Social Morality

Individuality may claim the privilege of enunciating moral laws universal in character but having their source and inspiration solely in the single individual.

Such laws can at best only be regulative and cannot be constitutive of the substance of individuality; for the substance of individuality necessarily involves other individuals within it.

In short individuality is itself only realized as a part of a concrete whole of individuals; its life is drawn from common life in and with others.

To attempt to enunciate laws from itself as if it could create the conditions of its own inherent universality can only issue in one result: laws are furnished without the content which gives those laws any meaning, or else the laws and the content remain from first to last external to one another. Hence the attempt is sure to break down by its own futility.

What is wanted to give these laws meaning is the concrete substance of social life; and when this concrete substance is provided ipso facto the attempt of individuality to create laws disappears, for these laws are already found in operation in social life.

Human spirit contains sense-certainty, perception and understanding, and is thus consciousness in general, so far as in analyzing its own self it holds fast by the moment of being a reality objective to itself, and by abstraction eliminates the fact that this reality is its own self objectified, its own self-existence.

Self-consciousness, taking the form of Morality apprehends itself as the essential truth, and the real essence as its actual self; no longer puts its world and its ground and basis away outside itself, but lets everything fade into itself, and in the form of Conscience is spirit sure and certain of itself. The ethical world, the world rent asunder into the "here" and the "yonder" and the moral point of view are, then, individual forms of spirit whose process and whose return into the self of spirit, a self simple and self-existence, will be developed. As these attain their goal and final result, the actual self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit will make its appearance and be their outcome.

An individual himself is the power of the "nether" world, and that reality is his "fury", wreaking vengeance upon him. The wrong, which can be brought upon the individual in the realm of the ethical world, consists merely in a bare something by chance happens to him. The power which perpetrates on the conscious individual this wrong of making him into a mere thing is nature; it is the universality not of the community, but the abstract universality of mere existence. And the particular individual, in wiping out the wrong suffered, turns not against it, but against a community - which did not caused him to suffer at its hands - but becomes a natural victim of convenience.

As we can see, the consciousness of those who share the blood of the individual removes this wrong in such a way that what has happened becomes rather a work of their own doing, and hence bare existence gets to be something willed, and thus an object of their gratification.

G.W.F. Hegel
The Phenomenology of Mind