Abstract
Recent years have seen a widespread tendency to pay renewed attention to Hegel’s critique of the moral standpoint. In contemporary practical philosophy it is no longer an uncontested truth that norms or laws can be called ‘moral’ only when they can be shown through an impartial testing procedure – conducted alone or in common – to be universally obligatory or binding. There are various different reasons for the departure from this model of moral normativity, ranging from a focus on the question of moral motivation to a critique of the merely prescriptive character of the obligations derived in this way. What has emerged as the decisive objection is the paradox faced by Kant and his successors that moral self-determination or self-binding presupposes a kind of freedom that can in turn be explained only by recourse to already existing moral norms. 1 Suppose, the argument goes, that we wish to reserve the predicate ‘moral’ for those norms that we can conceive of as ‘freely’ generated through an act of autonomous self-subjection or through an uncoerced consensus. In order to do so, we will sooner or later, but inevitably, have to bring moral norms into play so that we may first establish the agential freedom or the communicative accord that we have been presupposing. This commitment to prior norms is in effect conceded by Kant under the guise of the ‘fact of reason’, whereas discourse ethics tends to obscure it through its seemingly innocuous reference to the need for ‘complementary forms of life’. 2 Both of these forms taken by the commitment point to the same predicament: the general validity of certain moral norms must already be presupposed in order for the procedure of individual or communicative self-determination to be intelligible in the first place. This critique of the groundlessness of a purely constructivist moral theory has led to a resurgence of approaches that set out from an antecedently given horizon of moral norms and rules. The pendulum of historical retrieval whose operation seems to pervade all philosophical research has swung back to theories of morality that seek reconstructively to extract principles and obligations from norms already in existence.
This new orientation brings with it a danger complementary to that of Kantianism, which some have been quick to label ‘neo-Aristotelianism’. To derive all moral norms from a historical context consisting of already accepted practical rules and forms of life, since it is they to which we owe our deliberative freedom, seems inevitably to amount to legitimizing a given moral order. The contrast between social acceptance and moral validity, which is a familiar feature of our everyday life, threatens to completely disappear, since we now lack independent criteria for distinguishing between norms that are merely socially practised and ones that are morally justified. It is not hard to predict that until this charge of conventionalism has been answered, the voices of Kant and his disciples will continue to be a powerful influence in moral philosophy. Despite all the worries about abstract formalism, historically conscious philosophers will continue to return to approaches that set out from the idea that moral norms must be thought of as the results of some test of impartiality, be it individual or communicative, real or merely hypothetical. To find a way of escaping from this unresolved tension, I will attempt to exonerate the contextualist Hegelian account of morality from the charge of mere conventionalism. I will try to show that his concept of ethical life furnishes the author of the Philosophy of Right with a set of historically immanent criteria that allow him to distinguish, within the horizon of a given form of life, between valid norms and merely accepted ones. It will be important to present Hegel’s method in a way that avoids, as far as possible, holding it hostage to his philosophy of spirit, which can hardly serve as an acceptable premise today. Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life will be a viable option for moral philosophy only if it can be translated into an idiom that does not rely on the ontological presupposition of a universally self-realizing spirit. In a first step, I will in this way – post-metaphysically, so to speak – identify the general criteria that Hegel sets out as immanent givens of any ethical form of life (I). In a second step, I am going to examine whether this provides us with clues for discerning a certain directionality of moral development (II).
I
The demands that Hegel places on what he refers to by the umbrella term ‘ethical life’ are the positive results of the various objections he levels against Kant’s moral philosophy. The standpoint of morality, after all, is not simply to be abandoned. Instead it should be rid of its abstractness in such a way as to render intelligible why many past and present kinds of social practice already contain, to varying degrees, some form of the principle of universalization that Kant saw fit to juxtapose to reality as we encounter it. Existing or past social practices therefore qualify as ‘ethical’ by Hegel’s lights only if they enjoin us in an inconspicuous way – in the manner of customs rather than through external imperatives – to respect other persons and accordingly to ‘infringe upon’ our self-love. 3 Thus a neo-Aristotelian view on which each social form of life is normatively endorsed simply for its motivational and ethical power was alien to Hegel from the outset. Throughout his work he was far too entangled in the Kantian conception of moral autonomy, and far too invested in sublating it into the ‘objective spirit’ of institutional reality, to so much as consider reasoning from the mere social acceptance of arbitrary systems of norms to their normative validity. The abstractness, formality and motivational ineffectiveness for which he reproaches Kant’s idea of morality must have been correctively absorbed by his own concept of ‘ethical life’ in a way that of itself yields the criteria by which merely given normative practices can be distinguished from justified ones.
