On the Conflict of Value
论价值的冲突
P1 established the sources of value, P2 the positions at which value occurs, P3 the structure that obtains when those positions are occupied, and P4 the readings that value takes in time. Across four papers each value content has acquired its own history: which row of sources gives it standing, through which position it became this person's, what happens structurally when it is occupied, how it rises and falls over time. What has been missing is what happens when two of them collide.
The object of this paper is value conflict: a person holds two value contents, each already avowed, and in some concrete situation they demand incompatible actions.
The danger here is not saying too little. It is handing over a scale. Conflict pushes the question of an ordering of action to the front, and once an ordering is given grounds, those grounds get read as gradations. The first proposition of this series is that there is structure without ranking, while the situations of practice do not thereby stop producing orderings of action and outcomes. If the two are not cut apart, this paper will be read as saying that one need not choose, or as the moment the series finally conceded that values come in higher and lower.
One line runs through the whole: action cannot stand in for constitution. An ordering of action, the result of carrying it out, and the workings of a relation cannot of themselves rewrite the standing of a value content. Avowal, revision and exit are structurally permanent positions; what a relation can do is block the paths to them, and produce a reading in which constitution appears already complete. It cannot do the constituting. If a standing does change, some further first-person revision or exit has occurred. Hence yielding is not exit, and this is not because the bearer refrains from exiting, but because yielding is not the kind of act that can accomplish an exit.
Several readings follow. The standing of a content admits only of holding or not holding, not of amount, so conflict does not fall on the side of standing at all. It falls on the joint realizability of two demands for action, and joint realizability is a property of demands for action. The two standings, by themselves, supply no adjudication. Adjudication and constitutive acts are judged apart, and though both may occur within one and the same episode of deciding, each is settled by its own subject. Behaviour organized by an external demand, by habit, or by a script that has never been avowed may close an action-window without thereby qualifying as adjudication. And since adjudication presupposes the avowals it works from, it cannot turn around and certify them.
A value conflict takes no direction-value reading of itself, while an action arising out of it, if it bears on another subject, has its direction settled elsewhere. Among the five grounds on which adjudication proceeds there are only local priorities of domain, no total. No supplementary rule offered by theory can close those grounds into an adjudication. Between two bearers, a joint decision is real and really binds; what it binds is the arrangement of action and the responsibility that follows, and it does not thereby generate a position that ranks either party's value. A settlement may make demands; it cannot accomplish either party's exit from an avowal.
This paper gives no procedure for determining constitution and no algorithm for adjudication. No normative force is drawn upon anywhere.
Introduction
P1 established the sources of value, P2 the positions at which value occurs, P3 the structure that obtains when those positions are occupied, and P4 the readings that value takes in time. Across four papers each value content has acquired its own history. What has been missing is what happens when two of them collide.
The object of this paper is value conflict: a person holds two value contents, each already avowed, and in some concrete situation they demand incompatible actions.
There is one line, with different things lying on either side of it. On one side stand constitution and standing: whether a row of sources is present; whether a content has acquired standing within the person's own law; the person's own standing as an end. These three sit together on that side, and each has its own subject; they are not interchangeable. On the other side stands action: which content holds the center of gravity at this moment, whether new candidates can still surface from each row of sources, the coming and going of concrete contents. Conflict lies wholly on the second side, and so does adjudication. And the side of action does not settle anything on the other side automatically. What a relation can do is block the paths to that side, and produce a reading in which constitution appears already complete; it cannot do the constituting. If something on that side does change, the person has done something further over there.
The danger here is not saying too little. It is handing over a scale. Conflict pushes the question of an ordering of action to the front, and once an ordering is given grounds, those grounds get read as gradations: a reader will lay them out as a table of weights and ask which one scores higher. The first proposition of this series is that there is structure without ranking, while the situations of practice do not thereby stop producing orderings of action and outcomes. If the two are not cut apart, this paper will be read as saying that one need not choose, or as the moment the series finally conceded that values come in higher and lower.
P1 has already printed the proposition this paper must establish: that not ranking at the level of what value is does not mean that the situations of practice stop producing orderings of action. And only an ordering formed by the bearer's own law is what this paper calls adjudication; it is an ordering on the side of action, not a ranking of standing.
