遍化只筛除矛盾，却允许许多实质上不正义的东西通过（Hegel 1991, §135）。Rawls继承了康德式的雄心，却拒绝信任纯粹的形式，转而构建了一套程序，即无知之幕背后的原初状态，其设计预先嵌入了若干实质性约束，平等、相互无利害关系、对自身处境的无知，恰恰是为了使其产出能够是正义的（Rawls 1971）。这一教训是双刃的：一套程序可以被造就得担保正义的内容，但唯有以预先向其中装入若干在道德上具有重大意义的条件为代价。程序并不免费地生成正义。

还有一项考量对我们的论题是决定性的。即便是一种在程序上无可指摘的自我立法，也可能产生不正义的内容，只要立法者本人的判断，即关于爱要求什么、伴侣亏欠什么、何者算作对方提出的合理诉求的判断，是在某些系统性地低估对方地位的条件下形成的。于是程序在被败坏的输入上正确地运行。在亲密领域中，这并非一种遥远的可能性，而是寻常的状况，因为每个人关于爱的构想都是被继承和被濡化而来的；第7节将展示这是如何发生的。就目前而言，这一结构性的要点已经足够：恋人的真诚、自由与善良意志确立了这一誓言，从他那一方而言，是自主地、甚至是令人钦佩地作出的，但它们无法确立它是正义的，因为两方之间的正义并不是一方能够通过立法之善而授予的那类东西。

5.2 作为操作性构想的非支配

我所采纳的稀薄构想是共和主义的：一种关系在某一方受制于支配的程度上是不正义的，而支配，依照Pettit，被理解为暴露于他人施加任意干预的能力之下，即一种不受、且无需向受影响一方自身可申明的利益与声音负责的干预（Pettit 1997）。对我们而言，这一构想的决定性特征在于支配是模态性的：一个人之被支配，不仅在干预实际发生之时，而且在他随时可能因另一方的自由裁量而暴露于干预之可能性之下时。Pettit本人的例证是一位仁慈主人的奴隶：那位选择从不干预的主人仍然在施行支配，因为这种不干预所依赖的是他持续的善意，而非奴隶所获保障的地位；奴隶活在他人的自由裁量之下，而这就是不自由，即便那裁量是被仁慈地行使的（Pettit 1997）。因此，使自由与支配之间产生分别的，不是对待方式的好坏，而是权力的结构：被支配的一方究竟是拥有一种受保障的、非裁量性的地位，还是仅仅幸运地遇上了一位仁慈的尊长。

这恰恰是亲密案例所需要的工具，因为我们这一誓言中的恋人，在其最好的状态下，正是那位仁慈的主人。他的爱在其实际行使中也许无可指摘；非支配教我们去追问的问题是：被爱者所受的善待，究竟是由她的地位所保障的，还是仅仅由他的心性所赐予的。一条单方立法的爱之法则，无论多么仁慈，都将被爱者置于一个活在恋人自由裁量之下者的结构性位置：爱的条款，它将向她要求什么、提供什么、拒绝倾听什么，都由他设定，而她所受的善待，取决于他持续地意愿如此，而非取决于她任何足以提出异议的地位。这就是模态意义上的支配，即便恋人从未有过一次恶劣的干预，事实上即便他依任何实际标准衡量都美好无比。仁慈主人这一结构，正是对一条按假设乃是出于爱而作出的誓言究竟错在何处的精确诊断。

5.3 支配的三个向量

这一总体诊断可分解为三个具体的向量。

(i) 对声音的免疫化。这一誓言的标志性条款是”无论她有何感受”。但被爱者的感受并不总是某种需要被爱穿越过去的天气；有时呈现为她情绪之物其实是一项诉求：我需要空间；我需要你听见这件事；我们之间有什么不对劲了。一条被构造成无论如何都要去爱的誓言，有可能把每一项这样的诉求都转化为又一个需要以坚定来克服的偶然情况，以致最坚决的爱反倒成了最无力倾听的爱。恋人的恒久，从他一方而言是一种美德，从她一方却可能作为一堵墙发挥作用：她的异议被预先消化为某种他的爱本就被建造来熬过的东西。这是最严重的向量，因为它使支配本可借以被传达和被纠正的那一渠道失效，而它正是第3节那个理由回应性缺口的亲密面相。

(ii) 非互惠。无条件的单方承诺扭曲了一种正义关系所维系的给予与接受之经济。一种不附条件、不参照对方之给予的爱，可能把被爱者固定为某种她从未以其到来时的那种形式索求过之物的永久接受者，或者纵容恋人以忠贞之名去忍受他本不应忍受的对待，单方面地连牺牲的条款也一并设定。互惠并非要求爱像偿债那样被回报；它是这样一项条件，即给予的形态应当是双手都触碰之物。单方的无条件性把她的手从中移走了。