A first requirement that practices must meet if they are to qualify as ethical, and thus to achieve a social sublation or embedding of morality, results from the paradox of moral freedom that I briefly explained at the beginning of my talk. If it is true that insofar as we exercise moral self-determination, we must presuppose the validity of those norms to which we owe the freedom thus exercised, then practices can be candidates for ‘ethical life’ only if their normative structure gives rise to this sort of freedom. Human activity counts as a socially realized form of morality not in virtue of being guided by any rules whatsoever but only in virtue of being guided by normative principles that allow the participants to mutually view each other both as their authors and as their addressees. Hegel is thus faced with the task of articulating a conception of human practices that exhibits this structure of reciprocal empowerment and authorization, and even at quite an early stage of his work he addresses this task by developing his concept of recognition, following Fichte. 4 This concept refers to a special set of social actions that have the following property: those who perform such actions know themselves to be subject to a certain normative obligation, which arises from the right of others to judge their actions by reference to an underlying norm. When we take ourselves to love another person according to a determinate, socially acquired norm, we feel that we are subject to the resulting duties insofar as we accord to the loved one a status that allows him or her to hold our actions to the standards we are presupposing. In the case of formal right we know ourselves to be subject to the relevant norms because we accord all other legal persons the power and the ability to assess our practical interpretation of the obligations mutually accepted by all. Each act of recognition consists in according to one or several other persons the authority to judge the normative aptness of one’s own actions. In offering recognition, the recognizing agent ‘infringes on’ his ‘self-love’ insofar as he now knows himself to be bound by the norm with respect to whose application he has granted the other agent or agents a say. Thus on Hegel’s account a practice deserves the label ‘ethical’ only if a group of persons, which may vary in size, follows a norm to which each among them may in principle appeal to evaluate the actions of one of the other participants. This condition excludes both unilaterally enforced interactions and action from mere routine, and only when the condition is met does social reality exhibit the interplay of self-determination and normative obligation that Kant thought could be understood only as an isolated act of reflection removed from everyday practice. I will here set aside the question whether and to what extent such practices of shared norm following, based on reciprocal recognition, presuppose the existence of collective intentionality. In his doctoral dissertation written in our department, Titus Stahl has gone a long way towards answering this question. 5
I also need to mention here a further component of this initial characterization of ethical practice, which belongs to it no less than the possible presupposition of collective intentionality, and without which Hegel’s whole approach would remain unintelligible. The kind of norm that a given group of agents follows by mutually granting each other the authority to judge their respective individual interpretations and applications of it also determines, at least in outline, in which role or in which aspect of their personality they can come to encounter each other in the first place. To return to Hegel’s paradigmatic example: 6 when participants in a collective practice are guided by the romantic norm of love, they are able in their reciprocal evaluations to offer arguments that are more directly expressive of their emotional states than when they assess each other as members of a legal community. In this latter case, the only admissible considerations are ones in which emotions have already been to some extent neutralized, whereas in the former case agents may object to some proposed application of a norm by citing reasons that simply articulate their emotional attitudes. This dependency of the admissibility of types of reasons on the collectively acknowledged norm leads Hegel to conclude that the act of reciprocal recognition underlying the shared obligations cannot be understood simply as an ascription of deliberative autonomy, but must be thought of as according others this or that particular kind of freedom. 7 He can therefore say, putting things briefly, that in the context of the norm of love participants in a practice recognize each other as beings who have needs, whereas within the horizon of formal right they respect each other as ‘legal personalities’. What these qualitative distinctions mean in detail emerges only once we understand how they are respectively associated with different admissible reasons guiding the evaluation of actions. To recognize somebody as a creature with needs, or more briefly, as a lover, is then simply to accord him or her the authority to evaluate one’s own actions in light of the jointly accepted norm by appealing to reasons that are purely personal and emotionally tinged. As a context of agency founded on mutual recognition, each ethical practice generates its own specific forms of deliberative autonomy and along with this its own specific type of personality, which is relative to the reasons that can be appealed to according to the jointly accepted norm. 8
Hegel was not content, however, merely to demonstrate against Kant’s moral theory that the principle of universalization abstractly emphasized by the latter is always already practised in specific contexts of ethical activity. He also held that the standpoint of morality illicitly opposes duty to inclination and reason to sensibility. A further task for him was therefore to show how it is that within an ethical practice these aspects are not separated to begin with. To this end Hegel tries to outline a second immanent account of all forms of ethical life, which he takes to be no less important than the first one. In his view we can speak of a social embedding or sublation of morality only when the norms validated through our reciprocal recognition provide for an interdependency between our duties and our inclinations.
