Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

Abstract

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy.

Keywords:

• Moral agency
• Hegel
• Sellars
• Kant
• social mediation

Notes

1. For samplings of recent research on Sellars, see the edited volumes Wolf and Lance 2006, deVries 2009, and O’Shea 2016.

2. One exception is Hurley 2000, though this ignores the intersubjective dimension of Sellars’s ethics. Willem deVries (2005, 246) points to the difficulty of Sellars’s moral philosophy as one reason it has not received more attention: ‘Sellars’s essays in ethical theory are as daunting as his most technical work in metaphysics, highly abstract and compact in the statement of the problems considered and the solutions proposed, and bristling with formalisms.’ Even so, deVries (2005, 246) continues, ‘This may explain the neglect of his ethical work, but cannot justify it’.

3. Richard Bernstein (2010, 97) notes that Rorty ‘was one of the first to suggest that Sellars was leading us from Kant to Hegel’. Even so, in Rorty’s published work on both Hegel and Sellars, one finds no sustained treatment of Sellars’s work in moral philosophy, let alone further explanation for his linking of Sellars and Hegel on moral philosophical grounds – though there are, pace Bernstein, ‘suggestions’ to this effect. This leaves us to construct for ourselves what exactly Rorty may have had in mind in the passage quoted above. For more from Rorty on Sellars, see Rorty 1997; 1979, ch. 4; 1990, 151–161.

4. It should be noted that, despite a great deal of overlap, the account of rational agency in the Groundwork is not identical with that offered in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the latter, as Terry Pinkard (2002, 61) suggests, the introduction of the ‘postulates of morality’ into Kant’s account alters the sense in which the moral law is binding upon individual agents.

5. Pinkard 2002 claims that the notion of the ‘Kantian paradox’ has its origin in Pippin 2000, though I failed to find the phrase ‘Kantian paradox’ explicitly used there. For other references to the ‘Kantian paradox’ idea, see Chappell 2011 and Stern 2009.

6. While Pinkard argues that Kant’s position on moral agency is essentially paradoxical, Robert Pippin argues Kant’s position is in fact ‘metaphorical’, for ‘[t]he image of some sort of putatively law-less person making or originating or legislating a principle and only thereby being bound to it – otherwise not bound at all – makes it very hard to imagine on what sort of basis such a law-less subject could decide what to legislate’ (Pippin 2008, 71). That is, although Pippin recognizes that Kant’s conception of moral agency has a paradoxical air to it, he insists that the paradox is only apparent. For Pippin, the ‘fact of reason’, to borrow a phrase from Kant’s second Critique, is primary, and there is no intelligible sense in which the agent is not subject to reason during his or her moral action. The paradox cannot be ‘literal’, for Pippin, because reason and the moral law condition agency from the outset.

7. While this essay has emphasized the social dimension of Hegel’s transformation of moral agency, it is clear that this transformation is also inextricably historical. Even passing consideration of this historical aspect, however, raises an important conceptual difficulty: how does the ‘historical space of reasons’ become instantiated in the first place? As my focus here is the social transmission, rather than the historical inception, of moral agency, I set this question aside for now. For an analysis of the historical dimension of Hegel’s moral theory, with some attention to the issue of inception, see Howard 2009.

8. For discussion of Sellars’s intersubjective theory of concept formation and use, see Robert Brandom’s study guide for Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, contained in Sellars 1997; also O’Shea 2007, chs 5–6.

9. An account of the genesis of Sellars’s understanding of collective intentionality, including a helpful treatment of the distinction between individual and collective intentions, can be found in Olen and Turner 2015.

10. Although this essay has emphasized the social rather than historical aspect of Hegel’s theory of moral agency, a different treatment could, once again, invoke that historical aspect to help explain how Hegel resolves the Kantian paradox. Similarly, the reading of Sellars presented here has foregrounded the intersubjective and social dimensions of his account of moral agency, without developing the further consequences entailed by that account. One such consequence, I believe, would be a historical dimension to we-intentions and intersubjectivity – a dimension that would bring Sellars’s view further in line with Hegel’s. I leave it to future treatments of this topic to pursue this line.