Even for those who have struggled with Hegel long enough to discover that he is neither a positivist nor a communitarian, nor (at the other end of the spectrum) a Platonist, the fact that he also insists upon distinguishing his approach to practical philosophy from Kant's may seem deeply puzzling. After all, the two philosophers share in common the same principal opponents. Both set out to undermine the sceptic's doubts about the possibility of objective practical judgments and requirements; both in addition reject positivist derivations of law, exclusively empiricist accounts of human behaviour, and intuitionist forms of justification. The two philosophers furthermore seem to share the same conception of the conditions of human freedom. For Hegel as well as Kant, a theory of morality and political right devoted to advancing the cause of freedom must require more than just the absence of obstacles preventing the satisfaction of our animal passions. For Hegel as well as Kant, freedom requires in addition the respect of the ends we have as rational natures. We achieve this kind of freedom when our actions are motivated by the legislation of reason and when the social norms which constrain us are norms we can rationally endorse.

Despite these similarities, Hegel tells us in the Philosophy of Right that the conception of freedom he associates with Kant and discusses under the heading of “Moralität” must give way to the more adequate conception of “Sittlichkeit” or “ethical life”. It is clear that Hegel finds unacceptable what he calls the “empty formalism” of Kant's practical philosophy; it is also clear that he thinks that Kant's practical philosophy is “formal” because its supreme law or categorical imperative is an a priori law of reason. But this doesn't yet tell us why, for Hegel, these features of the Kantian approach are objectionable. In my view, we do his critique little justice if we say that it is aimed at a consequence which presumably follows from Kant's preoccupation with providing an a priori foundation for law and morality: namely, the failure to give sufficient moral weight to the empirical particulars which individuate persons and situations and need to be taken into account in the practice of moral assessment. As I shall argue below, the suggestion that Kant's formalism requires us to ignore empirical content in this way is neither plausible as a critique of Kant nor accurate as a representation of what troubles Hegel about Kant. We go more to the heart of the matter, I believe, if we say instead that Hegel is out to challenge the very distinction between the “empirical” and the “pure” or “a priori” so fundamental to both Kant's practical and theoretical philosophy. Hegel's critique of Kant's practical philosophy is an instance of his critique of Kant's idealism more generally, and of the assumptions about reason and nature upon which that idealism rests. Or so I shall argue here.

Several years ago Jürgen Habermas wrote a short answer to the question: “Does Hegel's Critique of Kant apply to Discourse Ethics?” The gist of his short answer is, “no”. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the formalism and abstract universalism of the moral law never even applied to Kant's moral theory in the first place, they also fail to apply to discourse ethics. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the rigorism of the moral law and of Kant's conception of autonomy do hit the mark, discourse ethics successfully draws their sting by reconceiving Kant's moral standpoint along the following lines. 1. Kant wrongly undertakes to establish the moral law as a “fact of reason”: discourse ethics derives the moral standpoint from two premises — one formal, a rationally reconstructed logic of argumentation, and one material, namely our intuitions about how to justify utterances. 2. Kant wrongly contends that we must be able to think of ourselves as both intelligible characters, inhabiting a noumenal world, and as empirical characters inhabiting the world of appearances: discourse ethics allows that in everyday contexts of action and in the context of moral discourse we have one character that has real needs and interests. 3. Kant is also mistaken in arguing that moral autonomy requires human beings to abstract away from their needs and interests and to will universalizable maxims for the sake of their universal form: discourse ethics understands moral autonomy to consist in the free adoption of a standpoint from which conflicts of interest can be impartially regulated, by giving special weight to the satisfaction of universalizable interests. 4. Kant misconceives the categorical imperative as an objective test of universalizability that is applied by individual wills in isolation: discourse ethics reconceives the moral universalism as an ideal of intersubjective agreement of participants in discourse. On the differences between the principles of discourse ethics and Kant's categorical imperative Habermas is wont to cite McCarthy's summary of his — Habermas' — position: “Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm” (MCCA 67).

