by Tommaso Biagi
Independent scholar of moral and political philosophy
“I do not rule you, and you do not rule me.”
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The Quiet Contradiction of Every Civilization
Every civilization—flawless, perfect in composition and intention—exists atop a quiet contradiction: We love freedom. We suffer domination.
We justify it as “necessary authority,” “the public order,” “the social contract”. We accept prisons “for safety,” wage labour “for development,” psychiatric coercion “for health”. It’s the same ball game. A minority suffers, the majority lives “better”.
But better for whom? The one screaming in agony and the one smiling in comfort do not feel the sum. No one consciousness feels the totality. The “greater good” is the fiction written by those for whom it works.
And this is my ethical starting point: It does not sum. Suffering does not sum. You cannot subtract someone’s hell from another’s happiness. A tortured life does not go away—it exists, somewhere, unseen—but it exists; it does not get erased. But it’s not like there’s some divine accountant tallying suffering and pleasures for an ethical balance.
Once we accept this, all systems of domination inevitably fail. The State, Capital, the Prison—all exist as coercive systems built upon the idea that some people’s suffering is an acceptable cost of order and profit. This is not a critique of free exchange between equals, but of the economic domination that turns cooperation into servitude.”—all exist based on a calculus that deems a few people’s suffering tolerable for a most incomfortable situation. But if one person’s suffering does not add or subtract out, then no king, no parliamentary body, no cop, no corporate board has the right to make another’s life a living hell “for a good cause”.
And this is where my theory comes from—The Ethics of Limit.
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From Non-Separateness to Non-Ruling
The first thing to concede is— it’s basic—existence apart. We’re separate consciousnesses. I don’t feel your pain; you don’t feel my pleasure.
This isn’t poetic; it’s metaphysical. If our experiences are separate, then there’s no moral arithmetic to combine them. My pleasure cannot “offset” your torture because your torture continues on another plane.
Once we deduce that fact of existence, we get an ethically devastating conclusion: there is no quantity of collective happiness that justifies one intentional hell.
This is the lexical priority of non-suffering: Avoiding hell comes first. No trade-offs. No “necessary evils”. No ethical calculus that posits someone else’s agony as a cost.
When we dismiss this—most prevalently today—we construct the modern State. We institutionalize the perception that some suffering is acceptable if in the majority’s interest. But since the “majority” does not feel that suffering, it does not hold.
To rule—to determine who must suffer—makes no logical sense. One cannot facilitate rule while acknowledging everyone as separate subjects and treating their suffering as a communal resource.
And so, The Non-Ruling Principle emerges:
I do not rule you, and you do not rule me.
Not because I sentimentally care about you, but because it makes the most ethical sense.
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Freedom Requires Shields
If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to say no and live. Thus, freedom requires Shields—the socio-material conditions facilitating refusal without ruination.
Basic income. Basic health care. Basic housing/shelter. Basic time/education—these are not luxuries, they’re preconditions of freedom. Without them, every choice has a requisite subtext of survival necessity.
A worker cannot afford to quit. A prisoner cannot afford to tell their public defender to back off. A mother cannot afford to rest/recover without daycare.
There are no freedoms without Shields—just like there are no opportunities for speech without air—possible in theory but impossible in practice. Any libertarian who cares about agency must welcome this: Freedom requires equal Shields. Without this symmetry, society becomes a prison with open doors but molten ground below it.
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Power Is Refusal
Power is not only parliaments or police. Power exists everywhere someone can say ‘no’ and someone else cannot—with safety.
Power exists within the boss, the bureaucrat, the lover, the teacher—domination exists within asymmetries of risk. The ultimate test of equity is not possession but how much power each party can refuse each other.
When I say “no” to exploitation, am I homeless? When you say “no” to authority, do you survive? Justice does not exist in distribution but in symmetrical denial; justice exists when saying “no” costs everyone the same—and ideally costs no one anything.
This redefines equality—it’s not about possessing goods, but having reciprocal agency to walk away from disaster without making either of us homeless.
Solidarity makes rational sense—not sentimental—because if coercion eats you, it will come for me next. I am only free if you are free too.
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Violence and the Ethics of Defense
Anarchism quakes whenever the possibility of violence emerges: how do you eradicate domination without recreating it? How do you defend without tyranny by any other means?
The Ethics of Limit separates:
• Violence of Domination creates hell—torture, enforced labour, starvation, incarceration
• Violence of Limit interrupts hell—it stops the downsizing of agency already occurred and circumvents the domination already in-process.
The former is coercive; the latter is refusal—the body striking the hand that’s strangling it remembers it’s still moving.
But the violence of Limit must come with regulations:
- It stops when the aggressor stops
- It does not punish/regulate/ shame the aggressor
- It does not create new hells in due process to replace lost old ones.
Then the revolution can be humane; The Ethics of Limit makes coherent sense of resistance: one fights not against persons but a potential that could create tyranny in the first place; the tyrant is not the enemy; tyranny itself is.
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Societies That Cannot Dominate
If domination is incoherent, then politics must concern itself with creating systems that cannot dominate—and I call them Federated Autonomous Zones (FAZs)—systems structured against power itself:
• Bounded Representation – Delegates have imperative mandates and can be recalled at any time
• Mandatory Rotation – No one position can be held long enough to accrue authority
• Horizontal Federalism – Assemblies coordinate without commanding
• Deliberate Slowness – No moral urgency exceeds ethical reflection concerning the Shields upholding freedom.
These are not utopias; they’re extant today in fragmentized forms: worker co-operatives, mutual aid networks, decentralized communities—the Ethics of Limit gives them a common language—a philosophy of non-rule. Their effectiveness in social ethical appeal is secondary; their likelihood to avoid creating hells based on a specific decision is the standard by which a moral society succeeds.
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What Freedom and Justice Mean
The Ethics of Limit is not a new ideological construction; it’s a reflection on every time we mistakenly allow domination under the guise of order. When the politician claims that “some must suffer for progress”, the Ethics of Limit denies that progress isn’t progress at all; when the CEO claims that “we cannot afford justice”, it replies that he cannot afford morality; when the philosopher believes “this is the lesser evil”, it chastises him for recognizing evil as governance as a whole.
Freedom begins where governance ends—not when tyrants topple but when ruling itself is an unthinkable reality—when domination becomes a contradiction in terms—when anti-authoritarian sentiment becomes coherent life! The stateless, non-dominating society is not science fiction; it’s simply the only life possible with common sense! Philosophy owes us more than utopia, or heaven—only this: the prevention of hell!
Freedom begins where common sense negates domination!
