Discussions with Eric Zhang.
The first part of this critique can be found here. A Nostr mirror publication of this article can be found at: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpltccdl38saf6k7wsrwry7x49xafprj3r85slyf3jpw95kswczpnqq2kcupj0gmx7nt3ddtn2jfcd4z4gvmj899r2m47qme
Section 1:
In the previous article, our Interns argued that autonomy is the principal end of the state. Human subjectivity can be divided into at least two parts, one quantitative and the other qualitative. Both have their respective needs, whose dissatisfaction results in dehumanizing conditions. The state’s aim is not merely to provide conditions by which people can pursue their self-interests. It is also concerned with promoting the development of their capacities for reflective deliberation and choice.
The present article will move to focusing on means rather than ends. The relevant question will be: How should a network state achieve this end? Fortunately, Balaji Srinivasan offers an approach to answer this: the idea of a one-commandment. That is, a one-premise moral critique of one or several preexisting nation-state(s) that will serve as a basis, a foundational starting point, to build a network state. However, his examples of one-commandments in the book tend to be impoverished in two senses. First, while his suggestions of one-commandments tend to be moral, they lack meaning. His example of a keto-diet society could be understood and expressed in moral terms, such as criticism regarding the public and private health of a society, but that doesn’t mean it will be meaningful enough to provide a vision about a greater good, whatever that may be, which people identify with and pursue, and that provides certain kinds of motivations to act on. The second issue is that one-commandments are also supposed to function as principles that guide the legal decision-making procedures of the society. The worry is that an individual commandment will be unable to accommodate all cases that arise in legal matters, and will easily devolve into morally troublesome situations. As will be discussed below, Balaji offers a solution by suggesting that network states adopt a preexisting legal codebase from a nation-state after formulating a one-commandment. This, too, has its difficulties. Throughout this article, I will use the United States as an example, and when such a case is invoked, it can be seen that, if Srinivasan’s proposal is employed, a network state would be beset by its attempt to reconcile the various preexisting legal parameters of a nation-state’s legal codebase, such as its forms of legal reasoning, modes of justification, and precedent, with its one-commandment.
There are therefore two conditions that a one-commandment must meet. It must be moral and sufficiently meaningful, and, secondly, it must be capable of generating principles that can guide the legal reasoning within the society, which will form consistent, coherent, and precedented justifications that establish the authority and legitimacy of the state. However, by satisfying these two conditions, a further problem arises. If a one-commandment is meaningful and can guide decision-making procedures within the society, it won’t be able to be formulated in a formal language that is appropriate for smart contracts. This is a problem because of certain statements made by Balaji in his book. At several points, he suggests that the constitution of the society will be in the form of a smart contract. However, smart contracts require certain properties that one-commandments should not, in principle, have if it is to satisfy the conditions above. For example, smart contracts operate by a set of fixed and specified rules that either hold or do not hold. Their functioning properly requires that the rules programmed into the contracts are determinate and should not require interpretation or discretion. A good one-commandment, though, should not be of this kind. This will all be explained in more detail below. For now, what’s important is understanding that one-commandments must satisfy the conditions. The task now is to understand these two conditions better. Let’s begin with the first.
Section 2:
The first condition is one about meaning. Not only should a one-commandment be a moral critique; but it should also be meaningful. Now, questions like ‘What is meaning?’ are inherently difficult to answer, and I will not attempt that. A more manageable approach is to look at the effects of meaning. It’s fair to say most have an instinctual grasp of what meaning is. We may not be able to conceptualize and articulate it, but we have an intuitive feel that allows us to point it out. Finding answers to difficult and troubling questions, writing a book, getting a dream job, and achieving goals are meaningful experiences. Many may not be able to express why, but they know and feel them to be so, especially through how they affect those who have them. The same approach can be adopted here. A meaningful society would produce certain kinds of effects indicative of meaning. But what are these effects supposed to look like? An important one is the effect of people being captured by what society presents as the good, which people identify with, take up, and develop in their lives. If a society is meaningful, and if what it presents is worth adopting, then one outcome should be that individuals within the society concern themselves with developing and understanding it. One apparent way to see this is when individuals create out of what a society presents. The United States serves as an example of this. Before turning to that example, something more should be said about why meaning is central to founding network states.
