Whereas a command can simply be followed, an end must forever be interpreted—it’s a legal realist boot stomping on the law forever.

“Ends” are exactly how we can drum up gay marriage from the American constitution: we judge not by the letter of the law, not by what the framers actually wrote, but by their supposed “intentions”, which are invariably our intentions. The constitution can’t simply be followed, it must forever be recast, remade, reinterpreted, it must be a ‘living document’, which is just to say, it must be thrown out. Judging ends and intentions is smuggling in our own, often unwittingly. This is the historical rule, and we can tell because in practice teleology has been followed by rampant atheism and/or the collapse of the social order, both anciently and in the modern world. 

There is no end, no purpose, no “that for the sake of which” as regards the LAW. A law is simply a command, and to adjudicate the purposes of that command is to override it. To question commands on the basis of whether they fulfill their intended ends is to issue your own commands—here is the problem of liberalism in a nutshell. This super-sovereignty, this endless debate over what justice really demands, over what a community is really for, over what white really is—all this is sublimated self-legislation. And to legislate for oneself is to lose the law altogether.

To judge ends and whether the law serves them is to put yourself in the place of the lawgiver. One cannot both be lawgiver and bound by law:

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