Introduction

Hegel’s staunch civic republicanism is a major contribution to moral philosophy, including ethics, justice, philosophy of law and philosophy of education. This study is thus devoted to systematic moral philosophy, including its history and its assessment, with keen attention to its contemporary significance. Hegel adopts, undergirds and augments Kant’s sound critique of rational judgment and justification (in all non-formal domains, sans transcendental idealism). On that basis, together with a shrewd reanalysis and further explication of Kant’s concept of rational willing, Hegel develops the most cogent and direct justification of the human right to non-domination and the civic republican right to rational justification. Hegel achieves this by further developing an unjustly neglected method for identifying and justifying the core moral principles of a natural law theory, which is nevertheless entirely neutral about moral (ir-)realism, (transcendent) metaphysics, theology and issues about relations between justifying reasons and motivations to act. To demonstrate that all of this is correct and well-justified, I begin by disambiguating some key features of classical natural law theory and revisiting Socrates’ question to Euthyphro (10de) and the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. Hegel realised that Kant’s Critical philosophy affords a cogent resolution of that Dilemma, which holds also in moral philosophy.