What makes meaning important is that it has to be admitted that reaching diplomatic recognition amongst other sovereign states is an arduous enterprise. To be sovereign is to compete with other nations, which is a potential threat to their sovereignty. And because such recognition must be leveraged; because it is highly plausible that nations primarily act from self-interest and rarely from any motivation that borders on goodwill, network states must be sufficiently motivated by a vision that they find meaningful enough to strive toward, and are willing to persevere through the issues and hardships that arise. Therefore, it should be a principal concern of any founder to undertake a serious and thorough investigation of what is worth criticizing about preexisting nation-states that will get at the heart of the issues that people find disillusioning, alienating, oppressive, dehumanizing, or obstructing about modern societies, which, when well understood, can be articulated and expressed in ways that positively affect people’s motivations, and that moves them to join a network state.
Let’s turn now to the United States as an example of a country that proved to be meaningful. I propose that the founders of the United States offered a project worth wrestling with. That is, they provided an ideal worth poeticizing and writing literature about, that was worth developing and coming to terms with which was meaningful enough to salvage and maintain despite its flaws and contradictions. It produced images that moved people and provided a sense of being a part of something bigger and more significant than themselves. The fact that many artists, writers, and philosophers devoted their creative resources toward the American project, who tried to work out its tensions and make progress in its promises of equality and freedom by understanding and elucidating its foundations and concepts, is evidence of the reality of what the United States attempted to do. Despite what the country got wrong and what it grossly failed to live up to, it grasped something true, which can be seen by how the society breathed life into the imaginative capacities of its people.
It is well known that the Founders of the United States were deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, especially the philosopher John Locke. It was Locke who offered a certain conception of a state of nature, where human beings are born free and equal and where each has a natural right to life, liberty, and property, that was expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s famous declaration that certain truths are held to be ‘self-evident’. These are truths supposedly discernible to anyone with the rational faculties necessary for ascertaining them. Locke believed that once someone has done the reasoning themself; who has followed the light of reason on its definite paths, these moral propositions will be illuminated as if they were mathematical axioms or basic expressions of arithmetic. They would be so firmly impressed upon the mind that no rational person could deny them. He writes in his Second Treatise on Government, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker.” If all the layers of society are peeled away, what lies underneath is a natural condition of equality and freedom. No divine hierarchy orders human beings by referring to their relation to an infinite being that justifies Monarchic authority, or the Church's claims to legitimacy. In a natural state preceding all social conventions and rules are natural laws that grant rights to those under it, and a legitimate government, one that may be properly said to have and wield authority, establishes the protection of people’s rights through the rule of law. Because in a state of nature, people must self-govern, they may easily overstep and try to violate the rights of others. They may steal the property of another person, restrict or take the freedom and liberty of someone else, or even take someone’s life; and since there is no central authority but only individuals, enforcing rights can be dangerous and costly. A good government would reduce and channel people’s dispositions toward self-interest and vice, directing it toward better, more productive ends. Thomas Paine, who played a fundamental role in galvanizing the people for the cause of revolution, wrote in his famous pamphlet Common Sense in 1775, “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.” So, he agrees with Locke: government is a necessary evil because human beings cannot sustain and enjoy their natural rights to freedom and equality independent of external constraint.
Now, whether or not normative natural laws exist is not important here; what matters is that Locke held such a view and that the Founders were influenced by it when writing the country's founding documents. In having this view, Locke provided the initial concepts of freedom and equality at the forefront of how the United States conceived of itself over time.
What’s essential to this view of natural rights is that underlying it are claims about an ahistorical element of human nature that is not subject to social and cultural conditions. This aspect of human beings stands outside of time. As Locke believed, human beings’ capacity for reason is the locus of dignity and respect owed to each person. By having contact with truth, with being able to reason to it, and because truth is good, the ideal of a good society is to promote the right human faculties that have access to it. And to achieve this, a free, democratic, liberal society is necessary. Only if human beings exercise these faculties for themselves, enabling them to rationally discern these ‘self-evident’ truths, can this vision of human potential be realized. The people must be able to self-govern and not depend on a patriarch or dictator to do it for them. For human beings to realize the fundamental dignity that characterizes them; for a free, equal, and just society of autonomous individuals to exist, the people must be able and willing to participate and uphold a democracy that places the responsibility of their well-being in their own hands. However, as the French philosopher Montesquieu points out in his work Spirit of the Laws, which was also profoundly influential for the founders, democracy, as a form of government, requires virtue. He writes that in an aristocracy or a monarchy, “the force of laws in one, and the prince’s arm in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole. But in a popular state (like a democracy), one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue.” If the people are not virtuous; if they do not act from the right source that grounds their dignity and respect but from human wickedness and vice; if unable to actualize what is necessary for self-governance, then democracy will not work, and the American project will fail.
