| According to Hegel, one defining characteristic of humankind is the capacity for responsibility or guilt (Schultz). Traditionally, philosophers have seen our practical or everyday understanding of moral responsibility as threatened by a theoretical view of the world as subject to causal determination. Hegel's defense of responsibility, however, is concerned not with the threat from determinism, but with reconciling two perspectives that occur within the practical or everyday view: internal avowals of intention (an agent's professed motives or reasons to act) and external judgments on action (like praise and blame). This is the "inner-outer" problem.;In this dissertation, I analyze the three incompatible concepts of moral responsibility implied by the Philosophy of Right: external responsibility, internal responsibility, and a third concept that posits "the identity of inner and outer." The first of these, external moral responsibility, extends blame to any wrong that expresses the agent's will at all. According to this concept, Oedipus can be blamed for patricide because he willingly killed the man who turned out to be his father; it is of no relevance that he did not kill his father knowingly or intentionally.;The second concept of responsibility is internal moral responsibility, which attempts to limit praise or blame to that aspect of the deed which the agent did intentionally. This concept implies a right of knowledge (Oedipus must have known what he was doing), a right of satisfaction (he must have wanted to do it) and a right of conscience (he must only be judged according to his knowledge of good and evil).;Against both of these, Hegel claims that we can only be blamed for our "buter" deeds insofar as they correspond to our "inner" intentions, but we can only know our intentions insofar as they manifest themselves externally in our deeds. I show how positing such an identity between inner and outer gives rise to what I term substantive responsibility. This, for Hegel, is full answerability to the concrete duties that attend any member of an actual ethical community. |
