the second emphasizes the importance and quality of those who are to
be seated, as it were, on the jury that will accept or reject those beings.
Let us now consider the other requirement that comes to light when
one claims to be speaking about values. One cannot simply mean that
a greater number of concerned parties, stakeholders, must be taken
into account. The requirement of consultation by no means exhausts
the content of this second packet, because the concept of value is not
put together any more homogeneously than the concept of fact. To
stop here would amount to limiting value to the simple requirement
of maintaining forms without concern for their content, procedure
without substance. There is something else here that is translated
by the ever-renewed insistence on what “has” to be done, what one
“ought to” be, something about the right order of priorities. This
preoccupation is never well understood, because it is never heardde-
tachedfrom the one that precedes it, norjoinedto the second categori-
cal imperative, with which it nevertheless fits very well.
When we raise the question of values, we are not distancing our-
selves from matters of concern, as if we were suddenly changing ve-
hicles, shifting from cars to stratospheric airplanes. We are asking a
differentquestion of thesamepropositions as before: Candidates for
entry into the common existence, are you compatible with those
which already form our currently defined common world? How are
you going to line up in order of importance? Do these propositions
that come to complicate the fate of collective life in large numbers
form an inhabitable common world, or do they come on the contrary
to disturb it, reduce it, crush it, massacre it, render it unlivable? Can
they be articulated with those which already exist, or do they demand
the abandonment of the old arrangements and combinations? The re-
quirement, as we can see, is to form ahierarchy* among the new enti-
ties and the old, by discovering the relative importance each must be
granted. It is within this hierarchy of values, this axiology, that moral
aptitude has always been recognized, when it had to be decided, for in-
stance, whether to save the child or the mother in a difficult delivery,
or to be determined, as at the Kyoto conference, to what extent the
health of the American economy is more or less important than the
health of the earth’s climate.
We shall formulate this fourth and last requirement in the following
A NEW SEPARATION OF POWERS
107