Authorship Without Equilibrium: Deliberative Justice and the Generative Relational Ground of Self-Legislation

Nadia Mazouz's deliberative theory of justice rightly insists that those subject to a judgement of justice must also be among its authors: a fully deliberative theory may not smuggle in an externally xed conception of the good (a Festsetzung) that is never itself brought before those it claims to orient. We take up this commitment and develop it. We rst state our reading of her central concepts; we then re-interpret them within a generative relational framework; we add an explanation her account does not supply; and we draw the result into a positive thesis in practical ethics. The pivot is the gure of the author: when the author and the a ected party coincide, what keeps self legislation from collapsing into self-reference? We argue that this coincidence is coherent only on a speci c ontological footing a generative relational account of value in which authorship is distributed across a relation and self-adjudication is built in as an anti-self deception mechanism. On that footing the deliberative good is not merely a normative requirement but an ontological fact: external legislators were always redundant. We further argue that the dynamical form of such authorship is not a re ective equilibrium a static xed point but a generative spiral carrying a non-trivial accumulated remainder (a positive holonomy). The distinction between genuine and forged deliberation is then the distinction between a cycle that returns value to its participants and one that extracts it. We close by showing that two hard cases illness and the trolley problem inside an intimate relation are unintelligible on the equilibrium picture yet tractable on ours.