(iii) 定义性的攫取。最为隐微的是，单方誓言把界定”爱她意味着什么”的权威安放在恋人之中。如第4节所示，”持续爱她”需要内容，而这一誓言把填充该内容的工作指派给了一方。但何者算作爱这一特定的人，是她拥有发言地位之事；要封闭这一点，无论多么充满爱意，都是攫取了一种本应共享的权威，是以第三人称去爱她，却以第二人称对她说话。

这些都不要求恋人是自私的、自欺的或胁迫性的。它们是结构性的，源自誓言的单方形式与它所规约之物的两人性质的结合。这一誓言可以在康德意义上是自由的、真诚的、恒久的、忠诚的，却仍然通过这些渠道设立起一种悄无声息的支配。下一节将通过追问一条誓言所设立的是何种秩序，来使这一结构变得精确。

6. 作为权利秩序之设立的誓言

说一条誓言”设立了一种秩序”，听上去或许像是隐喻。它不是。一条关于共享人生的誓言，在两方之间创造出一种确定的规范性位置之结构，而用以展示该结构的最精确工具，是Hohfeld对法律关系的分析（Hohfeld 1919）。Hohfeld表明，我们松散地称之为”一项权利”的东西，可分解为若干以相关对偶成对出现的不同位置：一方的请求权（claim）与另一方的义务相关；特权（自由）与无权利相关；而在第二阶上，一种改变各方位置的权力（power）与一种使自己位置被改变的责任（liability）相关，同时一种豁免（immunity）与一种无能力（disability）相关。至关重要的是，Hohfeld坚持每一种这样的关系都恰好成立于两个人之间：法律关系是不可化约地关系性的，从来不是某一方单独的属性。

6.1 单方誓言所分配的东西

透过这一透镜来解读，恋人的誓言乃是对一组支配该关系的Hohfeld式位置的单方设立。恋人承担义务（无论发生什么都要持续去爱），并由此向被爱者赋予相应的请求权。就此而言，这一誓言看上去是慷慨的：它把责任加于恋人之上，把权益加于被爱者之上。但决定性的位置在第二阶上。谁握有改变条款的权力，谁来决定那些义务与请求权实际上为何，”爱她”将被认定为要求什么、提供什么？在单方誓言中，那项权力完全为恋人所保留。他界定内容；作为其作者，他可以重新界定它；被爱者并不持有相关的权力，而只持有一种责任，即一个其规范处境由他人行使权力来决定者的位置。那么，被爱者是否持有一种豁免，使爱的条款不致在没有她参与的情况下被设定，并与恋人独自设定它们的一种无能力相关呢？她并不持有；单方结构恰恰就是恋人对那项权力的保留以及被爱者作为责任的暴露。

这是对非支配诊断的霍菲尔德式（Hohfeldian）转译，并使之更为锐利。誓言的慷慨完全处于第一序，即那些有利于被爱者的请求权（claims）与义务，而支配则完全处于第二序，处于权力（power）与豁免（immunity）的分配之中。一个人可能被慷慨地赋予了大量第一序的请求权，却仍然处于被支配的地位——如果他对那些条款不持有任何权力，也对它们的单方面修改不持有任何豁免的话。仁慈的主人会授予慷慨的请求权；他所扣留不予的，乃是权力与豁免。霍菲尔德使我们能够精确地说出，一个公正的亲密秩序所要求、而单方面的誓言所遗漏的究竟是什么：不是爱者一方更为慷慨的义务，而是第二序诸位置的分配，即一份制定与修改条款的权力，以及一份针对条款被单方面制定的豁免。权利秩序中的正义，乃是一个第二序的问题。

6.2 秩序与对秩序的单纯施加

这一分析也澄清了立誓冲动中正确的成分。在共同的生活中，某种秩序的设立并非可有可无的选项；两个但凡有所协调的人就处于法权关系（jural relations）之中，而秩序的替代项并非自由，而是混乱——在混乱中，谁也无法依凭任何东西。问题从来不是要不要拥有一个权利秩序，而是构成与修改它的权力如何分配。一个在设立秩序的同时把全部第二序权力都保留给其制定者的誓言，并没有因为设立了秩序而做出某种多余之举；它乃是因为垄断了构成性权力（constituent power）而做出某种不义之举。这一区分——在秩序的设立与对秩序之构成性权力的垄断之间——恰恰是我们将在最大尺度上所需要的区分，也是通向政治经济学语域的桥梁：一个仁慈的立法者能够设立一个支配那些它慷慨约束之人的秩序，这同一种结构会从亲密的二元关系一直重现到政治共同体。在勾勒这一同构关系之前，我们必须追问：那个垄断了构成性权力的立法者，是如何在毫无察觉的情况下做到这一点的——这就把我们带回到立法之自我的构成问题上。