In opposition to Kant, Hegel insists that whenever the members of a social group have subjected themselves to some moral norm by reciprocally according each other the relevant kind of authority, the norm itself must be reflective of some ethical value that expresses the inclinations and intentions of each of the agents. Only thus is it possible for the collectively accepted obligations not to be experienced as confines or obstacles that stand opposed to an agent’s own purposes, but as ‘determinations towards freedom’, as one student transcript of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of right has it. 9 In Hegel’s view, as long as the norms endorsed through reciprocal self-subjection within a socially practised morality are expressive of ethical purposes that each participant can view as a condition of his or her own self-realization, there is no gulf separating duty and inclination and no opposition between reason and sensibility. In fact one should probably go so far as to say that on Hegel’s view, moral norms are conceptually inseparable from values if only because in the absence of substantive ethical content, those norms would hardly be capable of setting in motion a collective process of reciprocal self-constraint. Therefore Hegel identifies a second immanent criterion of ‘ethical life’ or ethical action: namely that the collectively accepted norms must be such as to display a certain ethical purpose. 10 When normative rules cease to be amalgamated with values, the participants in a practice can no longer conceive of their mutually ascribed obligations as conditions of their respective self-realization, and their shared practice is then no longer an ethical one. It is already through this quite basic conceptual maneuver that Hegel makes the normative validity of any system of norms depend on a historical process that is not under the control of the agents involved in it. Even though their mutual ascriptions of authority qualify them as the authors as well as the addressees of any given norm, it is not within their power to ensure that the norm continues to have ethical resonance as individual inclinations change over time. This raises the question what role history plays for Hegel’s concept of ethical life. Before I turn to that question I will first summarize how he pictures the re-embedding or sublation of morality into the reality of social action.
As we have seen, Hegel wants to retain Kant’s view that moral actions are exercises of a certain sort of voluntary self-constraint or self-subjection. Yet for reasons having to do with his diagnosis of the paradox of moral autonomy, he does not accept that such actions could take place in a noumenal realm independent of any prior normative practice, as though moral norms were first to be generated or created through them. Instead he assumes that human individuals always find themselves already inhabiting a world of socially practised norms, which they can subsequently make their own by according the other participants in the practice the authority to assess their contributions to it. When this sort of recognition is reciprocally granted by all the members of a group governed by a certain norm, this gives rise to the kind of obligations Hegel calls ‘ethical’, 11 which henceforth serve as the foundation of an ethical practice or form of life. But Hegel is enough of a realist to hold that practised norms stand a chance of being vindicated through collective appropriation only if the demands made by them are such that participants can view them as conditions of their own self-realization. Therefore he believes that ethical obligations and ethical spheres of action exist only where the relevant intersubjective norms point to choiceworthy ends or where they reflect generally accepted values.