This paper does not treat how such an ordering is formed and carried out, nor what becomes of the item set aside; each has its own address, given in the closing section. Normative questions, that is, whether any of this ought to be so, are nowhere drawn upon.
The text observes the disciplines of the series: no external theorists are named, no historical events are cited; primary terms carry an English gloss at first appearance.
Section One · Narrowing the Conflict
V60 The Narrowing of Conflict
A person has two undertakings of his own, a book he has been writing for years and a craft he built up himself. Both come from the fourteenth row, the row of ends one sets for oneself and of the flourishing that goes with them. This afternoon there is time for one.
This is what the paper takes up: two value contents, each already avowed, under one and the same bearer, demanding incompatible actions in a concrete situation. What is incompatible is the actions, not the contents. Both contents are there, both are his, and only one of them can be carried out now.
Several situations look the same from outside.
A person stops doing something the way he used to. It looks as though it has run up against something else, when in fact that content is itself changing. P4 V52 makes the two cuts here: first ask whether a first-person constitutive act occurred in this change; if not, it is a rise or fall in running; if so, ask whether the original avowal terminated; if it did not, this is revision, and if it did, this is exit. Within the box marked revision there is only one content throughout, and no two of them standing against each other.
Another is wanting badly to get home early today while the work on hand is not finished. The line does not run through whether getting home early looks like a preference. As P2 puts it, the position of a particular preference is the easiest thing to misplace: a preference may be the first appearance of a candidate content, and it may equally be the way an already established value content expresses itself in action now. A person who has long cherished caring for his family and therefore chooses to go home early today has made a particular preference, and that preference is the showing of a standing value content. Preference is not fixed to a single layer, and a preference at a moment is not enough to establish that a content already is a value content, nor enough to establish that it is not yet one. So wanting to get home early, if it is only what one wants now, is not in view here; if it is how the avowed value of caring for one's family expresses itself now, then two values are again in collision.
Another is two people each holding one and standing against each other. That is not a matter of two contents under one bearer; its structure lies elsewhere.
Two further things must hold at once. The two contents must belong to one and the same bearer. And that bearer's first-person ordering of action must already be able to run in this domain of content. Quasi-subjects, and those who have temporarily lost that running, lie on the boundary; they are not developed here, and not being developed here is no judgment that they have no value.
That two contents belong to one person does not mean that no one else is in the situation. Belonging says whose each of the two contents is; it says nothing about who else is present this afternoon.
Section Two · Where Conflict Falls
V61 The Standing of a Content Admits Only of Holding or Not Holding, Not of Amount
That afternoon he will ask himself which of the two matters more.
To say that a content has standing is to ask one thing only: whether it has acquired, within the bearer's own law, the standing that avowal confers. P2 V20 gives just this definition. First-person avowal is a constitutive event, one that gives a candidate content the standing of being first-personally drawable upon, restatable and revisable, and this position cannot be granted or revoked from outside. There is no amount in the definition. As regards the standing that avowal confers, a content either has acquired it or has not; there is no third case, and the two contents here fall in the first class. The predicate does not come in more or less acquired.
A person's identification with some value can be equivocal, can waver, can take years to settle. Why insist that it is only held or not held.
Wavering, intensity, attention and center of gravity each have their own subject, and all are readings on the side of running; standing is not the same thing. What is gradual is the process of entering that standing: some avowals happen in an instant, some form by degrees and settle only after years, and a constitutive event says what has been structurally completed, not that it must fall at a single point in time. What is quantified here are the two contents whose avowal is already complete. And only when the question is whether this content has already become one of his values does the predicate admit of nothing but holding and not holding. None of the real equivocation of experience has been deleted; it simply does not fall on standing.
V62 Conflict Falls on the Joint Realizability of Demands for Action
Standing answers whether this one is his, and the answer is only that it is or is not. Whether what the two demand right now can both be done is another question.
Conflict is the denial of that second question: joint unrealizability. And joint realizability is a property of demands for action, not of standing. One content is his and the other content is his, and there is nothing between those two sentences that could obstruct anything, because holding and holding do not collide. What collides is that this afternoon is only one afternoon.