My aim in this paper is to investigate Hegel's claim that ethical life (Sittlichkeit) does not simply negate but rather incorporates, or preserves, crucial elements of the Enlightenment conception of moral subjectivity that Hegel associates with the standpoint of Morality (Moralität). More specifically, the part of Hegel's view I want to examine here is his claim that individual moral conscience (Gewissen) has its place within the rational social order as depicted in Part III of The Philosophy of Right, “Ethical Life”. There is a widespread perception among Hegel's liberal critics that his vision of the rational social order allows no place for the genuine expression of moral conscience. This is the view expressed, for example, in Ernst Tugendhat's recent charge that Hegel's view excludes the possibility of “adopting a rational perspective” on a society's prevailing norms and practices’: “Hegel does not allow for the possibility of a responsible, critical relation to the … state. Instead he tells us that existing laws have an absolute authority. The independent conscience of the individual must disappear, and trust takes the place of reflection. This is what Hegel means by the Aufhebung of morality into ethical life”.

The Philosophy of Right is not usually taken to contain a prescriptive ethics. Yet to establish as much regarding the elementary relations of the economy is the task of this essay. The project is cast into three parts. It begins with Hegel's account in the ‘Introduction’ of the free self prior to the exposition of the modes of just conduct or philosophy of right proper. It is an account of freedom not yet realized — without any particular content. Yet, the point is established that the philosophy of justice will be based on a twofold notion of self-determination. Most of the ‘Introduction’ concerns the argument that freedom or valid conduct has to do with pure self-determination, the self determining itself. The claim is also made that philosophy establishes its own legitimacy through its conceptual self-determination. Part two deals with the question of how freedom can be realized in civil society where the individual's governing orientation is particularity. The characteristic features of civil society do not encourage the expectation that freedom can be realized there. One, particularity itself appears to be rooted in a natural necessity which seems to preclude any possibility of freedom. Two, the inherently social character of civil society seems to rule out the exercise of a freedom that is about the self's relation to itself in self-determination. Three, the pursuit of particularity characteristic of civil society seems inherently antisocial and thus not a suitable mode of conduct for ethics. However, the argument will be made that the theory can conceive of the relations of particularity in a way that makes the free self inherently social and particularity both social and free from natural determinations.

The topic of forgiveness and reconciliation is one of the areas in Hegel's philosophy in which an uneasy tension between philosophy and religion, logic and existence, is most obvious. My goal in this paper is to illuminate Hegel's discussion of forgiveness and reconciliation in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion by examining his treatment of the same topic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Previous commentators have discussed the political and social aspects of reconciliation, but paid little attention to its religious aspects. Similarly, commentators who have addressed the psychological and social aspects of reconciliation in the Phenomenology, have too seldom turned their attention to Hegel's full discussion of the religious aspect of reconciliation in the Lectures. In bringing these two texts together, I hope to make a contribution to the larger project of showing the relevance of the Phenomenology to Hegel's later works. Finally, I will suggest some limitations in Hegel's analysis of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Part III of the Lectures delineates three levels of rupture and reconciliation: within the individual consciousness, among individuals of the community, and between the individual and God (215-251 ). This last level of reconciliation is the religious aspect and presupposes the earlier levels. To help understand the individual's reconciliation within himself and with others, which will be my main area of concern in this paper, we will now look at the relevant passage of Phenomenology of Spirit.

J. M. E. McTaggart's interpretation of Hegel's theory of punishment has a strange double life. On the one hand it is considered important by philosophers of punishment for setting forth an novel and suggestive account of what we are, or ought to be, doing when we punish wrongdoers. What such writers are interested in is the prospect that a “right to be punished” gives of resuscitating retributivism, giving a non-consequentialist account of punishment which is not grounded in vengeance-seeking or an ineffable intuition of justice. McTaggart's view seems to hold out the promise of such a novel retributivism.

On the other hand, Hegel scholars themselves seem to regard McTaggart's account as dead in the water as an interpretation of Hegel's remarks in the Philosophy of Right (from which his view is clearly drawn). At first sight, after all, there seems to be little textual evidence to support his reading. And two more recent accounts of Hegel's remarks on punishment have nothing to say about one of the central theses for which McTaggart argues, the one which I defend as an interpretation of Hegel here. The question for those sceptical of his reading remains how someone like McTaggart could have fallen prey to such a mis-interpretation; but perhaps it can just be explained as yet another case of a thinker reading his own views into Hegel rather than reading what is there. Perhaps McTaggart was over-zealous in putting forward his own thoughts and overlooked his scholarly duties.