Normativity, Law, and the Volitional Axis
Abstract
If law, contract, judgment, and punishment are genuinely legitimate (not merely effective), then man must possess a non-instrumental, irreducible source of authorship that is not exhaustively describable as causal mechanics.
We cannot keep normativity without paying the ontological cost. Either man is more than a causal system, or law is nothing but force wearing moral language.
This paper examines whether the practices of law—judgment, responsibility, contract, punishment—can be coherently grounded within a strictly atheistic and compatibilist framework. By steel-manning the strongest atheist position—namely, that normative agency is a socially constructed, causally realized, reasons-responsive function—we explore whether authorship, answerability, and obligation can survive without a non-instrumental volitional axis in man. The analysis concludes that compatibilism preserves the language of normativity while dissolving its authority, thereby delaying—but not avoiding—the conclusion that either irreducible normative agency exists or legal legitimacy collapses into organized coercion.
1. The Foundational Question: Is There a Volitional Axis?
The foundational question is narrow, unavoidable, and non-theological:
Does man possess a volitional axis—an irreducible capacity for authorship, answerability, and obligation—or are all human actions exhaustively describable as causal events within physical systems?
This is not a debate about consciousness, intelligence, or moral sentiment. It concerns whether normativity—the binding force of “ought,” responsibility, guilt, and obligation—corresponds to anything real in the human person, or whether it is merely a socially useful fiction layered atop causal processes.
Law presupposes more than prediction and control. It presupposes imputability: the capacity to treat actions as authored by persons, not merely as events that occurred within them. If that presupposition is false, the legitimacy of law is called into question.
2. The Atheist–Compatibilist Position (Steel-Manned)
The strongest atheist escape hatch from this challenge is compatibilism. Its core claims can be summarized as follows:
- Human beings are entirely physical, causal systems.
- Some causal systems are reasons-responsive.
- Normativity is not metaphysical; it is an emergent, socially constructed practice.
- Responsibility is assigned where it produces beneficial behavioral outcomes.
- Law and morality track functional properties relevant to coordination, deterrence, and prediction.
- No non-causal will, spirit, or metaphysical freedom is required.
On this view, normativity is effective, not ontological. It works because treating people as if they are responsible improves social outcomes.
This position is granted in full for the purposes of analysis.
3. The Core Reduction: Normativity as Social Optimization
Under compatibilism, normative concepts are functionally redefined:
- Responsibility → sanction sensitivity
- Guilt → conditioning signal
- Obligation → expectation of enforcement
- Judgment → risk assessment
- Justice → system optimization
Norms are tools. They exist because they are useful.
This yields what can be called the social-efficiency / cognitive-predictive / consequence-optimization theory of normativity:
Normative language persists because it stabilizes cooperation, predicts behavior, and reduces enforcement costs.
Crucially, this theory makes no appeal to authorship, desert, or binding obligation. Norms do not bind; they function.
4. Why Reasons-Responsiveness Is Not Authorship
Compatibilism hinges on the notion of reasons-responsiveness. But responsiveness is not authorship.
A thermostat is temperature-responsive.
A control system is error-responsive.
A neural network is reward-responsive.
None of these are authors.
Authorship requires more than sensitivity to inputs. It requires the capacity to:
- bind oneself by commitment,
- be answerable for having done otherwise,
- incur guilt independent of enforcement,
- be judged for ought-violation, not malfunction.
Under strict causation, the agent could not have done otherwise in the same conditions. “Reasons” are merely causal antecedents. The agent is not the origin of action—only its location.
That distinction is fatal to authorship.
5. The Collapse of “Ought”
Compatibilism attempts to preserve “ought” by redefining it:
“You ought to do X” = “X is what our normative system recommends or enforces.”
But legal and contractual “ought” means something stronger:
- binding even if undiscovered,
- binding even if unenforced,
- binding even when disadvantageous.
A norm that binds only because of enforcement is not an obligation; it is a threat. At that point, “ought” collapses into prediction: what will happen if deviation is detected.
Normativity becomes a forecast.
6. Contracts as Coercive Equilibria
Under causal reduction:
- A promise is a brain state.
- Its binding force is social expectation plus enforcement.
- Breach is undesirable only because it disrupts trust equilibria.
There is no fact of having wronged someone—only of having triggered sanctions.
Contracts cease to be covenants and become hostage structures: stable equilibria backed by force. The language of good faith and breach becomes narrative gloss atop coercion.
7. Guilt and Answerability as Ritualized Conditioning
Compatibilism can still use the language of guilt and accountability, but only instrumentally.
Guilt no longer tracks desert.
Answerability no longer tracks truth.
They become rituals:
- signaling mechanisms,
- deterrence tools,
- cohesion narratives.
Calling someone to account has no truth-tracking role if the outcome was causally fixed. It is theater, not judgment.
8. The Disappearance of Legitimacy
Once normativity is reduced to effectiveness:
- law is organized force,
- courts are allocation engines,
- punishment is behavior control,
- legitimacy is propaganda.
The state is not categorically different from a gang—only better optimized.
Compatibilism preserves the syntax of normativity while eliminating its authority. It delays the conclusion but does not escape it.
9. The Delayed Conclusion (Now Exposed)
Compatibilism postpones admitting the following, but cannot avoid it:
Normativity cannot be grounded in causation alone.
If man is entirely causal, then legitimacy collapses into efficiency. If legitimacy is real, then man is not merely causal.
This yields the unavoidable fork:
Normative agency is real
Authorship, obligation, and answerability are irreducible. Man possesses a volitional axis not exhaustively describable by causal mechanics.Normativity is an illusion
Law is force with narratives. Contracts are coercion. Justice is optimization.
There is no third position.
10. Conclusion
The compatibilist escape hatch does not preserve normativity; it dissolves it while retaining its vocabulary. It transforms law from judgment into management and obligation into threat.
Therefore:
Either man is more than a causal system, or law is nothing but force wearing moral language.
This is not a theological claim smuggled into philosophy. It is a logical debt materialism has never paid.
The volitional axis may be denied—but not without forfeiting legitimacy itself.