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Reason and morality
In this way, Hegel makes the transition from action seen as self-expression, to moral action, undertaken to fulfil ethical purposes. At first, consciousness sees no great difficulty in setting out to act morally, for it makes the assumption that each individual can see for himself what is right, and behave accordingly: 'It expresses the existence of the law within itself as follows: sound Reason knows immediately what is right and good. Just as it knows the law immediately, so too the law is valid for it immediately, as it says directly: “this is right and good” – and, moreover, this particular law. The laws are determinate; the law is the “matter in hand” itself filled with significant content' . Hegel then suggests that consciousness has this confidence because it thinks it can decide how to act in a particular situation by simply consulting certain self-evident and universally valid moral rules which will tell it immediately how to behave, rules like 'Everyone ought to tell the truth', or 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', where it appears that these imperatives in themselves provide guidance for action. Hegel argues that this is not the case, however, because whether I should act in a certain way in a certain situation is not something I can determine immediately by consulting rules of this sort: for in fact they require further qualification if they are to provide us with proper guidance, and this qualification makes determining the right action harder than Reason first thought, so that in particular cases these rules may not help us at all. For example, with regard to the rule 'Everyone ought to tell the truth', Hegel argues that this cannot mean 'Everyone ought to say whatever they believe', because people may believe things that are false; but if we modify the rule to 'Everyone ought to tell the truth if what they say is true', then as my beliefs are clearly fallible, I cannot be sure in a particular situation whether I should say anything or not. And, with regard to the rule 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', Hegel argues that this only leads to a good action if I love my neighbour 'intelligently', that is, do things for him that are in his real interests, not just in his interests as I happen to see them, because then my action is not much more than a self-indulgence on my part. But then, as before, the problem is that in a particular case my neighbour's real interests will in fact be hard to determine, so that the rule when properly developed does not really provide me with much guidance, and looks rather empty. Thus, as these cases show, the idea that determining how to act rightly just requires nothing more than grasping a few self-evident moral rules has turned out to be problematic.
Consciousness continues to believe that the individualistic stance of Reason can be made to work, however, not because various moral rules make the right action easy to determine, but because the individual does not have to rely on these rules, but can instead apply a procedural 'test' to his actions to make sure his actions are ethically justified; that test is the Kantian test of universalizability, where the subject asks himself if the maxim of his action can be conceived of or willed as a universal law on which everyone acted. In the subsection on 'Reason as Testing Laws', Hegel critically discusses this attempt by Reason to provide the individual with a way of determining the content of morality, and so offers a critique of this part of Kantian ethics. However, while Hegel's well-known attack on the 'formalism' and 'emptiness' of the Kantian position has convinced some it has left others cold; moreover, the exact nature of the attack is not easy to pin down, particularly when the discussion in the Phenomenology is set alongside other treatments of the issue in the 'Natural Law' essay and the Philosophy of Right. The most straightforward way of taking Hegel's critique is to see him as claiming that the universalizability test itself is empty, in the sense that every maxim can pass the test. Thus, for example, while Kant argued that making lying promises or obtaining property by stealing from others cannot be universalized (because the practice of promise-keeping relies on participants keeping their word, and the institution of property depends on participants respecting the rules of ownership), on this view Hegel is arguing that the maxim of these actions can be universalized without difficulty. However, Hegel never actually discusses the issue in this way: that is, he never argues that (for example) promising could continue to function in a situation where everyone lied, or that property could continue to exist in a world where everyone stole from everyone else, so that it seems that this way of taking Hegel's critique is too simplistic. Nonetheless, even if Hegel is interpreted as allowing that some maxims cannot be universalized, and thus as accepting that in this sense the test is not empty, he can also be interpreted as saying that this in itself is insufficient in helping us determine how we should behave: for we also need to be told why it would be wrong to act in such a way as to undermine the institution in question in this manner, and no formal test (of contradiction) can tell us that. Thus (to use a Kantian example), while Hegel does not consider whether or not the keeping of deposits would undermine the institution of property, he does consider whether Kant can give any reason to show that a world without property would fail any sort of formal test, which perhaps suggests that he thought this further issue required some sort of answer. (Solomon 'All that Kant's criterion shows, at most, is that a certain institution, which a given maxim presupposes, could not be sustained, given a certain generalized principle. But surely the question of stealing depends on our evaluation of the institution of private property . . .') It is indeed the case that Hegel's discussion of property in the Phenomenology and elsewhere seems focused primarily on the difficulty of using a formal test of non-contradiction to tell us whether the institution of property is to be preferred to that of non-property, rather than on whether a maxim like deposit-keeping can be universalized. Hegel claims that if the test of non-contradiction we apply is to see whether there is some sort of dialectical tension in the position, then both property and non-property are contradictory: for, a system of common ownership involves a system of distribution according to need (in which case some get more than others) and distribution according to equality (in which case all get the same), while a system of private property involves a tension between a thing belonging to an individual (in which case it doesn't matter how their possession of it affects others) and that individual feeling they are just one amongst many individuals (in which case it does). On the other hand, Hegel says, there is nothing logically contradictory in either system; so this kind of testing is inconclusive when asked to deliver a verdict on either institution:
Consequently, property is just as much an all-round contradiction as non-property; each contains within it these two opposed, self-contradictory moments of individuality and universality. But each of these determinatenesses when thought of as simple, as property or non-property, without explicating them further, is as simple as the other, i.e. is not self-contradictory. The criterion of law which Reason possesses within itself fits every case equally well, and is thus in fact no criterion at all.