7. 立法主体的构成：结构主义与女性主义的考量

迄今为止的每一个层面都把一个问题推延到了本节。康德式的本体（noumenal）避难所（第2节）预设了一个先于其关系且独立于其关系而被构成的立法之自我。理由响应性（reasons-responsiveness）的漏洞（第3节）取决于一个已经倾向于、或不倾向于把他者算作理由之来源的立法者。被败坏的输入问题（第5节）与被垄断的构成性权力问题（第6节）都指向一个立法者，他关于爱所要求之物的感受是从某处被给予的。本节追问这”某处”在哪里，而其答案瓦解了自我立法之纯粹性所依赖的那个假设。论证如同一条链条展开：立法主体不是源头而是一种效果（结构主义）；这一效果是由一个确定的、历史地被性别化了的秩序所生产的（女性主义政治理论）；因此，一个真诚的单方面誓言极易把那个秩序的种种从属关系编码并再生产出来，这就是为什么第5节的三个向量在结构上是可预期的，而非个人的失误。

7.1 作为效果而非源头的主体

在此处最为有用的形式中，结构主义的洞见在于：那个看起来是意义与法则之来源的主体，其自身乃是由先于它的诸结构所生产的。Althusser关于询唤（interpellation）的论述主张，个体是通过被意识形态”召唤”（hailed）而被构成为主体的：一个人通过在某个社会秩序向他发出的诸位置中认出自己而成为主体，以至于那个他似乎据以立法的内在性本身，正是他曾被召唤并曾作出应答这一事实的效果（Althusser 1971）。Lacan的平行主张是，主体乃是它被嵌入象征秩序——那个先它而存在的语言与法则的系统——的一种效果；那个言说并意欲的”我”，是在一个它并未创作的能指场域之中、并由该场域所构成的（Lacan 2006）。人们无需全盘采纳这两个系统中的任何一个，便可领会这一结构性的要点：那个为誓言立法的自我，并未把一种由其自身的自发性所铸造的爱之构想带入誓言；它带入的是一种它所领受的构想，在这种构想中，它被塑造成了那种以某些方式去爱、并期待某些事物的主体。

正是在这里，理由响应性论述（第3节）的历史主义强有力地回返了。Fischer与Ravizza使一种机制是否具有赋予自由的性质取决于它是如何被形成的：一种由操纵所植入的机制，即便如今运作良好，也并不为自由提供根据（Fischer and Ravizza 1998）。结构主义的主张是，爱之自我的机制总是由一个该自我并未掌控的过程所形成的，即主体之构成本身这一过程。这本身并不必然击败自由——否则就会使自由成为不可能；但它意味着，爱者据以立法的机制是否真正是他自己的（在那种为自由提供根据、并为正当权威背书的意义上），这一点不能被假定，而必须被追问，而这一追问要求审视那种形成过程的内容。那么，具体而言，形成这个立誓去爱之主体的历史结构究竟是什么？

7.2 这一结构乃是被性别化的从属

就亲密伴侣关系而言，女性主义政治理论给出了答案，而且这答案是具体的：历史地构成了爱之主体的那个秩序，乃是一个被性别化的从属秩序，而且它正是通过那些把自己呈现为自由且相互的情爱之家园的制度——婚姻、家庭、浪漫之爱——而做到这一点的。Pateman对性契约（sexual contract）的分析论证道，社会契约传统关于自由平等的诸个体订约进入公民社会的故事，掩盖了一个在先的性契约，男性正是通过它确保了对女性的父权制权利，而尤其是婚姻契约，一直以来并非平等者之间自由协议的典范，而是一种从属契约（subordination contract）的形式，在其中一方在同意的语言之下订约进入一种从属地位（Pateman 1988）。Okin对正义、性别与家庭的分析表明，家庭远非作为自发情爱的避风港而处于正义的范围之外，而一直是不义的首要场所，其结构是一种被性别化的劳动分工与脆弱性分配，而种种正义理论通过把家庭豁免于审视，帮助了这种结构的自然化（Okin 1989）。而Young关于压迫诸面相的论述坚持认为，支配与压迫首先并不是分配上的不足或个人恶意的问题，而是结构性的：它们是通过日常生活的那些正常的、往往出于善意的过程运作的，其中就包括亲密角色与家庭角色的日常运作（Young 1990）。

