Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (2):249-265 (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

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.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Hegelian Spirits in Sellarsian Bottles.Willem deVries - 2016 - Philosophical Studies:1-12.
Hegel's Moral Philosophy.Katerina Deligiorgi - 2016 - In Dean Moyar (ed.), Oxford Handbook to Hegel's Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
Sellars, Realism, and Kantian Thinking.Willem A. deVries - 2012 - Normative Functionalism and the Pittsburgh School.
Hegel’s Revival of Socratic Ignorance.James A. Dunson Iii - 2010 - Idealistic Studies 40 (3):201-214.
Moral agency in other animals.Paul Shapiro - 2006 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (4):357-373.
Hegel's Critique of Kantian Morality.Kam-lun Kwong - 1988 - Dissertation, University of Missouri - Columbia
The dialectic of beauty and agency.Kathryn Walker - 2013 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (1):79-98.
Rational Feelings and Moral Agency.Ido Geiger - 2011 - Kantian Review 16 (2):283-308.
The Pittsburgh School, The Given and Knowledge.Tom Rockmore - 2012 - Normative Functionalism and the Pittsburgh School.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-01-19

Downloads
56 (#254,410)

6 months
2 (#658,848)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Wilfrid Sellars.Willem deVries - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Sellars’ metaethical quasi-realism.Griffin Klemick - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2215-2243.
Wilfrid Sellars.Jay Rosenberg - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.Richard Rorty - 1979 - Princeton University Press.
Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Thomas E. Hill & Arnulf Zweig.
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1956 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:253-329.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.Richard Rorty - 1989 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Phenomenology of Spirit.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1977 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Arnold V. Miller & J. N. Findlay.

View all 53 references / Add more references