Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Thom Brooks, Thom Brooks

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444354232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía moderna

Hegel's Philosophy of Right presents a collection of new essays by leading international philosophers and Hegel scholars that analyze and explore Hegel's key contributions in the areas of ethics, politics, and the law.

• The most comprehensive collection on Hegel's Philosophy of Right available
• Features new essays by leading international Hegel interpreters divided in sections of ethics, politics, and law
• Presents significant new research on Hegel's Philosophy of Right that will set a new standard for future work on the topic

Part I

Ethics

Chapter 1

Consequentialism and Deontology in the Philosophy of Right

Dean Moyar

1

Hegel's philosophy resists our familiar ways of categorizing theories. This resistance presents a challenge for viewing Hegel through a contemporary lens, but it hardly prevents us from asking where his views fit within contemporary debates. Since conceptual distinctions are the way in which we understand the meaning of a position, a theory in which no distinctions could get a grip would be uninteresting and perhaps even unintelligible. Hegel himself appreciates this point very well, and he is among the tradition's most strident critics of the kind of philosophy of identity in which distinctions and oppositions are completely washed out. Though his conceptions of the Absolute Idea and Absolute Spirit do incorporate and thus in some sense overcome fundamental oppositions, Hegel has a place for many of our familiar philosophical distinctions within (and indeed as constitutive of the boundary between) the conceptual levels that characterize each part of his overall system.

In the Philosophy of Right two levels, “Abstract Right” and “Morality,” can be roughly aligned with deontological and consequentialist types of ethical theory. These types line up with central concepts of Hegel's two levels, namely the rights of the person and the idea of the Good. Though in his ultimate view of Ethical Life Hegel does think that the two sides can be integrated, that integration is fully intelligible only once we have appreciated the distinctions that have been drawn earlier in the conceptual development.

Besides illuminating some of the architectonic issues in the Philosophy of Right, this essay has three main goals. First, I develop an account of Hegel's conception of ethical value and its realization. Such an account is needed because, although he occasionally uses the term “value” (Wert) and its cognates, it is quite hard to see how to match up his discussions with the types of “value theory” discussed today. Second, I propose a way to understand Hegel's transitions in the Philosophy of Right in more accessible terms than we get simply by relying on his appeals to his logic and on the (often very sketchy) discussions of practical phenomena. Third, I build toward an account of individual and institutional action that sheds light on Hegel's motivations for structuring Ethical Life in the way that he does. His split between these two types of action preserves a contrast between the deontological and consequentialist approaches, even while highlighting their interdependence and showing why neither approach is adequate on its own.

In its most familiar form, the consequentialist/deontological distinction is a distinction between two ways of assessing actions. On the consequentialist model, actions are assessed in terms of the overall value that is achieved through the action. Typically the criterion is one of maximizing value. The value to be maximized can be conceived as a single metric, such as pleasure, or in pluralistic terms to include many different values. In either case an account of value, or a conception of the Good, is defined first, and the question of which action is right (permissible or impermissible) is answered based on which action maximizes that Good. By contrast, deontological theories aim first and foremost to specify normative principles of permissibility or impermissibility, and do not take achieving value, or bringing about certain states of affairs, as their central concern. Perhaps the most familiar deontological model is a test of the universalization of one's action (or maxim of action) to determine its rightness or wrongness. Another model is a contractualist account of principles that reasonable individuals would agree to, or not reject, in a suitably ideal contractual situation. Such theories can include an account of the Good, and can even require that individuals adopt certain ends, but typically there will be some conception of the right that serves as a constraint on action apart from the calculation of consequences.¹

Kant's moral theory is often taken to be the main representative of deontology in the history of ethics.² Given how deeply Hegel's ethics is informed by his engagement with Kant, it is not surprising that Hegel should have something to say on the nature of the deontology/consequentialism split. The prima facie argument for taking Hegel to be a consequentialist is his constant emphasis on Verwirklichung, actualization. Some of his best-known claims in ethics are directed against conceptions of ethics that are focused on upholding a pure abstract standard of what is right against the messy realization of the Good. The pervasive role of teleology in Hegel's accounts of practical rationality would itself seem to make the case that he is a consequentialist. Yet even a cursory look at the structure of the Philosophy of Right suggests otherwise. The strict universality of Abstract Right comes first, while the Good comes later, and there is little to no mention of calculating or maximizing value. Given that deontologists can also require that one act to realize valuable purposes, and so can share a concern for “actualization,” there is a plausible way to interpret Hegel's ethical thought as fundamentally deontological.

A few words on the common criticisms of the two types of theory will help bring out what is distinctive in the positions, and help clarify the stakes in locating Hegel's thought in reference to these positions. Consequentialists are often accused of not respecting the distinctness of persons. This leads, so the accusation goes, to the willingness of consequentialism to justify unacceptable “means” by invoking the end of maximizing overall value. Consequentialism has a hard time ruling out harming individuals for the sake of the many because it forces us to think of individual rights and moral claims as items that can be traded off against other value considerations. A similar intuition guides the famous attack by Bernard Williams that has come to be known as the “integrity objection” to utilitarianism. Williams stresses the first-personal character of agency, ridiculing the idea that our actions are somehow supposed to channel a system of value that would automatically trump the projects with which we identify in living our individual lives. The objection is that it would be deeply alienating to be forced to obey “when the sums come in from the utility network,” for “we are not agents of the universal satisfaction system, we are not primarily janitors of any system of values” (Smart and Williams 1973: 116, 118). The charges are that in ignoring the separateness of persons, the consequentialist adopts an implausible moral psychology and risks real harm to our sense of agency.