把结构主义的机制与女性主义的内容放在一起，链条便闭合了。那个为誓言立法的主体，作为一个爱之主体，是在一个历史地被性别化的秩序之内被构成的；他带入誓言的那种爱之构想——爱是什么、爱提供什么、爱可以要求什么、什么算作被爱者的好——并非由他的自发性所铸造，而是从那个秩序领受而来的；而那个秩序乃是一个把自己呈现为相互性的从属秩序。因此，第5节的三个向量并不是某个特定爱者的特异失误，而是一个真诚的主体从一个他误认为中立的、被构成的立场出发进行立法时，在结构上可预期的产物。对声音的免疫、非互惠性以及定义性的攫取（definitional capture），恰恰是人们会从一个被塑造成把情感供给与权威的性别化分配体验为爱之自然形态的主体那里所预测到的东西。爱者无需在意图上是一个父权者；他只需是那个形成了他的秩序的一个称职的产物，从该秩序内部出于善意地进行立法即可。这就是为什么本体避难所之失败，不仅是作为一种认识论的失败，更是作为一种描述的失败：根本不存在一个可供退守的、独立地被构成的立法者，因为那种为一种爱之构想立法的能力本身，就是受审视的那个秩序的一份沉积物。

7.3 为何这并不坍缩为决定论

必须立刻言明这一论证并未主张什么，以免它证明得过多。它并不主张主体是被完全决定的、无能力立法任何不由那个形成它的秩序所规定之物；那将使批判（包括本文）成为不可能，并会消解掉第3节曾认真对待其自由的那种能动性本身。这一主张更弱也更精确：根本不存在一个被保证为纯粹的立场，没有什么本体避难所或非关系性的实践身份（practical identity），能从中发出一种自足且自我证认的立法。批判性距离的能力是真实的，但它并非某个无因之立法者的自发性；它本身乃是一种关系性的成就，是通过与那些不契合于被继承之构想的东西的遭遇而赢得的，其范型便是那个说出”被当作爱所提供之物，对她而言并非爱”的他者所给予的抵抗。这便是那颗积极的种子：如果被形成的主体无法从内部证认其自身的立法，那么矫正就只能来自外部，来自他者进行争辩的资格（standing），第10节将使这一资格成为构成性的。不过，我们现在首先可以精确地陈述出，一个设立正当秩序的誓言与一个设立剥削的誓言之间的界线。

8. 权利秩序还是剥削？誓言的政治经济学

我们现在可以回答驱动政治经济学这一维度的问题：一种共享生活的自我立法，何时确立起一种正当的权利秩序，又何时确立起剥削？所需的材料已然在手：对构成性权力（constituent power）的二阶分析（第6节）以及被构成的、被性别化的主体（第7节）。剩下需要做的，是审慎地引入剥削的形式结构。

8.1 剥削的形式

我从马克思主义传统中取用剥削的形式，同时对劳动价值论保持不可知的态度，因为论证并不需要它。从形式上看，当满足以下条件时，剥削便成立：（a）一方系统性地占有另一方贡献或劳动所产生的收益；（b）控制贡献被给付与被计量之条件的，是占有的一方，而非作出贡献的一方；（c）该安排由一种表征所维系，这种表征使占有显得自然、自愿、乃至充满爱意，以至于它根本不被体验为占有（关于占有的形式及其神秘化，参见 Marx 1976，尤其是对工资形式的分析）。条件（c），即意识形态的遮蔽，并非偶然之物；它正是将剥削与公开的强制区别开来、并使剥削得以稳定存续的东西。马克思关于工资形式的论点——即工资形式把一种攫取剩余的关系呈现为一种平等交换（一日公平的工作换取一日公平的工资）——在亲密领域中有着精确的对应物：在那里，爱的语言把一种关系呈现为情感的自由涌流，而在这种关系中，一方的关系性劳动被占有，却没有得到承认，也没有相应的权力作为回报。

8.2 作为场所与面具的爱

这一分析在社会再生产理论（social-reproduction theory）中的女性主义展开，为其提供了亲密关系层面的内容。在情感上和物质上维系人的工作——照护、关注、对情感的管理、维持一段关系与一个家庭运转的劳动——是劳动，尽管它在工资之外被执行，因而按该理论的说法，并非严格工资意义上被剥削，而是被侵占（expropriated）：它是必要的工作，却无偿、被低估，并因被重新编码为爱或女性气质的自然表达而被弄得不可见（Federici 2012; Fraser 2016）。Federici 的核心主张恰恰是：家务劳动与照护被弄得显现为爱的表达而非工作，而这种重新编码正是其被侵占的机制（Federici 2012）。Hochschild 对情感劳动（emotional labour）的分析点明了更进一步的维度：管理自身的情感以在他人身上制造出某种被要求的情感状态，是一种工作，而且它的分配是不平等的，其中一方通常被指派承担维系关系情感气候这一无止境的任务（Hochschild 1983）。社会再生产理论对剥削与侵占的区分，以及它坚持认为爱与照护的领域正是资本主义把再生产人的成本卸载到那里的所在，赋予了这一亲密关系分析以政治经济学的深度（Bhattacharya 2017）。

