So it does, and in a variety of ways.

So it does, and in a variety of ways. The accounts of morality and its history given in the Phenomenology of Mind and in the Philosophy of Right are by no means identical. Moreover, in the Phenomenology at least, Hegel covers the same ground more than once in different ways.

What I shall do, therefore, is to try to outline Hegel’s general view of the history of morality and of the role of moral philosophy in that history; then look at what is illuminating in Hegel’s changes of mind; and finally, criticize Hegel’s own solution. Hegel envisages the most elementary forms of human life as essentially unreflective. The individual is absorbed into a closed society in which he acts out his customary role. In such a society the questions, What shall I do? how shall I live?

cannot arise. It is as I become conscious through my relationships with other people of my status as a person, apart from the roles which I fill, that room is made for these questions. As society becomes more complex, as possibilities of alternative ways of life grow, so choices multiply. But in choosing I cannot discount the criteria of contemporary social practice.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, like Greek sophists before them, write as if the individual with his psychologically determined passions approaches social life with ends and aims already given; for Hegel this is a profound illusion. What passions and what ends the individual has and can have are a matter of the kind of social structure in which the individual finds himself.

Desires are elicited and specified by the objects presented to them; the objects of desire, and especially of desires to live in one way rather than another, cannot be the same in all societies. But it is not necessarily the case that the desires elicited by a particular form of social life will find satisfaction within that form. The working out of the ends of contemporary practice may, in fact, destroy the very form of life which brought the desire for those ends into being.

The reflective criticism of both ends and means may have unintended consequences. In the light of these considerations Hegel pictures developed society in terms of a succession of forms of life, each of which, by a natural transition, is transformed into its successor. In the Phenomenology there is no suggestion-there is, indeed, a denial -that actual historical periods must rigorously follow out this pattern.