Ethical Life — Sittlichkeit

Hegel's distinction between Moralität (morality) and Sittlichkeit (ethical life) is one of his most important contributions to moral philosophy. Morality, as Kant developed it, is the law the individual gives themselves through pure practical reason — universal, formal, and indifferent to particular circumstances. Hegel does not deny that Kant's moral law captures something real. But he argues that a morality wholly detached from concrete social life is empty: the categorical imperative cannot tell us what to do without drawing on the actually existing institutions and practices of a community.

Ethical life actualises itself in three progressively richer spheres: the Family (immediate, natural unity grounded in love), Civil Society (the differentiated realm of particular interests and market relations), and the State (the rational totality that contains and transcends both). Each sphere is genuinely necessary; none can be reduced to or replaced by the others. The family provides the individual's first identity; civil society gives scope to particular freedom; the state integrates both into a concrete universal that the rational will can truly endorse.

One of Hegel's most powerful formulations is that ethical life is the individual's "second nature." The rational institutions of family, civil society, and state are not external constraints on freedom but the very medium in which genuine freedom is realised. Just as language is not an external tool for pre-formed thoughts but the element in which thinking becomes possible, ethical institutions are the element in which the free will becomes concrete and actual. To inhabit them reflectively is freedom; to experience them as alien impositions is a sign of insufficient self-understanding.

Hegel's Sittlichkeit became the foundation of twentieth-century communitarianism. Thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor drew on Hegel's critique of Kantian and liberal atomism to argue that the self is not prior to but constituted by its social and communal ties. The debate between Rawlsian liberals and Hegelian communitarians remains one of the central disputes of contemporary political philosophy.

The concept of Sittlichkeit has been subject to considerable feminist critique. Hegel's relegation of women to the sphere of the family, and his identification of women with immediate ethical sentiment rather than the universal reason of the state, reflects the patriarchal assumptions of his era. Contemporary Hegelians like Seyla Benhabib and Axel Honneth have worked to reconstruct Sittlichkeit in ways that do not reproduce these exclusions.