现在，单方面的誓言可以被精确地定位在这张地图上。一项把二阶权力保留给立约者（lover）的誓言，由一个在性别化秩序中被构成的主体所作出，并以无条件之爱的语言来表达——当它运作起来，以便把所爱之人（beloved）圈禁为不被承认的关系性劳动与再生产劳动的提供者时，它便满足了剥削形式结构的全部三个条件。（a）她维系性劳动的收益被占有，关系得以维系下去，立约者在情感上和物质上得到维系，而（b）那些条件——什么算作爱、欠下什么、可以要求什么——则由他通过其保留的构成性权力来加以控制，并且（c）这整体被遮蔽为爱，确切地说是他对她的爱，以至于她的劳动被重新编码为她情感的自然表达，并作为劳动而消失。那本使誓言看起来像是奉献之巅峰的无条件性，在这一分析看来，恰是完美的意识形态形式：它把一种占有结构呈现为纯粹的馈赠，而且它恰恰在立约者真诚之时最为有效地做到这一点，因为他的真诚正是那层表面，结构在其之下不为人知地运作着。

8.3 那条界线

这就得出了本节所许诺的那条确定的界线。当对方对二阶条件保留共同作者权（co-authorship）——即设定和修订所给予与所要求之物的权力，以及一种免于让那些条件被单方面固定下来的豁免权——时，共享生活的自我立法便确立起一种正当的权利秩序；在这些条件下，维系关系的劳动是按贡献者共同控制的条件被给付与被计量的，并被承认为贡献。当对方被圈禁为不被承认的关系性劳动的提供者、其所依的条件并非她所共同控制、且这一圈禁被爱的语言所遮蔽时，同一种自我立法便确立起剥削。这条界线，并非由情感的温度、一阶条款的慷慨、或立法者的真诚来划定——所有这些都与剥削相容，而且确实是剥削最有效的掩护。它被划定的方式，恰如在政治经济学的情形中那样，取决于构成性权力的分配，以及取决于贡献者的劳动是被如此承认为劳动，还是被重新编码为自然的奉献。亲密关系与政治经济学在此并非类比，而是在相关的结构层面上是同一的：在二者之中，一种正义秩序与一种剥削秩序之间的差别，都在于那些以其劳动维系着该秩序的人，是否保留着设定其条件的权力，以及是否拥有让其贡献得到承认的资格。

9. 来自意识形态承认的反驳

论证如今明确无误地指向一种补救：使誓言成为关系性的；分配二阶权力；赋予所爱之人以构成性资格，去争辩并共同作者化爱她意味着什么。但对这一补救最严重的反驳，恰恰来自它所赖以为据的那些传统——承认理论与关系性自主——之内，因此在陈述这一补救之前必须先回应它，否则补救便会落空。

这一反驳是说，关系性并不能保证正义，因为承认本身就可能是意识形态的。Honneth——他的理论把爱作为承认的第一个领域，即基本自信得以形成的领域，并把承认作为自我实现的媒介（Honneth 1995）——本人正是这一困难的来源。他注意到，主体可以从一种在从属位置之内被给予的、且确保其对该位置之同意的承认中，获取真实的自我价值与稳定的身份认同（Honneth 2007）。那位忠诚的伴侣或许恰恰通过履行一个使她从属的角色而获得了一种坚固的身份感与自尊感；她的承认是真实的，她的认可是真诚的，然而她所认可的安排，却是我们有理由称之为不正义的。”意识形态承认”指的正是这样一些情形：被承认、并欢迎这种承认，与支配共存、甚至加固着支配。当这一论点被压向关系性自主时，它便成为一个两难：Khader（2020）论证道，关系性理论所颂扬的那种社会嵌入，也正是可能造成一个人对贬损自己的处境产生真诚依附的东西，即适应性偏好（adaptive preferences）的问题（参见 Khader 2011）。把这应用于我们的情形：立约者把条件开放给共同作者化，而所爱之人——由第7节所描述的那个使她甘于索求甚少的性别化秩序所构成——共同作者化了使她从属的条件，并珍视这些条件。这段关系现在是关系性的、承认性的、共同作者化的，且是不正义的，而且因为它披着相互认可的外表，便愈发阴险。

