Autonomy and Global Coherence: The Categorical Imperative as Meta-Rational Governance

Universalizability is often treated as a local test on maxims. Yet any law that claims authority under autonomy must do more than yield isolated verdicts: it must remain publicly applicable under the conditions of its own use, survive self iteration without heteronomous patching, and scale from local repair to a coherent law-regime. On that basis, the justificatory force of Kant's Categorical Imperative is reconstructed as a structural condition on lawhood rather than as a merely first-order decision procedure. Universalization is therefore internalized as a practice update, since an external test would reintroduce heteronomy at the level of form. Once internalized, a further problem appears: maxims may be repairable patch by patch while still failing to globalize. To address that problem, Rising Sea disciplines ambient repair by minimality, preservation, publicity, and non-vacuity, while Moral Weak Compactness (MWC) turns patchwise repairability into a single public global witness. The resulting upward-directed sequence of repairs defines a coherence horizon: the practice-world in which laws of freedom become jointly compossible under autonomous legislation. That horizon is interpreted as the structural correlate, and regulative practical analogue, of the Good. The Categorical Imperative thus emerges less as a static maxim test than as a governance form for the iterability and global integrability of practical reason.