So conflict does not fall on the side of standing. The reason is not that there is no scale there: even if there were a scale there, two gradations would not become incompatible merely by sharing a table. The reason is that there is nothing there that could be jointly realized.
V63 The Two Standings, By Themselves, Supply No Adjudication
Unless a revision or an exit occurs besides, the two standings the contents already have will not yield a higher and a lower, will not license declaring either void, and least of all will compute, from the sentence that both are my values, which of the two to do this afternoon.
The book and the craft come from the same fourteenth row. Even for someone who still believes the four rows come in higher and lower, there are here no two comparable items: one row, one bearer, both avowed. And the conflict is real, the afternoon is real, and the question of an ordering of action stands there all the same.
The thing he is asking after does not exist at the position he is asking at. He still has to sit down at two o'clock and do one of them.
Section Three · The Sense of Higher and Lower
Sitting in that afternoon, it is hard not to wonder which of the two counts for more. The thought does not come from nowhere. It is reading something; the thing it reads is just not where it takes itself to be.
As the four rows of sources rise through the levels, the dimensions available do increase. A bearer opened out to the fifteenth level does not have the same number of usable dimensions as one opened only to the twelfth. This is a structural matter, and it falls on construction-history and available dimensions. When P1 established richness it set three limits on the word at the same time, and one of them is that there is no amount on the side of standing. More and fewer says what can be used, not what is worth.
The direction upward is real as well. A person may stop at the rows of sources he has already acquired, and taking up no further row is no loss to him; while the part of the structure now in place that it has not exhausted keeps offering a legitimate bridge onward. The bridge gives a condition on direction; it does not do the taking up for him. So this structure only gives the direction in which one may open further; it does not judge which of the two rows already in place weighs more.
There is also an asymmetry, and it has appeared only at sources of higher structural position. When such a source has its conditions of application actually present, and the bearer nonetheless actively shuts down that source's running, this is not a neutral walking-back. P1 V11 cuts this apart from walking-back. What is shut is the running, not the fact that the source-position was once acquired. The asymmetry does not say that the higher one is worth more; it says that the conditions of application of that source are present now, and the bearer has shut it. Nor does P1 assign the act any place in direction-value.
One more thing is easily read as height of structural position, and that is the window for an action. A book not written today can still be written tomorrow; a person not visited today may not be there tomorrow. What is divided here is whether putting something off closes the same opportunity, not whether an act once done can be taken back; the two are different questions. The action-window is something he really does look at; what is misread is the correlation between it and structural position.
And that correlation runs the other way. For a man close to starving, the demand from the lowest row has the tightest window of all, and the harm of missing it is the least reparable of all: once life stops, nothing else needs discussing. If an ordering of action could be computed straight off structural position, this case is the counterexample; and if one says instead that the lower always takes precedence, those ordinary afternoons are the counterexample. Both readings take the windows and the harms present in a situation and read them as gradations on a scale of standing. That the correlation can reverse is itself enough to show that it is not structural.
Someone will then step back and say that height of value varies with the situation. That step calls the scale back again and merely gives it a parameter. What varies with the situation is the ordering of action, not standing. An ordering of action was never a ranking of higher and lower value in the first place, so its varying says nothing about anything varying on the side of standing. A man who writes his book first yesterday and works his craft first today has not, across those two days, moved the standing of either by a hair.
Section Four · Yielding and Exit
V64 Action Cannot Stand in for Constitution
That afternoon he did one and left the other. Where the one he left stands within his own law depends only on whether some further revision or exit has occurred; it is not decided by the leaving itself.
An ordering of action, the result of carrying it out, and the workings of a relation upon him cannot of themselves rewrite the standing of a value content. Avowal, revision and exit are structurally permanent positions, as P3 V39 established: what a relation can do is block the paths to them; it cannot take them away. The most constitution-like thing anything outside can accomplish is a reading: attribution belongs to the side of social recognition, which has no constitutive authority, so nothing has actually been constituted there, only a reading in which constitution is taken to be complete. And where the bearer himself shuts down the running of a source of higher structural position, P4 is explicit: what changes is that row's reachability, not its presence; construction-history cannot be erased; what is shut is the running, not the fact that the row was once acquired.