这确实是一把架在补救咽喉上的真刀，而且它被本文自身的第7节磨得更利：如果主体是由一种性别化秩序所构成的，那为何要指望所爱之人被构成的偏好会比立约者被构成的构想更为纯粹的试金石？我不会通过否认这一反驳的力量来钝化它。使誓言成为关系性的，其本身并不能确保正义。如果一种正义的关系秩序的标准是事实上的认可（de facto endorsement），即双方实际上接受了那些条件，那么意识形态承认便会彻底击败这一补救，因为事实上的认可恰恰正是那位心满意足的从属者所提供的东西。

9.1 可争议性，而非认可

答案在于，起作用的标准并非事实上的认可，而是活生生的可争议性（live contestability），而这正是第5节的共和主义分析得以见效之处。回想一下，支配是模态性的：它关切的不是干涉是否实际发生，而是一个人是否暴露于他人随意施加干涉的可能性之下（Pettit 1997）。把这转置到承认上来。使一种关系秩序成为正义的，并不在于其条件事实上被接受，而在于每一方都保留着一种在模态上稳健的资格去争辩和修订它们——这种资格的检验，不取决于异议是否实际发生，而取决于若异议发生将会怎样。那位心满意足的从属者的处境之所以不正义，按这一标准，并非因为她未能反对（她并不愿反对），而是因为，倘若她反对，她的反对将不具任何分量；该秩序的结构使得她的异议无法撼动它。在异议被预先排除的条件下作出的认可，并不是那种能够赋予正义的认可。可争议性所追问的是反事实的、模态的问题：异议是否活生生的、有分量的、在相关的一系列情境中是有效的？而这一问题区分开了确保资格的承认与仅仅确保对资格之缺失之同意的承认。这恰恰是为何事实上的认可作为标准会失败，而模态的可争议性会成功：前者是关于现实世界的一个事实，意识形态能够制造它；后者是关于权力结构横跨诸可能世界的一个事实，意识形态无法仅凭制造出实际的同意来满足它。

有两点澄清能够强化这一回应。第一，可争议性并不能仅凭一种纯形式上的反对许可而得到满足。在一段关系中，被爱者虽被”允许”表达异议，但其异议在结构上却是惰性的——它总是被消磨殆尽、总是被重新框定、永远无法改变任何事情——那么这段关系与那种径直禁止反对的关系一样，确凿无疑地通不过检验；这是 Hohfeld 那一论点的关系类比：一项缺乏相应权力作为对应物的名义性诉求，并不构成任何保护。鲜活的可争议性要求异议能够带来差别，这关乎二阶权力与回应性的分配状况，而非关乎某种名义性权利的存在。第二，依循 Ricoeur 的思路，可争议性预设了双方之间的恰当距离（proper distance）：一种近到足以容纳亲密、却又保全他者那不可化约之分离性的关系，从而使被爱者始终是一个能够说”不”的他者，而不致被吸纳进爱者对共享之善的构想之中（Ricoeur 2005）。承认恰恰是在这一距离崩解之时坍缩为意识形态——当他者被如此彻底地等同于这段关系、或等同于爱者关于她的形象，以至于不再存在任何她得以表达异议的立足点之时。恰当距离是使可争议性保持鲜活的结构性条件，而它又回连到主体的构成问题上：维持一个他者得以从中提出争议的立足点，正是防止其被构成的偏好沦为爱者之偏好、或秩序之偏好的内化回声的关键。

9.2 诚实的剩余

为了恪守不过度宣称的标准，必须陈明这一回应的限度。可争议性既非一套算法，也非一种保证。存在着一些棘手的疑难情形，其中异议究竟是鲜活的还是被封堵的，确实暧昧不明；还有一些情形，其中一种深度内化的从属性侵蚀了构想异议的能力本身，以至于反事实检验有可能返回不确定的结果——争议的立足点仿佛已被预先殖民。我并不主张可争议性消解了意识形态式承认这一问题。我主张的是：它把正义定位在了正确的位置上——定位于在模态上稳健的争议资格，而非定位于同意之事实——并且它的表现确凿地优于事实上的认可，因为后者会被意识形态当即击败。在争议能力本身已遭损害之处，恰当距离的要求以及批判性立足点的关系性达成（见第7节）便成为修复的场所——这一修复缓慢、不确定，且永远不可被假定为已经完成。一项标准可以是正确的，却仍留有一片棘手疑难的剩余；认识论上的诚实要求我们指明这一剩余，而非将其粉饰遮掩。

