ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the centrality of public reason in Hegel’s moral philosophy, which belongs to the history of reason and to the historical development of our discovery, understanding, use and institutionalisation of cogent methods, standards and practices of rational justification. Moral philosophy thus concerns how we live and how we ought to live, as individuals and together as members of our polities. In view of our history and practices, we must be prepared, willing and able to discuss – frankly, cogently, publicly and constructively – inconvenient or discomfiting truths and redress them properly. Hegel understood that history is a slaughter house (GW 18:157), which obligates us to improve the justice of our lives and our polities so that those of our predecessors who have sacrificed, and those who have been sacrificed, for the sake of our liberty, freedom and justice need not have so suffered in vain. These, our moral duties of justice and of virtue to reason cogently and publicly, are central to Hegel’s theory of justice and republican government.
