Hegel's theory of moral action, its place in his system and the 'highest' right of the subject

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, July, 2007 by David Rose

Hegel summarizes his theory of moral action in one dense paragraph which sets out the conditions of moral action pertaining to a subject as opposed to action pertaining to a person:

   The expression of the will as subjective or moral is action. Action
   contains the following determinations: ([alpha]) it must be known
   by me in its externality as mine; ([beta]) its essential relation
   to the concept is one of obligation; and ([gamma]) it has an essential
   relation to the will of others (PR [section] 113).

The first determination ([alpha]) is familiar: an event is an action if the agent's intention plays a causal role and the agent is aware of it. The right of knowledge ([alpha]) is the condition that the agent must recognize an event as being produced by him or herself for it to be an action as opposed to an event.

Freedom is understood as freedom-in-itself in 'Abstract right': a person is free if he or she can satisfy personal wants and desires even if these wants are immediate inclinations or blind obedience to the dictates of authority. Yet, even within this sphere, it is possible to distinguish actions from mere events: 'Its utterance in deed with this freedom is as action, in the externality of which it only admits as its own, and allows to be imputed to it, so much as it has consciously willed.' (EPM [section] 503) Only those events admitted as one's own are actions, that is events to which the agent ascribes himself or herself as the author. Such self-ascription is, in the first instance, nothing but the identification of a reason conceived of as an intention in the set of causal conditions necessary for bringing about the event (EPM [section] 504). Thus, the agent can distinguish between deliberately knocking a man off his ladder ('I wanted to because he had ogled my wife') and involuntarily knocking a man off his ladder ('It wasn't my fault, I tripped on the carpet.') (12) The subject is responsible for the occurrence to which the predicate 'mine' can be attached and which is traceable to the subject's intention. If we can reconstruct a desire and belief as an intention that played a casual role in bringing about the event, then we can identify an action (PR [section] 115).

However, Hegel wants subjects to be held responsible for their actions in order to distribute praise and blame as demanded by the retributivist theory of punishment. The first determination of free action on its own is unable to fulfil this goal since it 'fails to cast the agent in his proper role'. (13) Reasons, that is dispositions and beliefs, cause an intention which causes an action, but the agent just does not feature and it is agents we hold responsible and not their beliefs and dispositions. So, reasons must effect something (viz. an agent) in order to become intentions and since reasons do not always produce the same intention in differing agents, something is missing in the causal explanation in order to make it plausible. Of course, one could cite the agents' differing webs of beliefs as the differentiating factor in diverse responses, but it is still possible for an agent to be moved by beliefs despite himself. Cases such as coercion and addiction feature an agent who is in accordance with the standard model ('I believe the robber's gun is loaded and I do not want to die'; 'I am in a state of wanting and I believe that the drug will alleviate this'), but, phenomenologically, these stories do not seem to capture the real nature of human action. (14) It makes intuitive sense to say that 'it was not me' or 'I wasn't acting on my own will' and such statements do have a legal--if not metaphysical--resonance. Coercion and addiction have been problematic for the empiricist model since Hobbes and the only real response is to say that the model of action proposed explains, but does not evaluate the actions of agents in terms of intentions. Evaluation must rest on controversial doctrines such as free-will or responsibility and these concepts play no role in the explanation of action. (15) In other words, there is no way on this simple causal model to distinguish human action or full-blooded action from animal action or non-intentional action. The distinction between animal and human action maps neatly onto the Hegelian person versus subject dichotomy: with the former, the content of the will is given, whereas with the latter the content is chosen and hence is the subject's in the genitive sense. Hegel captures this determination of full-blooded moral action with his second determination ([beta]).