10. 誓言的重新奠基：关系性的共同立法与生成性正义

我们现在可以重构这一誓言，以便保全一路确立下来的诸善——第3节的自由、第4节的道德价值——同时弥合第5至8节所诊断出的裂隙，并经受住第9节的反驳。这一重构并不否弃原初的誓言。其内核——即爱不应成为情绪的人质，亦不应成为回报的因变量——是值得保留的；正是这一点使誓言成为自由的一项成就。必须改变的并非那份恒常，而是其单方面性；并非一阶的奉献，而是对二阶权力的垄断。

原初的誓言是：无论发生什么，无论她作何感受，我都将继续爱她。重构后的誓言则更接近于：

我将继续爱她，而爱她意味着什么——此时此地——我向她敞开：向她的声音、她的异议、她的修正敞开。我的恒常在于我不会使我的爱沦为她情绪的人质，亦不会使之取决于她的回应；但我的恒常并不凌驾于她那争议的资格之上——争议我的爱对她做了什么、又向她索求了什么。我们之爱的条款是属于她与我共同设定的，而绝非由我独自设定。

前几个分句保全了自由的层面：这份爱依然是自我立法的，依然被抽离于情绪与互惠的管辖之外。第3节的理由-回应性标准如今得到了满足而非违背，因为该机制被明确地向被爱者敞开，作为理由的一个来源。最后几个分句则弥合了正义的裂隙，办法是将二阶权力（见第6节）从单独的爱者那里重新安置到二人共同之处：恒常作为爱者对留下来、并持续意愿她之善这一承诺的属性而被保留，而被交出的则是对那个善之诠释的垄断。三条矢量在其根部得到了处理：声音被构成性地接纳，而非被免疫隔离；给予的形态成为双手共同触碰之物；爱她的界定被复归于共享的权威之下。而且，由于起作用的标准是鲜活的可争议性而非认可，这一重构便不会坍缩为意识形态式的承认：检验的标准不在于她是否接受这些条款，而在于她的异议是否依然鲜活、有分量，并能够在那使她始终是一个能说”不”的他者的恰当距离之上撼动这些条款。第8节的政治经济学界线由此被重新跨回正确的一侧：随着二阶权力被共享、她那维系性的劳动被承认为贡献而非被重新编码为自然的奉献，这一秩序便不再具有剥削性，而成为一种真正的权利-秩序。

10.1 从自我立法到共同立法

请留意自我立法这一概念发生了什么。我们始于一个自足的理性行动者为自己颁布一条法则。我们终于一条统辖爱者之爱的法则——它并非、也不可能是他独有的法则，一条在其根基处即为共同立法的法则。这并非一种由外部强加到某个本来孤立的行动之上的让步；第7节已表明，那孤立的行动从来就不曾孤立，立法着的自我自始至终都是关系性地被构成的。这一重构并非将关系性添加到某种自足的立法之上；它把立法自身的根据带入视野，并使誓言的形式与其起源之真相相契合。康德式的图景预设了一个先于关系、且独立于关系而被构成的立法者；而本文逐步确立起来的关系性本体论——经由本体界避难所之失败、行动者身份的历史主义、以及主体的结构性构成——则主张：爱着的主体在一定程度上是在关系之中被生成的：他关于爱为何物、他者应得什么、以及他自身想要什么、是什么的感受，是在他意欲对之立法的那段关系之中、并通过该关系而成形的（Nedelsky 1989; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000; Helm 2010）。亲密领域中的”自我”立法，自始至终都不过是两个主体彼此持续相互共同构成这一进程之中的一个环节。

10.2 生成性正义

这就允许我们——在论证的终点而非此前——提出一种比那承担了诊断工作的非支配底线更为厚实的正义构想。倘若主体是在关系中被生成的，那么他们之间的正义就不仅仅是支配的缺席，而是对一系列条件的积极维护——在这些条件之下，每一方都能在关系中继续成为他们之所是，而这一生成过程不致被对方所俘获或封堵。我们称之为生成性正义（generative justice）：以关系是否持续敞开每一方持续的自我塑造之条件——其中核心地包括争议关系自身条款的资格——为衡量尺度的正义。非支配与鲜活的可争议性是底线；生成性正义则是它们所指向的那一实质性理想，并且是重构后誓言的恰当目标。之所以只在此处才引入它，而不以它为整个论证奠基，乃出于方法论上的诚实：诊断与回应单凭非支配这一稀薄而被广泛共享的概念便能成立，并不要求读者接受那更厚实的、关系-本体论式的构想。生成性正义命名了重构后的誓言所为者何；非支配与可争议性则是它至少必须确保的东西。

