Respect Without Content: A Formal Theory of Moral Recognition and Its Empirical Determinations

Abstract: This article develops a systematic theory of morality grounded in the subject-object separation, arguing that this separation is not a contingent philosophical stance but a transcendental condition for moral discourse itself. Drawing on semiotic arguments from Saussure, Peirce, and Greimas, I demonstrate that any sign system—and thus any meaningful moral language—necessarily presupposes both a subject position capable of distinction and interpretation and an object position toward which meaning is directed. On this foundation, morality is defined as the subject’s intentional respect for the subjectivity that the object theoretically possesses. The moral framework thus constituted is transcendental in structure yet empirical in content: it prescribes only the formal requirement that relations be brought into some kind of consideration, while all substantive moral content is filled by the sedimentation of emotional experience, rational cognition, and volitional practice. It also explains how moral sense can be inverted into a counter-moral sense through the will’s misdirected investment under symbolic violence. This yields a two-tiered system of duties. The a priori duty is purely negative and formal—not to systematically exclude any subject from the possible scope of moral consideration based on morally arbitrary factors. Empirical duties, by contrast, are positive, contingent, asymmetrical, and plastic, governed entirely by the moral content the subject has sedimented through lived experience. The priority of the a priori over the empirical structures the attribution of moral responsibility, the boundaries of communicative rationality, and the analysis of recognition exclusion and moral death. I argue that systemic exclusion, reinforced by Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, can abolish the moral framework locally, rendering the excluded morally dead. This provides the transcendental basis for state legitimacy: the state derives its legitimacy not from promoting any substantive moral vision, but from its unique capacity to dismantle institutionalized exclusion and safeguard the negative liberty of all subjects to remain within the possible scope of moral consideration. The resulting political form is a “Minimal State” redefined as a Minimal Moral State, whose sole normative commitment is the preservation of the transcendental conditions of moral relations themselves. Unlike Nozick’s minimal state, this Minimal Moral State does not protect property rights as side-constraints but only the transcendental conditions of moral recognition. Keywords: moral framework; subject-object separation; sedimentation; negative liberty; counter-moral sense; symbolic violence; minimal moral state