Berkley Center

Charged with introducing the topic of moral innovation to the seminar, Robert Pippin made the case for our turning our attention to Hegel’s philosophy. The seminar is concerned with moral changes that arise in the contingent course of history. Prof. Pippin, of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago argued that if one wants to assert that:

- what ought to be done is always [or even just sometimes?] historically indexed;
- there are, at a time, for us, objectively right answers; and
- we can compare, across times, views as morally superior and inferior

then the philosopher to turn to for support is Hegel. For Hegel, what ought to be done is always indexed to an historical community. His own way of explaining this has an archaic ring. Pippin, in the paper offered for discussion, set out to update the Hegelian conception of community. An essential element of this conception is its suggestion that the group constitutively shapes individuals and the individuals constitutively shape the group. Pippin proposed that we turn to Philip Pettit’s recent writing on group agency to recast this idea.

Recasting the understanding of the community in this way makes available a more readily understandable account of the rational spurs of moral change, enabling us to see that at least some of the moves that Hegel describes as “dialectical” involve the alleviation of irrationalities that show up at the group level. In his paper, Pippin concentrated on collective self-deception, such as arises when a group takes itself to be committed to something (the wrongness of torture, say) but its actions belie this. Such a situation is rationally unresolved.

One line of questions discussed in seminar concerned the boundaries of the community. How should we think of the moral “we,” bound together in a group? Does it embrace all of humanity? The slaves were not embraced. Pippin suggested that, for Hegel, the “we” is always limited in an historically contingent way, and that differentiation of those within the community is often an additional source of moral progress. Yet slavery may have been supported, not by racist ideologies asserting that some were not fully human, but by self-deception as to the implications of the commitment to treating all humans with respect.

How to trace the rational implications of a practical commitment was also discussed. These are less obvious, it was pointed out, than the implications of a belief. What if a supposed commitment is halfheartedly executed? Does that reveal that the agent is self-deceived about having the commitment, or merely weak-willed in following through on it? There are many ways to work out what, in particular, one ought to do to follow through on a commitment; and at times, one might be legitimately stymied as to how best to do so.

The seminar closed with a broader discussion of the modes of criticism supported by Hegel’s type of social analysis, which is alive to the latent but deep contradictions present in a case like that of Rameau’s nephew, who claimed not to have any specific identity, and so to be able to live out any role. Accepting that one must embrace some specific life, complete with its contingent particularities, is, Hegel argues, a prerequisite to living as a free and rational agent—an aim that is constitutive of morality, as we use the term.