One's Own Law: The SAE Critique of Ethics and Morality / 自己的法:SAE对伦理与道德的批判

Full bilingual text and framework available at self-as-an-end.net This paper argues that morality and ethics are fundamentally distinct categories: morality is an internal law endogenous to each subject's dimensional-degree (DD) level within the Self-as-an-End (SAE) framework, valid only for oneself and not extrapolable — not even to others at the same level. Ethics, by contrast, is the structurally illegitimate operation of disguising one's internal law as a demand upon others. The paper diagnoses the three major Western ethical traditions (Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics) as moral phenomena at different DD levels, each genuine at its own level but false when claiming universality. It proposes the concept of the ontological imperative (ontologischer Imperativ) — a moral law that is not obeyed but embodied, arising from the subject's structure of being rather than from rational legislation. The paper introduces moral resonance as the legitimate mode of inter-subject moral relation, distinguishing it from moral blackmail. It concludes with a single termination lemma ("cannot not legislate only for oneself") and functions as SAE's anti-ethics chapter: a bulkhead preventing morality from being extrapolated into ethics. Chinese authoritative, English rewrite. Keywords Self-as-an-End, SAE, ethics critique, morality, ontological imperative, dimensional degree, DD, remainder, moral resonance, self-legislation, autonomy, Kant, Nietzsche, anti-ethics, colonization, philosophy of morality Language Chinese (authoritative) / English (rewrite) License CC BY 4.0 Access Open Related Identifiers DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18528813 (isPartOf) — SAE Paper 1 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18666645 (isPartOf) — SAE Paper 2 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18727327 (isPartOf) — SAE Paper 3