So yielding is not exit. Not because he refrains from exiting, but because yielding is not the kind of act that can accomplish an exit. Yielding belongs to the ordering of action, exit to constitution, and the two are not on the same side. His not writing the book today, taken by itself, cannot move where that book stands within his own law.
If the standing of a content has genuinely changed, then some further first-person revision or exit has occurred. The change comes from that constitutive act, not from the yielding.
V65 A Yielding Unaccompanied by Revision or Exit Does Not Change the Standing of What Was Yielded
This concerns the act of yielding alone. What becomes of the item set aside has to be asked separately, and there are four different things here, each with its own subject.
Whether it is still avowed by him. P4 V53 answers this: the passing of time does not change it, the turning away of attention does not change it, and a change of standing occurs only through revision or exit.
Whether the demand for action that this situation raised still holds. This goes with the situation. The child has grown up, the appointment has lapsed; the demand can cease to hold while the content remains in his name.
Whether the window for that same action is still open. Some windows do not open again once shut; some are there again next year. This is a matter on the side of action, and it is not called reachability.
Whether new candidates can still surface from that row of sources. This last is reachability in P4 V48's sense; it is read row by row, and it asks whether anything issuing from that row can still surface out of his own running in this domain.
The four answers can differ from one another in pairs: the content still avowed while today's demand no longer holds; the window shut while the row still surfaces new candidates. To gather them into one question about how the item set aside is doing now is to ask about nothing real at all.
V66 Adjudication and Constitutive Acts Are Judged Apart
An adjudication is itself an arrangement on the ordering of action. Whether a constitutive act also occurred within an episode of conflict is not answered by whether the episode was an adjudication; it is settled by the two cuts of the fading: whether a first-person constitutive act occurred, and whether the original avowal terminated.
A person may indeed end a conflict by revising or by exiting. That afternoon he sees it clearly: that craft is no longer one of his own undertakings, and from now on it is a pastime. This is an exit, and it is real, and it was not brought about by the adjudication. The two can occur within one and the same episode of deciding and still be settled each by its own subject.
V67 What This Paper Calls Adjudication Must Hold Within the Bearer's Own Law
When two avowed contents collide, the behaviour actually produced can still be organized by something else. Someone on the phone is pressing him and he goes; his hands move first and habit chooses for him; he is too tired and picks one at random; or he proceeds by a set of practices taken over from elsewhere, practices that have never acquired standing within his own law. All of these can close this afternoon's window, and none of them is thereby what is meant here by adjudication.
What enters first-person practical adjudication is the ordering of action that takes two avowed contents as the two ends of the conflict and is formed by the bearer's own law. P4 V55, in setting the domain for the center of gravity, establishes the same thing, and it holds down the other end at the same time: no reading of the center of gravity does not mean the value is low, nor that the action did not count.
The concrete relation, the boundary, what harm will be done, which of the two can be put off, may all enter as grounds of adjudication, and none of them needs first to become a value content of his. That the child is now unattended is a fact about a relation; that this harm cannot afterwards be made good is a judgment about consequence; both can change how he orders this afternoon, and neither needs to be avowed as a value first.
Given that adjudication must hold within his own law, does which one he chose in the end thereby show which one truly belongs to him. It does not, and the reason is structural: adjudication presupposes the avowals it works from, and therefore cannot turn around and certify them.
At most it shows which avowed contents actually organized the ordering on that occasion. It cannot prove that those avowals have not been colonized, nor say which among them is more truly his own. P3, in establishing self-colonization, sealed this off: an audit reads only whether the positions are open or shut, and does not judge what the bearer truly avows; and to go past those and read the first person is to set up a relation that structurally generates just what introjection requires. What is missing was never permission at the level of type; it is discovery. Nor can the determination be made at the time: taken as carries within it that one has not at this moment seen it to be external, and if a person can see at the time that this is not something issuing from his own sources, the taking-as fails on the spot and the state dissolves with it.
So what that afternoon leaves behind is material that can be looked back on, not a procedure for determining anything on the spot.
