ABSTRACT
In fact, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas admit that one cannot ignore the lessons of Hegel's critique of Kantian morality. Hans-Georg Gadamer so powerfully synthesized Aristotle's ethical theory and Hegel's critique of Kant that after his work the two strands of argumentation became almost indistinguishable. The young Hegel answers that there is no contradiction in willing a situation in which deposits and property do not exist, unless of course the people make some other assumptions about human needs, scarce resources, distributive justice and the like. Both in his theory of representative institutions and even more so in his reflections on war and world history, Hegel made the "self-preservation" of the universal the normative goal to which morality had to be subordinated. Yet the relation between morality and this larger ethical context is not what neo-Aristotelians and the young Hegel would like the reader to think it is.