11. 结论：誓言与秩序的同构性

本文始于一句爱人的誓言，并已抵达一种为该誓言所共享、却又远比其自身宏大得多的秩序所共有的结构。这一誓言，作为共享生活之自我立法的一个实例，被表明为康德式自由的一次典范性运用——其自由，依任何可操作的标准来看，皆以其始终对他者保持回应为条件；它是一种在道德上令人钦佩的形式，其内容却是沉默而可被俘获的；而且，在其单方面的版本中，它是一种模态意义上的支配建制，一种仁慈主人式的秩序——在一阶上慷慨，在二阶上支配。一项 Hohfeld 式的分析将这一不义精确地定位于对二阶构成性权力的垄断；一种关于被构成之主体的论述则表明了一个真诚的立法者何以会在无意之中再生产这一不义；而社会再生产的政治经济学则划出了那条界线——区分了那建立起权利-秩序的誓言，与那建立起剥削的誓言，即在爱的面具之下对未被承认的关系性劳动的征用。补救之道并非一个更纯粹的立法者，而是一种关系性的共同立法，其正义安放于他者那在模态上稳健、鲜活的争议资格之上，而其目标则是那持续敞开每一方之生成的生成性正义。

最深层的收获，正是导论所许诺的那种同构性。一位爱者通过誓言所确立的微观秩序，与一种政治经济通过其对权利和劳动的分配所确立的宏观秩序，在那些至关重要的结构性方面，乃是同一回事。在二者之中，一种自我标榜为自我奠基的立法，事实上都奠基于先于它而存在的种种关系与一段历史。在二者之中，立法一方在程序上的正确性——真诚、可普遍化、善良意志、慷慨的一阶给予——都无法证成该秩序的正义，因为正义是第二阶的事情，关乎谁掌握着设定与修订条款的权力，以及那些受其约束者是否保有对其提出异议的资格。在二者之中，一种正当的秩序与支配或剥削之间的区别，并不在于强势一方的仁慈，而在于那些以其参与和劳动维系此秩序者所拥有的、得到保障的、非任意的资格。并且在二者之中，最有效地掩盖支配的意识形态，恰是那种把占有重新编码为馈赠的意识形态——无论是以工资形式的“公平交换”，还是以爱的“无条件奉献”。

一位爱者最恳切的誓言与一种政治经济对权利的分配竟会共享同一种结构，这既非将爱贬抑为经济学，亦非将经济学拔高为浪漫。它是一个关于规范性本身的论断：任何凌驾于一种共享生活之上的法则——从最小的二人组到最大的政体——其效力地位都不取决于其作者的纯洁或善意，而取决于受其约束者那不可化约的、对其作出回应的资格。理解了这一点的爱者，并不会因此爱得更不自由或更不忠诚。他第一次正义地去爱，因为他已明白：那共享生活的法则从来就不是他一人所能给予的，而最深的恒久，并非那种逆着所爱之人而坚持己路的意志，而是那种在他们之间始终守护着一个空间、让她得以永远作出回应的意志。

两个人之间所建造之物——一种秩序、一句誓言、一段共享的生活——从来不是中立的，也从来不是单纯被给定的：它要么为双方都确保了重新制定其条款的资格，要么悄然将这些条款固定为一方的馈赠与另一方的命运。那么，继续去爱，便不是逆着她去稳住那秩序，而是一次又一次地把那使其成为“我们的”的权力交还到她手中。

致谢

本文是关于亲密关系哲学与正义理论的系列论文中的第三篇。此处所讨论的爱者与被爱者被刻意保持匿名，案例亦被作为一个建构出来的情形来呈现，以便论证得以立足于其结构本身，而非任何私人的历史。

我最深的感激，归于那位我一直爱着的人，归于这一系列的第一篇论文便已题献的那位“森林女孩”：她精神纯洁而自然，心地善良，坚韧而智慧，内心怀着对这个世界的一份静默的使命感。她是这篇论文写作的动机，正如她也是其他诸多事情的动机一样。这几页中所审视的那句誓言，正是由她所唤起之物所促成的；而本文的结论——最深的恒久，并非那种逆着所爱之人而坚持己路的意志，而是那种始终敞开着一个空间、让她得以永远作出回应的意志——便是我向她重申那句誓言的形式：我不会辜负她，直到我们生命的终点。

为透明起见，我谨说明：在准备本手稿的过程中曾使用一款人工智能助手，作为起草、构建以及打磨论证及其文字的工具；其中的思想、立场与最终判断皆出于我本人，我对内容承担全部责任。

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