  In this conception, the difficulties of hybrid interpretivism do not arise. Principles have the role of identifying the legally relevant aspects of institutional practice. Principled consistency in this conception therefore consists in consistency in the morally relevant respects of the practice. Principled consistency so understood has no room for prior or residual concern about fidelity to the practice. The pure interpretivist would say that, since it is not the case that we compare moral ideals with some nonmoral code of norms constituted by the content of institutional communication, the question does not arise whether we ought to trade merit for consistency, to weaken our morality to make it compatible with our history. Or whether we should treat some ideal as a ground of obligation just because our institutions have not clearly said anything inconsistent with it. Since we ask in what ways institutional history is morally relevant, the correct answer is determined by moral fact, not a moral approximation or an ideal diluted by history.  Yet the answer does not describe ideal arrangements—those we should want to have, prescinding from institutional history—but the normative significance of the arrangements we do have. So we shouldn’t worry about our morality being too perfect for our history, or not as perfect as our history might let us get away with, or about how to choose between the two. We deploy morality, as is, not to compare it with history but to find what difference history made.