The two criteria just alluded to lie at the foundation of Hegel’s concept of ethical life. Social norms that are objectively valid, in contrast to ones that merely enjoy de facto acceptance, are distinguished both by the fact that they are appealed to as principles for the reciprocal evaluation of actions within a group and by the fact that they express values affirmed by the members of the group. In Hegel’s view this conception of ethical practice imports back into social reality almost everything that Kant’s idea of ‘morality’ had presented as a separate principle opposed to that reality. Whenever a sphere of ethical life is established – which Hegel holds to be indispensable for the reproduction of society – the curtailing of ‘self-love’ demanded by Kant is integral to everyday reality itself and does not require a search for special motivational sources. Thus for Hegel, the standard model of the social efficacy of morality is the collective appropriation of ethical norms, whose validity is owed to the fact that the members of a group mutually grant each other the authority to evaluate their respective applications of those norms. Yet Hegel is aware that the solution he suggests does not capture all of the implications that Kant intended his idea of moral autonomy to have. For applying the Categorical Imperative is meant to curtail our self-love not just in relation to the members of our particular group but rather in relation to all human beings, and thereby to ensure that we respect them in the way morality requires. It is well known that Hegel’s answer to this challenge is a philosophy of history whose task it is to demonstrate that the historical process as a whole can be understood as a progressive self-realization of spirit, which in its final stages brings forth ethical equivalents of Kantian moral universalism. My main concern in the second part of my talk, to which I will now turn, is not whether Hegel succeeded in presenting the universalist content of Kantian morality as the result of a progress in the consciousness of freedom. That will no longer strike us as plausible today. Instead I will ask whether his standard model of ethical life contains theoretical elements that could allow us to conceive of this sort of progress even without presupposing an objectivist philosophy of history. 12
II
In reconstructing the immanent criteria contained in Hegel’s concept of ethical life, we have encountered two kinds of considerations that require us to take into account historical processes and historical trends. First, we saw that Hegel conceives of morality as socially embedded insofar as it is the result of the collective institution of norms whose individual application and exercise are subject to reciprocal evaluation by the members of a group. Insofar as the participants in any particular form of ethical life grant each other a say in what counts as the adequate realization of a norm, their shared practice becomes subject to a certain historical dynamic, since each member of the collectivity may criticize the actions of the other or others and may call on them to act in a more adequate way. Even if Hegel did not always face up to the implications of this idea, it follows that morality, understood as the totality of the norms accepted in the relevant way, is characterized by an ineradicable element of historical revisability and openness. A second respect in which ethical life turns out to be dependent on historical processes emerges from the observation, made earlier, that Hegel considers the ethical resonance or expressiveness of norms to be a precondition of their successful adoption into ethical practice. In his view, a given socially practised norm will be appropriated by a group in the required way only if the members of the practice can jointly conceive of that norm as desirable for the sake of their self-realization. But individual inclinations and dispositions change over time, and therefore socially habituated ‘ethical’ norms may suddenly lose the motivational power that they owe to the values they embody. Thus in this respect too there is an ineliminable element of historical openness in all ethical life. At any given time, practical rules that until then used to enjoy intersubjective acceptance may cease to be followed and may consequently lose their ‘objective’ validity because they no longer sufficiently reflect the currently prevalent desires, intentions and ends.
Even though Hegel acknowledges and explicitly mentions these two respects in which history enters into the ethical world, he does not make much of them in his presentation of progress in human history. He does at times mention the struggle for recognition as an engine of historical transformations and ameliorations, but generally speaking he relies on the ontological conception of a progressive self-realization of spirit advancing independently of any deliberate efforts on the part of human agents. Given the failure of this sort of objectivist historical teleology the question today is whether the elements of historical change inherent in Hegel’s concept of ethical life may perhaps be sufficient, or at least provide us with some clues, for making the idea of moral progress in history intelligible without presupposing the existence of an anonymous self-realizing spirit. Such a project would amount to an attempt to reverse the trajectory from Kant to Hegel in the philosophy of history while availing oneself of explanatory resources drawn from Hegel’s theory of ethical life rather than from Kant’s anthropology in order to outline a plausible, hypothetically intended conception of progress. 13 In closing, I will limit myself to a few remarks in this respect, which more than anything will reveal how many gaps remain to be filled in explaining such a possible progress in the realm of moral norms.