For the consequentialist, one trouble with deontology is that it has to presuppose an account of value in order to secure any real determinacy in its demands. Far from being able to specify rightness independently of value, deontologists must bring in value considerations if their tests of universalization or reasonableness are to produce actual results.³ They cannot simply avoid questions of value, and this leads into a second objection. To distinguish itself from consequentialism, deontology seems to require actions that decrease the overall amount of good in the world. Some distinctive deontological actions make the world a worse place compared to other alternatives, and a requirement to make the world worse seems at least very odd, if not downright irrational. The deontologist has to say that following some rules of right action is simply right, regardless of the consequences, and this does produce some intuitively unwelcome results. A related worry is that such theories can be too agent-oriented, and thus not concerned enough about the world of value beyond the issues that involve the agent's own integrity. The consequentialist will say that too much focus on integrity can lead to moral narcissism, allowing the individual to care about himself, to keep his hands clean, at the expense of other agents. The agent is in effect maximizing consequences for himself alone, for he has put undue weight on his own moral cleanliness.

To better fix the distinction, I will wrap up this section by formulating the differences between the types of theory through their views on two main issues and through their contrasting pairs of intuitions. For the first main issue, I will assume that deontological theories can be expressed in terms of value (even though the Good is not given priority over the Right on such accounts). What then distinguishes the two is that while the deontologist thinks of the agent as honoring or instantiating the value, the consequentialist thinks of the agent as promoting the value.⁴ This contrast comes out most clearly when we think of a short-term violation of a value in order to promote its long-term flourishing. The deontologist might say that we should always honor the right to free speech, whereas the consequentialist might say that it is good to deny the right in the case of neo-Nazis or other groups whose program is to eliminate the right altogether. Sometimes a consequentialist is willing to “dishonor” the value in the short term in order to promote the value in the long term. The consequentialist will be focused on promoting value, while the deontologist on the contrary will stress honoring value and will not be willing to break moral rules, violate moral rights, in order to promote value. Essential to the deontological view is what I call the sufficiency of honoring value thesis, which says that it is always enough for an individual to honor values, and almost never permissible to dishonor the value (or violate the norm) in order to promote that value in the long run. Endorsed by the deontologist, this sufficiency of honoring value thesis is rejected by the consequentialist.

The second issue is trickier, and turns on how we think of value and its optimization as determining what we ought to do. The deontologist (consonant with an integrity theorist like Williams) will find repugnant all talk of objective value determining the status of actions, or of a “value network” (changing only slightly Williams's “utility network”) generating obligation. Taking the first-person stance as central and irreducible, they hold that statements of obligations must be addressed to individual agents and conceived in terms of the free will of individual agents. I call this the agential self-sufficiency claim. Of course it does allow for universal demands to be placed on the individual will, but typically there is a voluntary dimension to taking up or endorsing or legislating those demands such that they are not imposed “from the outside.” Note that on this issue I am not assuming that the deontologist endorses a substantive value theory, for when deontologists stress agential self-sufficiency they often bracket or exclude questions of value. In one way or another consequentialists must reject agential self-sufficiency, and hold that a system or network of value does indeed determine obligation. Some consequentialists prefer to distinguish their position by stressing the agent-neutral quality of the value to be promoted, but given the complexities of the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction,⁵ and given that it is entirely possible to be a consequentialist while endorsing agent-relative value, I find that (even despite its vagueness) the agential self-sufficiency formulation is superior.

For each side there are two main intuitions driving the adoption of the position. On the consequentialist side, there is (1) the intuition that ethical action must serve greater overall value, where “overall” does extend to some degree into the future, and (2) value has objective standing and the world of value can be ordered so that in any case of action there will be some option that is determined as better, objectively, as a function of value. On the deontologist's side, there is (1) the intuition that objective value is too theoretical, too metaphysical even, to guide an agent's willing, and (2) that consequences cannot make an intrinsically wrong action right.

These intuitions can be fit into a single picture by distinguishing between levels, and indeed I will argue that Hegel does so. It is thus worthwhile to sketch here a more familiar attempt to get the intuitions into a single picture, namely rule consequentialism. This theory asserts that individuals should act primarily according to moral rules rather than in order to maximize value, but it also holds that the rules themselves are validated because they maximize consequences. The rule consequentialist can affirm that wrong actions are wrong because of rules, and that an individual's actions are not determined by calculating consequences but by endorsing moral rules. On the other side, the intuitions of the consequentialist are borne out in that the rules are justified by objective value and in that at the overall level consequences have the final say. I will return to rule consequentialism in my closing assessment, and will only note here that there is a strong internal tension in this theory. Agents are supposed to act for rule-based reasons, but those reasons (rules) are supported by other considerations that are not supposed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Ethics
• Part II: Politics
• Part II: Law
• Index