Now, although Hegel may be right that a test of non-contradiction is inconclusive when it comes to institutions, it is not clear that the switch from testing maxims of actions to testing institutions is one the Kantian need feel obliged to make. Commentators on Hegel have suggested that this switch is required, because otherwise it is not clear why the contradiction test applied to maxims reveals anything of ethical significance: for, even if making lying promises undermines the institution of promise-keeping (for example), unless promising is shown to be a morally sound institution, then this would not show would collapse without possibility of revival. But it does not follow that a world without promises would be morally inferior to the existing world . . . Hegel is quite correct in arguing that it is a presupposition of Kant's argument that it is right to keep promises: the very conclusion his appeal to the universalization test is supposed to justify.' 'To show that a maxim contradicts an institution it presupposes shows nothing about the moral standing of the maxim until we know something, by some other means, about the moral standing of the institution.') However, the Kantian may respond to this argument, by claiming that it underestimates and misidentifies the moral force of the universalizability test as applied to maxims: for this test shows that if the agent acts as he is planning to do (by making a false promise or whatever) he would be free-riding, by acting in a way that can only succeed if others do not do the same, and it is this that shows his action to be wrong, in a way that is independent of our ethical evaluation of the institution on which his action relies. (Korsgaard 'What the test shows to be forbidden are just those actions whose efficacy in achieving their purposes depends upon their being exceptional.') Or, on another interpretation, the test shows that my action can only succeed if I use the fact that others participate in the institution in order to control their behaviour. (For a clear account of the difference between these readings, and their respective merits, see Herman) Either way, both readings show why failing the universalizability test in itself has moral significance, so it is not clear why the moral standing of the institution relevant to the maxim (property, promise-keeping, or whatever) needs to be brought in to settle this. It appears therefore that these objections to the formalism of 'Reason as testing laws' do not carry much weight. Nonetheless, Hegel's discussion does raise an important question-mark over what exactly the Kantian moralist can expect to achieve. For, on the one hand, if the test of non-contradiction is purely formal, it is not clear that failing the test reveals anything of moral relevance: why, if a maxim fails the test, does this show that acting on the maxim would be wrong? If, on the other hand, the test is seen as a way in which the agent can discover whether or not by acting in a certain manner they would be free-riding, then it is not clear that the test 'compares a content with itself', as it then presupposes some moral content as part of the test (namely, the wrongness of free-riding, or of manipulating others), rather than determining what is right and wrong through the test, and so is no longer purely formal in this sense. The way Hegel concludes this section, and makes the transition from Kantian morality to Greek ethical life, suggests that he sees the Kantian as facing a dilemma: either the Kantian treats the universalizability test as purely formal (but then why should passing this test matter from a moral perspective?), or he accepts that the test has some moral content (in which case he has not shown that reason can distinguish between right and wrong actions on a purely formal basis). The Kantian can thus either threaten the authority of morality itself by trying to determine what is moral by using a purely formal (morally empty) test, or he can accept that the test is not purely formal but itself part of morality, in which case we have not in fact got beyond a kind of moral foundationalism, which just takes certain moral principles (concerning the wrongness of free-riding, for example) as given. From this, Hegel therefore makes a transition from the Kantian standpoint, back to the ethical life of the Greeks:2 for, according to Hegel, they were simply prepared to accept the foundational nature of moral principles in precisely this manner, without any attempt to 'ground' or 'derive' them in some extra-moral test. (As ever, of course, the Kantian can reply that this was never their intention in proposing the Formula of the Universal Law; but then the Hegelian response might be, that in that case the Kantian cannot claim to have added much to the way in which we ordinarily determine the rightness or wrongness of our actions, by assessing them in terms of substantive moral principles.) Hegel therefore ends the section by returning to the standpoint of the Greeks, who would have seen this whole idea of testing actions using certain formal (non-moral) criteria, as an anathema. In contrast to the position of 'Reason as testing laws', Hegel characterizes the Greek position as follows:
The relationship of self-consciousness to them [the laws] is to them. Thus, Sophocles' Antigone acknowledges them as the unwritten and infallible law of the gods. They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where they came from, none of us can tell. They are. If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being, and regard them as something which, for me, is perhaps true, and also is perhaps not true. Ethical disposition consists just in sticking steadfastly to what is right, and abstaining from all attempts to move or shake it, or derive it. Suppose something has been entrusted to me; it is the property of someone else and I acknowledge this because it is so, and I keep myself unfalteringly in this relationship . . . It is not, therefore, because I find something is not self-contradictory that it is right; on the contrary, it is right because it is what is right. That something is the property of another, this is fundamental; I have not to argue about it, or hunt around for or entertain thoughts, connections, aspects, of various kinds; I have to think neither of making laws nor of testing them.
Hegel thus uses the failure of the Kantian standpoint (as he conceives it) to take consciousness back to the ethical life of the Greeks, where consciousness did not see itself qua individual as having the capacity to 'step back' from the moral world and ground it in some way: rather, it was simply immersed in that world, living unreflectively within its teachings and precepts. At this point, therefore, consciousness finds itself ready to 'put its merely individual aspect behind it', and so move from Reason to Spirit. Here consciousness is prepared to recognize that perhaps something fundamental was lost as well as gained in the transition from the outlook of the ancient to the outlook of the modern world, and that this has resulted in the one-sidedness of Reason. Consciousness therefore turns from a consideration of Kantian morality to an investigation of Greek ethical life.
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