The takeaway from this philosophical vignette is that the foundations established in the United States held freedom, equality, and democracy as fundamental values that would animate the society, and that would lead to reimaginings of what those concepts mean over time. These are deep sources of meaning for those who identify as Americans, regardless of what part of the political spectrum one is on. Every political speech has to pay homage to these ideas. The use of the word freedom alone by a politician in the US can legitimize what they say to the public, even if their words are empty and lack significance. But when used properly and with meaning, they culminate into the highest expression of American society. While the language of Martin Luther King Jr is religious, it is also fundamentally American, and it was his ability to understand, develop, and wield that language that made him such an influential figure. Since America’s inception and development, the language of rights, freedom, equality, and democracy has become ubiquitous in the context of morality and human value, which points to how meaningful these concepts are. American literature also played a central role in this development.
American literature is an example of those within the society trying to come to terms with what these ideas mean, how to understand them, and how life should be lived in light of them. The example I want to look at is the 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement, with figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. As thinkers, these three certainly have their differences, but what is continuous is the attempt to expound an individualism that is the source of a universal nature. By being an individual, as someone free and ‘self-reliant’, who does not conform to external constraints but relies on their internal intuitions, who trust themselves through and through, a truly democratic society may be realized. One should not be a product of mere circumstance; one must actively shape it. Emerson writes in his essay Self-Reliance that “there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is a new nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” Each individual has a unique and authentic self, differentiated from everyone else, and the noble life to pursue is one of uncovering this potential. To carve a path distinct from all that has come before is to lead a virtuous, spiritual life of freedom.
In the case of Henry David Thoreau, he gives his individualism a political salience, especially in his essay Civil Disobedience. There he argues that until people can participate in a democracy by using their conscience, by their capacity to discern the right for themselves, independent of what others say, think, or do, will the government be less liable to corruption. He begins the essay in agreement with Locke and Paine, saying, “I heartily accept the motto - ‘That government is best which governs least.’” Government is an expedient, he says, something purely instrumental, and what matters for society is for the people within it to realize their own moral conscience, which, of course, requires the exercising of their faculties, of their capacity for moral deliberation and choice. No one can do this for anyone else; in a democracy, where a majority may easily wield power unjustly by the sheer use of numbers, it is the responsibility of the individual to participate in the political processes by thinking for themselves, which must be directed toward justice and virtue, just as Montesquieu argued. And when government fails, when it does live up to its sole purpose which is to promote the well-being of the society, then it is the duty of its citizens to peacefully disobey the law, to obstruct its processes, until justice emerges and the rights of people are restored. This has been one of the most lasting contributions made by an American: it provided Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. a way to demonstrate the injustices they dedicated their lives to eradicating.
Whereas Thoreau and Emerson focused more on individualism, Walt Whitman focused more on what unites and what is universal about human beings in a democratic context. The political scholar George Kaleb writes, “Together with Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman tries to draw out the fuller moral and existential significance of rights. These are the rights that individuals have as persons and that the political system of democracy exists in order to protect.” Whitman’s poetry attempts to animate a democratic spirit, a national identity, that ‘the people’ identify with, and that moves them to feel the sanctity of individual rights. If democracy is going to work, the society must be animated by a sense of connectedness whose source produces the tolerance, sympathy, understanding, and moral conscience necessary for people to self-govern, and for individuals to choose the lives they wish to live. But this can only be achieved if the notion of rights sparks feelings of reverence, of emotions that dispose one to care for the dignity of other people, both in action and thought; otherwise, the society will surely either devolve into a tyranny of the majority or an elite aristocracy that governs over the community. In America, as the Transcendentalists saw it, what is universal is the individual, with each one’s infinite potential for becoming, and democracy and its virtues must promote the right of the individual to cultivate this potential for themselves.
The founding of the United States, then, and its underlying principles of rights, freedom, equality, and democracy, were sufficiently rich enough for subsequent generations to reimagine and reinterpret, through poetry, literature, and philosophy, what it means to be an American. Those who identified with the country and found it meaningful were willing to direct their efforts toward developing an ethos within the United States. This is of course a tall order, and the expectation of what a network state is, or what it should become, will likely be less than this example. Nevertheless, the U.S. is founded on principles rather than ethnicity or religion - or at least in principle - which serves as a model for network states and their one-commandments.
