Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 21
The Three Stages
Morality develops through three stages, in each of which the will discovers itself as relating to itself at a deeper level. Within each of these stages, a historical differentiation can be marked, showing that even the determinations of the stages themselves are not timeless quantities but were worked out in a historical process.
Intent and Guilt: The first stage concerns the deed as what the will actually willed. Hegel’s point is one of delimitation: an action belongs to the will only insofar as the will intended it — as what it did consciously and with knowledge of its immediate consequences. What goes beyond this intending — more remote consequences that the agent could not have foreseen — is indeed connected with the deed, but is not attributable to the will in the same way. From this follows the modern concept of guilt: guilt attaches to the will only where the will also wanted what it did and could have known its consequences. Modern criminal law rests on this determination — intent, negligence, chance are different degrees of how a consequence belongs to the will.
This delimitation was won historically. It has at the same time a limit, which Hegel names in the Remark to § 120: Where someone cannot relate to his own condition, imputation no longer hangs on intent but on that capacity itself. What drops out there is developed by Die fühlende Seele: die Aufgabe und ihre zwei Verfehlungen, on the deranged soul. [KF] In archaic legal orders the deed was imputable as an objective occurrence, without regard to the inner relation of the will to it — whoever caused a killing was responsible, even if it was unintended (this is the logic of the blood feud and of the early laws of compensation). Roman law developed the first differentiations: dolus (intent) and culpa (negligence) were distinguished, with different legal consequences. In the Christian Middle Ages, another differentiation is added: inner guilt before God — Augustine and later scholasticism emphasize that it is not the deed as such but the inner consent to sin that makes a person guilty. This is an internalization of the concept of guilt that prepares the later modern criminal law without being identical to it. Only in the modern era — Pufendorf, Wolff, then the Kantian school — is intent clearly defined as a legal construct and decoupled from the ecclesiastical concept of sin; the modern triad of intent/negligence/chance is an achievement of modern legal thought, to which Hegel connects.
Intention and Welfare: On the second stage, the will becomes deeper with respect to itself. The deed is not a punctual event but has a further end — an intention toward which it happens. Intent had grasped the deed in its immediacy; intention grasps it as a means to an end that goes beyond it. Whoever works does not merely will the motions of working; he wills the wage, his livelihood, his own welfare, honor, recognition. The deed is for something. This intention, this striving for one’s own welfare, is legitimate within morality — the individual will has a right to pursue its own welfare, and it would be wrong to dismiss this as merely egoistic. Whoever, as a subject, pursued only the ends of others and denied his own welfare would not be a moral subject but the tool of others’ ends.
Here too a brief historical line can be drawn. In Aristotle, eudaimonia — the good life, happiness — is the universal end toward which all activities are directed; it is not individual welfare in the modern sense, but the successful life within the polis, embedded in virtue and community. The Stoics opposed this by holding that one’s own welfare is an indifferent external factor and that only virtue as such counts — a position that tends to deny the individual’s right to his own welfare. In the Christian Middle Ages, welfare is referred to the eternal salvation of the soul; worldly welfare is at best a preliminary stage or a temptation. Only the modern era — the English moral philosophers, then utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) — established the welfare of the individual as a legitimate, independent end; the subject’s right to its own happiness becomes a self-evident presupposition in the Enlightenment. Hegel’s recognition of the right to one’s own welfare stands in this tradition; it is an achievement of modern subjectivity, not a timeless right. Its genesis is modern; its validity reaches further, because without this recognition the moral subject would not be taken seriously.
The Good and Conscience: On the third stage, the will falls into the next contradiction. One’s own welfare, as merely particular, is not a standard for itself; different subjects pursue different forms of welfare, and their pursuits can come into conflict. The will that reflects recognizes that above its own welfare stands something universal: the good as such, which is not merely its own but that of all.
Here Hegel determines the relation of welfare and right with a formula that carries everything that follows: “welfare is not a good without right. Likewise, right is not the good without welfare” (§ 130). Neither of the two is by itself the standard. A right that disregards the welfare of those affected is as little the good as a welfare that sets itself above right — Hegel adds in parentheses the old formula, that fiat iustitia should not have pereat mundus as its consequence.
Equally important is the warning he places before the matter. The welfare of all is at first a “complete but wholly empty determination” (§ 125). As long as the universal is not further determined, absolutely anything can be accommodated under the welfare of all. And § 126 draws the consequence: an intention of one’s own or another’s welfare cannot “justify an unjust action” — Hegel calls the opposite one of the “corrupt maxims of our time.”
Here Hegel already lays down what every appeal to the common good must be tested against: it is indispensable as a standard and empty as long as it is not determined in content. Whoever wants to determine it in content must state which needs and which affected parties he means — and he cannot invoke good intentions if he breaks the law for their sake. [KF] Conscience is the instance in which this relation to the universal becomes present within the individual will — the point at which the subject orients itself no longer merely by its own welfare but by the good as such. This is the highest form of morality: a will that relates to the universal without being compelled to do so by an external authority.
Here the historical line can be drawn most clearly. In the ancient world there is no concept of conscience in the modern sense — the Stoics’ syneidesis and Cicero’s conscientia designate a co-knowing with oneself, but not an independent moral instance that could raise its own voice against the prevailing order. Only Christianity develops conscience as the voice of God within the interior of the human being — in Paul (“their conscience bears witness”) and especially in Augustine, an interiority appears that can become critical toward the subject itself. But here conscience is still theonomous: it is the receiving organ of a divine truth, not the source of the norm. The Reformation radicalizes the position of conscience — Luther’s “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” is the founding formula of modern conscientious autonomy, in which the individual subject stands before God without ecclesiastical mediation; but here too conscience is still bound by scripture, not itself the source. Kant takes the decisive step: conscience becomes the self-examination of practical reason; the moral law is not given from outside but imposed by the subject on itself — the categorical imperative as the form in which reason gives itself the law. With this, conscience is established as a self-reflexive moral instance. Hegel’s determination of conscience follows immediately from Kant, but at the same time criticizes the abstract form that Kantian conscience assumes: without reference to a concrete ethical substance, it remains formal and can turn into evil. This critique leads over to ethical life (Sittlichkeit).
The dialectic of these three stages is a movement of the will’s increasing deepening into itself. At each stage, the will discovers itself more deeply: first as the author of its deed (intent), then as the pursuer of a further end (intention/welfare), and finally as related to the universal (conscience/the good). What the historical differentiation shows is that this movement is at the same time one of intellectual history: what Hegel here develops conceptually is the inner logic of a long development that comes to itself in the modern reflective subject. But precisely at the highest stage — in conscience, which wills the good — the limit of the merely moral becomes apparent.