Summary
The right to abstract freedom
In Hegel's ethical theory, the final good is not happiness but freedom. One consequence of this is the importance of the right of persons in Hegel's theory. Personal rights set limits to what may be done to a person in the name of interests, whether that person's own interests or the interests of others. If rights are there in order to override eudaemonistic considerations generally, then we might expect them to be ascribed to persons independently of those considerations. Hegel's theory meets this expectation, since “abstract” right is so called precisely because it abstracts from all considerations of well-being or happiness: In abstract right “it is not a matter of particular interests, my utility or my well-being” (PR & 37). Instead, it is a matter of securing the abstract freedom of a “person.”
As we saw in Chapter 2, § 2, Hegel holds that every human being has “formal freedom,” the capacity to abstract from all particular determinations, desires, and interests. This capacity is what makes someone a person, “a self-consciousness of itself as a perfectly abstract I, in which all concrete limitedness and validity is negated and invalid” (PR § 35R). As persons, all human beings are equal (VPR19 : 67–68). Even though the exercise of this capacity to abstract (as in negative freedom or arbitrariness) is not freedom in its most proper sense, Hegel holds just the same that it is essential to guarantee individuals in the modern state adequate room for the exercise of arbitrariness (Chapter 2, §§ 2, 5, and 11).
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- Hegel's Ethical Thought , pp. 77 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990