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Ethical Theory
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Brian_O'Connor_-_Hegel's_Ethics.pdf | 216.15 KB |
Alternative Title
Hegel's Ethics
Author(s)
Date Issued
30 June 2014
Date Available
28T10:43:17Z March 2019
Abstract
The word “ethics” is commonly taken to be a synonym for morality. In more formal contexts it serves as the name for codified conduct that governs individuals by virtue of their voluntary membership of particular institutions or professions. Although both of these significances are encompassed within Hegel’s conception of ethics he intends a yet broader meaning for it. The German word Hegel uses is Sittlichkeit, a word that is sometimes translated into English as morality as well as ethics. The stem of Sittlichkeit is Sitte, meaning customs and suggesting practices that partly form ongoing ways of life. In Hegel’s philosophy the sphere of ethics concerns both the actions of the individual moral agent and the normative environment that gives those actions their moral value. Considerations of ethics in its moral philosophical and its political institutional contexts cannot therefore be adequately treated in isolation from each other. It is of crucial importance in understanding Hegel’s ethics that his claim about the inextricability of the moral agent from its ethical environment runs much deeper than the notion that the community simply furnishes the agent with sets of approved or disapproved options. It says that we are constitutively communal beings whose judgments about the preferability of one choice over another are already influenced by our communal situation.
Type of Material
Book Chapter
Publisher
Routledge
Copyright (Published Version)
2014 Routledge
Language
English
Status of Item
Peer reviewed
Part of
Baur, M. (ed.). G.W.F. Hegel (Key Concepts)
ISBN
978-1844657957
This item is made available under a Creative Commons License
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