V68 A Value Conflict Takes No Direction-Value Reading of Itself
Direction-value appraises a transformation, and both of its directions require two subjects: an act that loosens another's grid and opens new dimensions, or one that locks another's grid and cuts away usable dimensions. Two contents standing against each other under one person are not two subjects at the ends of that standing, so the conflict itself takes no direction-value reading. It is neither benign nor malign; that column has no definition for it.
The concrete action arising out of the conflict is another matter. He fired the kiln that afternoon and it burned all night, and next door no one slept. That action landed on someone else, and whether it cut anything away is read by the criteria of the power theory; this paper does not read it for them. The conflict takes no direction, and the action arising from the conflict takes no direction, are two sentences, and only the first holds.
After that afternoon is over, do not gather several things into one question. What an adjudication gives is only the ordering of action at the time. Whether new candidates can still surface from each row afterwards, and whether concrete contents come and go, are not settled by the adjudication itself; for these to change, one must trace separately to which thing he actually did, to how he did it, to what happened in the world once it was done, or to some further event in running. Unless a revision or an exit has occurred besides, the side of constitution and standing does not move on account of this afternoon: the rows of sources he has acquired are still present, the book and the craft stand where they stood within his own law, and his standing as an end has nothing to do with this afternoon.
The adjudication, the thing he chose, his carrying it out, and what followed in the world, are four things. They have their own times, their own subjects, and their own settlements. To say of them together that an adjudication changed something is to press four things into one.
Section Five · Grounds and the Gap
The two standings the contents already have will not give him which of the two to do this afternoon. He has not therefore sat still; he is looking at other things.
He is looking at who is present this afternoon and what relations he stands in with them. He is looking at what this piece of work will touch and in whom, and where the boundary is met; how that boundary comes to be questioned, and by which mode a dispute is handled, belongs to the rights theory. He is looking at irreversible harm, at what cannot afterwards be made good: the subject here is the harm, not this decision of his, and not whether he may change his mind later. He is looking at whether what he does now can still be taken back, which is retractability, and the subject there is the action. And he is looking at what becomes of the item he set aside: whether that demand for action still holds, whether the window for that same action is still open, whether new candidates can still surface from that row, and whether its standing within his own law has changed.
This last remains four questions, each running by its own domain, and they are not gathered into one. The action-window sits within those four, and it is not the same question as retractability: a thing may be alterable at any point once begun, while its window is only today.
V69 The Five Grounds Have Only Local Priorities of Domain, and No Total
There is no common gradation among them, no weighting, and no table that ranks them all. Each asks a different thing, and what each turns up cannot be cashed into a single place.
Among them there are local priorities of domain, not a chain running from first to last. Only once one knows who is present and what this piece of work touches in whom can the corresponding relations and boundaries be unfolded, and only then can it be read where certain harms fall. Whether what he does can still be taken back is judged from the action itself, without needing to know first who is present. The item set aside is the same: where it stands within his own law turns only on whether a further revision or exit has occurred; the reachability of that row is a reading of his own running; whether the current demand still holds and whether the window is still open each go with their own situation.
There is a structure to the diagnosis. There is no procedure running from the first ground to the fifth in order, and still less an algorithm for adjudicating.
V70 The Five Grounds Cannot Be Closed into an Adjudication by Any Supplementary Rule
He will think that he ought to set himself a rule: when in doubt, take the one that can still be taken back.
Theory can of course propose such a candidate. What it cannot do is exempt that rule from the step required when it is applied on this particular afternoon. P4 V45 gives exactly this: to lay down a further condition for the application of a condition is to lay down something that must itself be applied to the case, so the gap has merely moved to the next line of the list, and the list does not close by growing longer. The gap is not there for some stronger driver to fill; it is where this structure stands open at just this point. The bearer stands there.
Where a rule comes from and what makes it bind him are two questions. A rule's content may have come from a teacher, may have been carried down in a tradition, may have been read in a book, and its provenance does not settle whether it is an external measure; P3, in establishing colonization, set the question of source aside. Whether it is a rule within his own law is settled separately.
Those five are themselves conditions. Complete, they still do not yield which of the two he does this afternoon.
