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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Allen W Wood
Allen W Wood*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

It is not surprising that a book entitled Hegel's Ethical Thought (hereafter, “HET”) should attract the attention of Hegelians. But I hope the Hegelians who read HET will forgive me for the fact that they were not its intended audience. My principal aim in the book was to contribute to contemporary discussions of the history of ethics and ethical theory by showing the direct relevance of Hegel's thought to issues that still interest moral philosophers.

This aim does not presuppose (as Pinkard would have it) that philosophy consists of a “menu” of positions from which we are to choose arbitrarily. On the other hand, you can't expect a hearing from an audience of non-Hegelians if you arrogantly assume beforehand that Hegel's philosophy encompasses what is true in all others. (HET does include some attempts to argue that Hegel's ethical theory has such advantages, especially over eudaimonistic and Kantian theories. See HET, Chapter 3, §§ 7-8 and Chapters 8-9.) Hegel's thought is now taken more seriously among English speaking philosophers than at any time during my life, but a major obstacle to this welcome change has been the narrowminded sectarian arrogance often found among his admirers.

The same aim also dictated that I not read Hegel's ethical thought so as to make it dependent on his speculative logic. Here Hegelians must descend from the mists of speculation long enough to face up to some cold, hard facts. First, there is no generally accepted interpretation even of what Hegelian logic is about, not to mention matters of finer detail. Second, on no interpretation does Hegelian speculative logic have any credibility at all for philosophers today.

Type
Symposium on Allen W Wood's Hegel's Ethical Thought
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 13 , Issue 1: number 25 , Spring/Summer 1992 , pp. 34 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1992

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References

1 The greater and lesser logic together are cited over 50 times in the book. (Nor do I mention the Phenomenology of Spirit “only occasionally” - there are over 75 references to it in HET.) Of course, a book on Hegel's ethics is going to be mainly about the Philosophy of Right, whose structure HET generally follows.

2 This will be my way of citing Hegel, , Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed Wood, A (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) by paragraph numberCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Pinkard's recognition of this point is apparently what leads him to say that my Hegel is a “Marx for the bourgeoisie” (though I must confess I have no idea what he thinks that phrase is supposed to mean). Hegel may have been bourgeois, but he hardly represents a revolutionary movement in behalf of the bourgeoisie, and certainly does not see himself as doing so.

4 “Does Hegel Have an Ethics?” Monist 74, No 3 (July, 1991), p 364 Google Scholar.

5 As I argued in HET (p 111), if you avail yourself of a concept of right which has the demand for punishment already built into it (whether you get this concept from ordinary language or somewhere else) then you need to justify the claim that people have rights in this strong sense of right. But in order to do that, you would have to justify the institution of punishment - from scratch. For until you have justified punishing people, you can't expect to justify ascribing rights (in your strong sense) to anyone.

6 However, in HET, p 123, I expressed doubt whether punishment as it presently exists is a rational or cost-effective way of doing this.

7 Hegel, , Philosophie des Rechts: die Vorlesung von 1819/1820, ed Henrich, D (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp 194–196 Google Scholar; see Hegel, , Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed Wood, A (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), § 244, Note 1, pp 453–454 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.