Satisfying the first condition means putting forth a project worth investigating, developing, and creating out of. If a network state is to have longevity, then the founders must spend their time establishing principles that will move people to envision a better mode of life that elicits motivating reasons to care for its inception and growth. And, of course, there will and should be a great deal of diversity between what networks states formulate as principles worth living by. There is likely a plurality of solutions that have the potential to make people better off. The environments people grow and develop in, the cultures they're embedded in, and the values instilled, are diverse. Therefore, the socio-political structures most conducive to each group's well-being will be too. However, what should not be diverse is the goal to provide a vision of a better life for those who desire to leave preexisting nation-states and join a network state.
Section 3:
Let’s turn now to the second condition. The question to be turned to is how principles can be formulated that will guide the decision-making procedures within a network state. This question can be thought of as one about the nature of principles. What should principles look like? I don’t aim to offer an exhaustive answer to this question, but, again, if the focus is on a significant aspect of principles, it will be helpful to look into and analyze it. Such an aspect can come to light by distinguishing principles from rules. What is significant in this discussion is that, whereas rules can be encoded into smart contracts, principles cannot. Rules are mechanical by nature, whereas principles require interpretation when applying them in context, especially in unprecedented situations. An example of this is the United States. When the Declaration of Independence states that all people are created equal, the document presents a principle by which the society will operate. Such a principle cannot be captured by a formal language appropriate to technologies like smart contracts. This will be explored with more detail below, but to herald what that will look like, think about how this principle could be captured by a language that is by its nature binary. That is, a language that necessitates formulating conditions that either obtain or do not obtain. A smart contract that is prone to ambiguity, and that lacks resources to determine whether something has been met or not is a defunct one; one that hasn’t been properly coded according to possible situations that will or may arise. On the other hand, rules are of a kind that do exactly this and are therefore viable candidates for smart contracts. Principles guide a society’s decision-making procedures, which generates rules that align with the principles themselves. This will also establish the legitimacy of a network state. When people join a network state, what they’re essentially agreeing to is the set of principles that will used to govern the society. And if no principles are formulated, or if they are but are poorly articulated and understood, then the justifications employed by the state will be impoverished in quality as well. Punishment is a great example of this. Every state must have an apparatus to administer punishments for those who violate the rules, and if those rules do not correspond to a firmly established standard that creates consistency and coherence between them, then the applications of those rules can easily produce inequalities, unfairness, injustices, etc. And what right does a state have to punish if it does so arbitrarily and not for the sake of reasons that can be justified according to a set of principles that the members of the society initially agreed to? Imagine a group of friends who all adopt the rule that promises must always be lived up to, but who then only adhere to it when it applies to some friends rather than others, and who attempt to enforce the rule by blaming and criticizing someone who breaks it, even though they all do so. It would be fair to say then that the rule has little to no legitimacy because it’s applied arbitrarily. There must be some acknowledged, rational basis to ground the rules that supply a measure of consistency and coherence that can be applied when broken. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between rules and principles to be clear about what the target concept of a one-commandment is and to eliminate potential confusion that may result in harm to those willing to join a network state.
As mentioned above, this distinction is relevant because Srinivasan seems to believe that smart contracts can function like constitutions which, as in the United States, consist of principles and not rules. So, it is significant to see how smart contracts cannot achieve this.
Turning to the book then, when Srinivasan offers his complex definition of a network state, one of the clauses of the definition states that it is “a consensual government limited by a social smart contract.” Then in section 2.4.3, he seems to suggest that law is reducible to smart contracts, and suggests optimistically that one day they will be the primary bearers of legal codes. This indicates that he believes one-commandments will operate through smart contracts, as sets of conditions that function more or less mechanically. Again, the issue is that it oversimplifies the nature of law. If a one-commandment may sufficiently guide the decision-making procedures of the society, then it will be unable to be formalized into a smart contract. The distinction between rules and principles helps us see this. Recall that rules, by their nature, have an all-or-nothing character. A rule in baseball states that when there are three strikes someone is out, which either obtains or does not. There is no wiggle room or discussion about whether the rule is valid or not. Exceptions to this rule are not about the validity of the rule itself but about whether the rule applies, as is the case when deciding whether a pitch is a strike or a ball. Disputes about whether a player is out or not is a matter of whether the proper conditions for the rule have been met. Laws in a society share similar features. For example, when a police officer issues a speeding ticket, they are merely applying a rule that either holds or does not hold. And when someone disputes the validity of the ticket, they are disputing whether the law (the rule) was broken or not, and not whether the law itself is valid. Now, one-commandments which satisfy the second condition will not be amenable to these kinds of constraints. One-commandments will operate more like principles than rules. As the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin points out, principles have two dimensions that rules do not. First, principles are not all-or-nothing but require discretion when being applied to cases. For instance, the principle ‘always be fair’ cannot be formulated in rule-like terms. In other words, principles cannot be exhausted by enumerating their parts and accounting for all the possible cases it is relevant to. Of course, there will be clear cases when the principle is violated, but there will remain countless cases that have to be understood by applying and interpreting the principle. In the case of baseball again, imagine if one of the game’s rules was ‘to always be fair’. How could this be formulated in a way that gives it an all-or-nothing quality, which will render it mechanical and unambiguous? It’s impossible. Rules will have to be formed in light of the principle. For instance, perhaps the three-strike rule is the fairest standard by which the game can be played; a rule can then be established accordingly. But this again requires distinguishing between rules and principles.