As for irreversibility, it does not get a ground of its own, because it has no single subject. A harm may not be repairable, an action may not be retractable, and the item set aside may meet a window that shuts and does not open again. The three remain in the third, the fourth and the fifth ground respectively, each asking its own question about whether anything can be made good, and they do not combine into a single weight of irreversibility. By the orthogonality of the two axes, it is not read back onto standing either.
What prudence there is to be spoken of in this afternoon's action belongs to the theory of action. Whether any of this ought to be so belongs to the second critique.
Section Six · Between Two People
The man next door has come over. He too has something of his own that he has worked at for years, and it requires him to be up before daylight, while a firing takes the whole night. Two people, each with an undertaking of his own, and only one of them can be had tonight.
V71 A Joint Decision Does Not Generate a Third Position of Value Adjudication
The two can sit down and agree on something: the kiln moves to the middle of the month, and on those days he rises late. That decision is real, and it really does bind both of them.
Agreeing on something has not generated that position, and this does not require first exhausting every possible position. What it binds here is the arrangement of action they have agreed on and the responsibility that follows; it has not thereby acquired the authority to rank either party's value standing. Why each of them is bound is settled separately by consent, by promise, by the moral law, by rights and by institutions. If some other kind of collective subject can hold, it must be shown by its own conditions of constitution; it does not follow from this one joint decision.
What they agreed on is that each one's value belongings stay as they were, while the arrangement of action falls in one place.
V72 A Settlement Cannot Accomplish Either Party's Exit
Suppose what the man next door proposes is this: from now on, stop treating that craft as an undertaking of your own.
The demand can be made, and it may even genuinely make someone think it over again. But whether an avowal has terminated can be accomplished only by that person's own exit. P2 V21 established it: first-person avowal cannot be granted by another and cannot be revoked by another. There is a great deal the outside can do; it can hold down expression, it can block reachability, it can make life impossible to live; and not one of these accomplishes a revocation in the mode of avowal.
The judgment here goes in three steps. Is this only a demand from outside. Has it gone on to seal off his revision and expression, blocking the paths to those positions. Has it gone further still and registered an external end as one of his own values. Only when the third step is complete does colonization settle. If the first step is only a demand, it remains only a demand. If the second has gone on to seal the paths of revision, of expression, or of running, then it falls to coercion, to violation of rights, and to blockage in running, and belongs to the rights theory and the power theory. Only the third reaches the colonization of value.
A settlement can produce severe suppression or violation of rights and still not be the colonization of value. The two do not combine into one.
Two orderings of action, each of them completed by its own bearer, meet in this night; that is not a joint adjudication ranking the two parties' value standing, but two separately formed orderings of action falling into one arrangement. What can be arranged where they meet is each side's own actions, how resources are staggered, who moves aside a little of what is in the way. The outside can also supply supporting conditions: time, things, a somewhat steadier situation. It cannot arrange what candidates will surface from the other's rows of sources, which his own running sustains, and still less can it stand in for his constitution.
That the other is an end, and that from this it follows that he too has ends and values of his own, was established long ago. It comes to bear here for the first time in a concrete way, and coming to bear is not the same as being established: one cannot say in reverse that because I see he has values of his own, he is therefore an end.
Nor can it be said that the two sides' values matter equally. Equally is still two gradations on one scale. What is to be said is something else: the position that thing occupies for him, and the position this thing occupies for me, are positions of the same type within our respective structures, and they do not make up a common amount.
Section Seven · Closing and Downstream
Conflict falls on whether two demands for action can both be met, not on the standing of the two contents. An adjudication arranges only this afternoon's ordering of action; if reachability and concrete contents change afterwards, that is not settled by the adjudication itself, and must be traced separately to the thing he chose, to the carrying out, to what followed, or to some further event in running, and none of these is read back onto standing. Yielding is not exit, because yielding is not the kind of act that can accomplish an exit. If a standing has genuinely changed, some further first-person revision or exit has occurred. A joint decision does not thereby generate a third position of value adjudication; what two people agree on is that each one's value belongings stay as they were, while the arrangement of action falls in one place.
What still belongs to him and was set aside this afternoon, and how it goes on being carried by one and the same life, is handed to the theory of meaning.
