In discussions of the transition from Kant to Hegel, it is commonplace to characterise it in terms of the move from the individual to the social. In this chapter, I too will be following this pattern in considering Hegel’s solution to the problem of moral obligation.

What I earlier called the standard story concerning the history of Kantian and post-Kantian ethics takes a similar trajectory, in offering a social solution to the Kantian paradox, of the sort proposed by Pippin and Pinkard: because in Hegel the legislating subject is a ‘we’ not an ‘I’, this is supposed to help resolve the problem of emptiness faced by the constructivist account. But it is not clear how much this can help. As one critic has put it: ‘there is no value in a system of mutual constraint which harmonizes the various rational natures’ choosing unless that choosing is itself valuable. For one valueless rational nature to constrain itself out of deference to other valueless rational natures is just one more version of arbitrary self-launching’. The problem thus seems to be no different at the Hegelian social level than it is at the Kantian individual one, so it is hard to see why, if the latter is deemed problematic, the former should be deemed any less so: both seem to be equally empty unless we recognise an antecedent background of value which determines the way in which we take ourselves to be constrained.