Rules are candidates for being encoded into smart contracts because of their mechanical nature. Principles, on the other hand, are not and require interpretation when cases arise that are ambiguous or unprecedented. Because one-commandments are tasked with guiding the decision-making procedures of the society and of formulating laws that will constrain the behavior of its members, they should not be understood as being rules themselves but rather as normative principles, as reasons for forming certain judgments about the law and the conduct it is meant to regulate. It’s important to understand one-commandments this way because if they are seen as rules; if they are treated as being reducible to all-or-nothing propositions, then the higher, more complex legal procedures, the ones that require interpretation and discretion, will be unable to deal with cases that elude a rules application, and therefore will be unable to fully guide the society, which one-commandments are supposed to do. If they are treated as principles, as standards to produce rules and to apply when ambiguity arises in exceptional cases, a society will be better equipped to form consistent and fair legal precedents. For instance, the First Amendment in the US Constitution is a principle about free speech; it protects individuals’ and groups’ right to freely express their opinions and beliefs. When cases arise that pertain to this right, and if the case contains a sufficient degree of complexity, then the Supreme Court examines the case based on the First Amendment and past cases with similar conditions. Now, ideally, they would resolve the case by merely referencing precedent, and not on considerations regarding their own moral and ethical opinions. They would observe how previous judges may have applied the First Amendment in similar cases to the one being adjudicated, and draw their conclusions accordingly. What’s important is that they appeal to a document of principles that serves as a standard by which cases can be resolved, or, if the case is novel enough, generate new laws that will serve as future precedents.
As mentioned, one of the essential functions here is to provide justifiable reasons for decision-making, which eliminates the degree of arbitrariness inherent in the conclusions drawn by the state. In the US, when issues arise regarding rights, duties, laws, or any other politico-legal issue, the constitution serves as a basic frame of reference, a justifiable grounding for one’s judgments and assertions, that gives weight to the forms of reasoning that occur within the society. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Constitution cannot be morally evaluated. It has, and it should be. But because moral opinion can vary so widely, and because there must be some shared standard by which the society can operate in its deliberative processes, without which disorder and confusion would dominate its operations, the constitution provides a general basis for achieving this. It is essential, then, as a founder of a network state, to carefully consider the principles that will be adopted to govern the society.
An example of a one-commandment will illustrate the point. In his book, Srinivasan presents an FDA-free society as a possible network state and formulates a principle that undergirds it: Your body, your choice. Because of the history of the FDA, Srinivasan imagines a founder who would desire to create a network state that would address those issues by implementing this principle and eliminating third-party institutions that limit people’s ability to make choices regarding what they wish to produce and consume. But Srinivasan then makes the following suggestion, which creates issues: With this principle, “you could then take the existing American codebase and add one crucial new feature: the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference.” The problem is that the US legal codebase is derived from the US Constitution, and because that document consists of twenty-seven amendments and not one, substantial revisions will be necessary for making Your Body, your Choice the principal standard within the society’s legal system. For instance, if regulation like what the FDA does is eliminated, then the commerce clause of the constitution that states “Congress shall have (the) Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, should be either eliminated or greatly reduced in bearing any significance in future cases of law. That means of course that any part of the legal codebase derived from this amendment must be altered as well.
