Sittlichkeit and Post-Modernity: An Hegelian Reconsideration of the State

Abstract

Moral disputes are interminable: the Enlightenment failed to provide by sound rational argument a principled basis for resolving controversies in ethics or in politics among persons and communities with different understandings of morality. There are as many secular understandings of justice, fairness, and equality as there are major religions. This is the case because the rational resolution of moral controversies depends on accepting a particular moral vision, along with its particular premises and understandings.1 Each moral understanding is only one among many alternative, competing moral and political visions. One must already possess a moral understanding to make a morally directed choice.2 Moral controversies are soluble not by thought,3 only by will, not by discovering a general canonical content-full moral truth, but by imposing a truth or accepting a solution.4 If post-modernity is the post-Enlightenment recognition that there is no universal moral narrative, then Hegel discloses its roots.5