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

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.