Now, while this problem is technically difficult because founders have the responsibility to hierarchically organize principles by their relative weights, it also has moral concerns. For instance, imagine a case where someone starts a private school within the FDA-free network state and decides to only admit persons of a certain race. Imagine further that the principle Your body, your choice has been interpreted by the judiciary sector of the society to mean that producers of goods and services like education can do what they please insofar as they obtain consent. Now, because they adopted the US legal codebase, and because I took this to mean that legal precedent has been carried over as well, then what if another member, one who has been discriminated against by the new school, appeals to Brown v. Board of Education, which relies on the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution? Either the decision made will have to uphold the conduct of the school by appealing to Your body, your choice, which will mean the Fourteenth Amendment is reduced in significance, or they will have to prioritize that amendment over Your body, your choice. Either option has its difficulties, but clearly, the first option is far worse because of its oppressive and discriminatory nature. Therefore, founders mustn't merely establish a principle and then adopt a codebase. The principles expressed in a one-commandment should be deeply considered to avoid these kinds of potential catastrophes.
Let’s look at another case. In the absence of regulatory institutions, and this being so based on principle, is there no restriction regarding what someone within the society may produce and consume? Could someone choose to sell one of their kidneys in exchange for other goods? Could pharmaceutical manufacturers sell a carcinogenic drug by misrepresenting it as being capable of curing other diseases, and where the consumers who purchased the drug are told they’re out of luck? These are possible cases that are not ruled out by an unspecified and ambiguous principle like Your Body, your Choice. Unless a founder wishes to bite the bullet on these kinds of cases, this means further principles need to be developed that will interact with one another and can be used to form legal judgments that align with basic moral intuitions like having some form of consumer protection that prevent wrongful forms of exploitation, as is the case with misrepresentation of goods and services that undermines consumer consent.
A single, all-encompassing one-commandment that can guide a society’s decision-making procedures is difficult to formulate. Committing to a principle like Your body, your choice will likely lead to complications, as the previous two examples demonstrate. To avoid this, a good approach is to make a general enough principle that can be universalizable; one that is applicable and appropriate in all cases. The philosopher Immanuel Kant and his moral philosophy offer excellent examples of this. One of Kant’s famous contributions to moral philosophy is the idea of a categorical imperative. How Kant gets to this idea is complicated, and I’m not going to attempt an explanation of that. But from it, he generates universally applicable principles that a one-commandment should strive for, one of which can be called the humanity principle: never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. An entryway into understanding an application of this principle is in the case of friendship. When two people are friends, this typically means that both persons treat one another as ends-in-themselves. Both friends represent each other as deserving consideration that does not use the other for any purpose other than for their own sake. When promises are made and decisions are acted upon in the context of the friendship, both share the responsibility of respecting the other by holding the other as the end one is directed toward. This doesn’t mean the friend is never treated as a means - that would be impossible. Sometimes people need a ride to work when their car has broken down, or one friend knows someone who can help the other get the job, and so one uses the other by obtaining the contact. But both are never to use the other as merely a means. Certain benefits may be derived from having a friend, but one is never a friend for those reasons: one is a friend because the other is intrinsically valuable.
In a society, this principle is general enough to guide the decision-making procedures. That’s not to say its application will be easy. It will often be difficult to understand what this principle amounts to and how it should be interpreted, but it won’t run into the same issues as Your body, your choice. The difference in generality between these two principles can be seen in the way failures occur when trying to follow them. Your body, your choice inevitably runs into cases that question its validity because certain moral intuitions desired to be preserved are violated. The humanity principle doesn’t easily run into this problem. When a case arises that seems to question the principle, it’s not so much whether it is valid because it fails to live up to intuitions but because it is difficult to live up to it as an ideal. Out of these two problems, failing to live up to a principle is better than adopting one that fails to satisfy moral expectations. The US Constitution is a great example of this. The idea of self-evident truths that hold human beings to have intrinsic value by virtue of their natural rights has proven to be a powerful resource for recognizing and upholding the moral worth of persons. The country has failed to live up to this throughout its history, but as an ideal, it has persistently pointed to a path forward to resolve the mistreatment of those within the society. While the contradiction of slavery in the United States was for a long time suppressed and rationalized, the language of natural rights provided the conceptual resources to dig it back up and shed light on it. As many have pointed out, the language of rights is self-correcting. If mistreatment of others exists, then the language illuminates it, brings it out into the open, and directs attention and concern for rectifying the moral shortcomings. Therefore, one-commandments should aim for universalizability, and avoid narrow and constrained principles that fail to capture moral intuitions. Having an ideal that one fails to live up to is far better than an impoverished one that lacks the proper resources.