The Veto Maze And You
- Modal Path Ethics has spent months arguing that institutions must remain intelligible, answerable, and open to correction.
- So naturally, I submitted a jurisprudence paper that required around six months of reading Modal Path Ethics to understand.
This may not have been my finest operational path.
The paper in question, Bounded Last Words: Final Authority Without Sovereignty, recently encountered an unsuspecting academic journal. The experience was educational. Publication was declined, and the criticism was substantial.
Tragically, most of it was completely correct.
I have known for some time that this manuscript?
Lawson, Aidan Edward
Not very good.
It does contain an argument worth making, buried beneath too many simultaneous arguments, insufficient engagement with the literature, and several paragraphs apparently written for the benefit of a civilization that has already adopted my terminology.
I had not accounted for the continued existence of the current civilization.
Minor oversight.
The Vocabulary Problem
Some of the language is admittedly ridiculous.
Consider the closed correction stack.
That would be a situation in which an institution controls not just a decision, but also the evidence used to justify it, the procedures for challenging it, and the conditions under which the challenge succeeds.
This is a useful concept. Closed correction stack is also the kind of phrase one might hear shouted during a very unsuccessful NASA launch.
Or take distributed finalities.
The idea here is that different authorities can make binding decisions within limited domains without any single institution acquiring unlimited authority over the whole system.
There is something there. There are also too many syllables.
Then I arrive at veto mazes.
No. Absolutely not.
I'm keeping veto mazes.
A veto maze is an arrangement in which multiple institutions can obstruct action, but none can reliably bring a necessary action to completion.
- Everybody has a brake pedal.
- Nobody has a steering wheel.
That's a veto maze. This term stays.
No institution wears the crown.
Also staying.
An institution can have the final word on a particular decision without possessing the authority to determine the ultimate legitimacy of every other institution.
Operational finality is not sovereignty.
It's the central distinction of the paper. The crown is doing work here.
The incumbent owns the clock and succession standards.
Yeah.
Great line.
Keeping it.
If the people exercising authority can determine when their authority expires, when a replacement becomes legitimate, and what counts as a successful transition, they possess an enormous advantage even without formally claiming permanent power.
And finally, measurements and provenance need preservation.
They do.
I have nothing further to add.
Other phrases are notably much less defensible. Metaphysically permanent probably did not need to be in there.
Plus, all the way back in April, I posted Heidegger, Sorge, and Care, where I whined about Heidegger spending hundreds of pages developing his own philosophical vocabulary. This was a short note that turned into a twenty-two minute tirade.
I thought academic philosophers lived for jargon. It seems apparently they expect you to explain it, too.
The Actual Problem
The problem isn't the use of specialized language.
Specialized language can be valuable. A term earns its place when it names a recurring phenomenon well enough that I no longer need three paragraphs to describe it.
The actual problem here is that I repeatedly used these weird names before establishing the phenomena.
Even worse, I sometimes treated connections between my own concepts as though they could substitute for detailed engagement with the scholarship.
But no. They cannot.
A serious paper must do more than announce that Bodin, Hobbes, constitutional pluralism, and competence-competence are probably relevant here. That thing must actually engage their arguments. It must identify where existing accounts succeed, where they fail, and what the proposed theory adds.
Nor does a case study become an argument by appearing several times. The East Palestine disaster was supposed to help demonstrate why authority, evidence, operational responsibility, and correction cannot always be treated as one institutional possession. But the manuscript needed to demonstrate that connection rather than expecting readers to just sort of reconstruct it.
A reader does not have an obligation to excavate the theory; I have an obligation to present it.
This is especially embarrassing because I already wrote Modal Path Ethics Is Doomed, which explicitly warned against anyone ever accidentally creating a world where everyone has to speak Modal Path Ethics. That's one of the worst possibilities on the map.
But when I submitted this paper, I behaved as though the entire jurisprudence profession had already moved to that very world.
The reviewer has politely declined citizenship.
A Quick Note on Institutional Authorship
This is probably also a good place to finally clarify something else about Modal-Path-Ethics-speak
Occasionally, I have referred to this noble framework as "we."
That "we" is me and my dog.
That's the Modal Path Ethics institution. Just in case anyone was confused about that.
There is no secret deep research department. No sentient AI overlord. No anonymous committee of genuises standing behind me. There is but a man and a dog who periodically exercises authority over this man.
Bigby did not review Bounded Last Words before submission. In retrospect, this was a serious failure of internal governance.
The division of powers is otherwise very sophisticated.
- I retain authority over Modal Path Ethics.
- Bigby retains authority over food, water, sleep, leaving the apartment, and the interruption of Modal Path Ethics.
His decisions are final within their jurisdiction.
No institution wears the crown.
The Last Word.
Occasionally, events have very simple explanations. I am pleased to announce that I have finally discovered one.
The underlying argument needs a thesis a reader can identify without a metal detector, an actual conversation with the jurisprudential literature, and a case study that does something besides keep showing up to remind everybody that a train, in fact, derailed.
It also needs fewer sentences that sound as though a committee of emergency management systems has taken over.
I thanked the editor, of course. A reviewer who takes the trouble to read a manuscript closely and explain its failures has done a great deal for the author.
I will rewrite the Bounded Last Words paper. Some strange terminology will go. Other terms will receive explanations understandable to human people who have not spent the last several months living inside my apartment. The literature will receive slightly more attention than my homemade glossary does.
But the veto mazes stay.