How an ordering of action is formed, how it is carried out, how it is looked back on afterwards, and how judgment, habit, hesitation and capacity enter it, are handed whole to the theory of action; this paper does not use them and passes no judgment on them.
Why another's values cannot be exhaustively read, why they cannot be compared by a common external measure, why they cannot be unified into one, and how resonance between two bearers occurs, are handed to the paper on the other.
Acknowledgements
This is the fifth paper in the value theory branch of the SAE (Self-as-an-End) philosophical system, written by the author alone. The drafting used a four-way cross-review method: internal precision audit, ontological-limit and contradiction detection, boundary testing, and structural gatekeeping with pre-publication signature. Four load-bearing points were settled through review. The central line was corrected twice: first from the claim that active shutting and colonization actually reach the side of constitution, to the claim that the line cannot be crossed at all, and then straightened to action cannot stand in for constitution — that is, the workings of a relation have no authority to stand in for constitution, while the bearer's own revision and exit do genuinely change the standing of a content. The two-valuedness of a content's standing was re-anchored from the list of what changes a standing to the modal definition of first-person avowal, making it a consequence of that predicate's own definition rather than something borrowed from the non-ranking of sources. The qualification of adjudication was narrowed from the claim that in conflict only one's own law remains, to a qualifying clause acknowledging that behaviour may be organized by coercion, habit, or an unavowed script and still not constitute adjudication. And the section on joint decision was narrowed from a proof exhausting every possible position to a proof only that a joint decision acquires no authority to rank value standing. The five grounds were likewise aligned item by item with the upstream list through review: retractability and the action-window were given separate subjects, and the window was returned to the four questions about the item set aside rather than added as a sixth ground. This paper continues the standing output of an upstream-paraphrase audit table, comparing each of its restatements against the upstream original; that table is reviewed by the gatekeeper and not audited by the drafter. The four-way review markedly improved the precision and consistency of this paper, for which thanks are due; responsibility for the text is the author's alone.
References
All works below are archived on Zenodo, with Chinese and English versions under the same record. The DOIs cited are concept DOIs, which always point to the latest version; version numbers and access dates are therefore not given. All works are single-authored (Han Qin); collaborators are thanked in the acknowledgements. Works are listed in series order.
Qin, H. (2026). Systems, Emergence and the Human Condition: A Normative Social Theory Centred on the Subject as an End in Itself (SAE Foundational Paper 1) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18528813
Qin, H. (2026). Internal Colonization and the Reconstruction of Subjecthood (SAE Foundational Paper 2) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18666645
Qin, H. (2026). The Three-Layer Two-Dimensional Unified Structure: The Complete Framework of Self-as-an-End (SAE Foundational Paper 3) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18727327
Qin, H. (2026). One's Own Law: An SAE Critique of Ethics and Morality (SAE Foundational Paper A16) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19037566
Qin, H. (2026). General Methodology: The Severing-Constituting Cycle (SAE Methodology) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18842449
Qin, H. (2026). Via Rho (SAE Methodology Paper 00) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19657439
Qin, H. (2026). On the Origin of Power (SAE Power Theory Paper 1) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20370225
Qin, H. (2026). On the Severing of Power (SAE Power Theory Paper 6) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20647463
Qin, H. (2026). On the Thickness and Boundary of Basic Rights (SAE Rights Theory Paper 2) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20769253
Qin, H. (2026). On the Limitation and Violation of Basic Rights (SAE Rights Theory Paper 5) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21212595
Qin, H. (2026). On Rights and Entitlements (SAE Rights Theory, Special Paper) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21314907
Qin, H. (2026). What Value Is Not (SAE Value Theory, Prequel) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21362575
Qin, H. (2026). On the Source of Value (SAE Value Theory Paper 1) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21405207
Qin, H. (2026). On the Occurrence and Recognition of Value (SAE Value Theory Paper 2) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21437038
Qin, H. (2026). On the Colonization of Value (SAE Value Theory Paper 3) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21611154
Qin, H. (2026). On the Dynamics of Value (SAE Value Theory Paper 4) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22050204
Qin, H. (2026). The SAE First Critique [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21439120