ABSTRACT
Hegel insists that the truth of the matter is not hard to find. ‘The truth concerning right, ethics and the state is at any rate as old as its exposition and promulgation in public laws and in public morality and religion’ (PR: 11/13-14). In other words, it is not the task of the ethicist or political philosopher to tell us how to behave. Our community has its legal, moral and religious rules. These rules, rather than the spouting of radical or out-of-date moralists, tell us what do. The task of the philosopher is not to identify or rehearse them as the principles of right. It is to comprehend them. We can take it that they amount to a rational system (‘the content is already rational in itself’ (PR: 11/14)); the job that remains for the philosopher is to display that rationality in a way that advances our understanding of why we identify with the actual system of rules that bind us.
