The Ancestral Principle

If authority is epistemically prior to reason, what gives authority its binding form? Authority is authorship; obligation arises from origin. A command binds because it issues from that which made, constituted, founded, or transmitted the form of life within which one stands.

What makes X authoritative over Y is that X stands to Y as father to child, as source to derivative, as begetter to begotten. To ask "why obey tradition?" is no different from asking "why obey your father?" The answer is given in a relation: because he is your father.

The ancestral principle is a rule for adjudication. When two commands conflict, priority goes to the one that is more ancestral and more properly one's own. The alternative is to make oneself the judge of authority, which is to destroy authority by relocating it in the self.

A command persists through neglect, interruption, and forgetting. Its authority cannot depend on uninterrupted obedience, because that would make obedience the source of authority, collapsing law into the very will it is meant to bind. Interruption is irrelevant to legitimacy.