We saw that on Hegel’s view, merely given, habitually practised norms are transformed into ethical obligations when the participants in the relevant practice mutually accord each other the authority to hold their respective actions to certain fundamental standards. Thus there can be no ethical sphere, no institutionalized domain of moral action, that is not anchored in relations of reciprocal recognition. This individual empowerment gives each participant the right to cite reasons that in light of a collectively shared norm speak against one person’s or several other persons’ particular way of putting that norm into practice. Generally speaking it is therefore part of the everyday exercise of an ethical practice that despite the emergence of shared habits, the application of the standards inherent in the practice remains subject to contestation since there is a continual stream of novel objections and reservations. As in other areas of habitual action, such as ‘writing’ and ‘reading’, the ‘ethos’ of ethical life [die ‘Sitten’ der Sittlichkeit] is not rigid and fixed once and for all but exhibits a certain flexibility and reflective corrigibility that leaves room for revisions in the light of new insights. Within any given ethical sphere, the reasons that may be brought against accustomed ways of following its standards are – on the one hand – relative to the fundamental norm of that sphere; but on the other hand these reasons may also emerge from new discoveries enabled by that fundamental norm. In general, all norms that are capable of being collectively adopted and thus of being elevated to the status of ethical principles – such as the principle of ancientry, the principle of care, or the principle of equality – are not only open enough to permit very different kinds of application, but also serve a cognitive function that makes them comparable to spotlights capable of illuminating ever new circumstances and states of affairs. Now suppose that participants appeal to such reasons in support of objections that over time lead to revisions in the way norms are applied, and thus to revisions in the ethical practice itself. The historical accumulation of these objections will have the effect of creating increasingly narrow constraints that each further critique must meet before it is taken into account. The various innovations in the practice of a given ethical norm, which in essence amount either to an increasing generalization or an increasing differentiation of that norm, are not lost from one generation to the next but gradually add up to yield thresholds that all future arguments offered by the members of the group must be able to cross. So conceived, the history of an ethical sphere is an unplanned learning process kept in motion by a struggle for recognition, since the participants contend for specific ways of applying an institutionalized norm according to their own respective situations and sensibilities. The further this struggle advances – that is to say, the more revisions have already been made to the practice of a given norm – the more restricted is the dialectical space that remains available for novel objections and grievances. 14 In this way the history of an ethical sphere can be thought of as a conflictual process whereby a certain validity surplus initially inherent in every ethical norm is gradually stripped away.
If we wish to remain within the space of normatively mediated conflicts and to maintain that human history is a history of struggles for recognition, we need to offer an explanation of why over time certain ethical norms lose their collective acceptability and are gradually replaced by others that are more open and more universalizable. This brings me to the second point in Hegel where history plays a role in the formation of ethical life. In his theory of ethical life, rather than in his teleological philosophy of history, Hegel argues that each conflict over the application of a norm brings about changes in the very desires and inclinations that first gave rise to that conflict. The struggle itself, we could say, has a socializing effect on those who take part in it, insofar as it forces them to better understand their own motives and thereby enhances the force of individualization. This, for example, is how Hegel views the modern institution of the family, where the adolescent in struggling for the love of others gradually develops motives that finally lead him or her to leave the familiar normative sphere altogether. When this idea of a socializing feedback effect of the struggle for recognition is transposed to larger historical contexts, the implication could be that in the course of a protracted conflict over the adequate realization of a given ethical principle the motives of the parties to this conflict are transformed to a point where they no longer consider the relevant norm to be desirable at all. Due to the pressures of individuation released by the struggle, their aims and inclinations and their conceptions of the good would then have changed to such an extent that they no longer regard the accustomed norm as having any intelligible value. 15 Such an ethically faded or withered norm, over whose correct application the struggles of the past were fought, would then come to be replaced by a norm whose ethical purpose is sufficiently broad to present a foothold for newly emerging goals and ends. In this way the history of ethical life could be thought of as a series of institutionalized norms such that each successive norm exceeds the previous ones with regard to its ethical capacity and its accommodation of the good. It is of course true that on this view, too, agents are not in control of the historical coming and passing of their various inclinations and aspirations. But at least the history of these changing motivations would be mediated by the same struggle for recognition that also propels the moral progress found in the spheres of ethical life.
Footnotes
The following lecture was given on 20 September 2013 at Stony Brook University, New York.