ETHICS not intentional A good purpose is essential if an action is to be morally good Hegel resembles Kant in the emphasis he places on the importance of purpose, or ultimate motive But he does not agree with him that duty is the only morally worthy purpose, and he does not appeal to the principle of universalizability as the criterion of moral acceptibility Kant’s formula of universal law, he complains, allows in some highly suspect maxims (PR, 148) The mere belief that one’s purpose is good does not suYce to render an action morally correct Following one’s conscience is indeed necessary, but not suYcient, for virtuous behaviour Hegel stands at a distance from those subjectivists, before him and after him, who have claimed that the individual conscience is the ultimate court of appeal Here, as elsewhere, Hegel is well aware of the social context of private judgement When we turn to the third section of Hegel’s ethical system, uprightness, the social element becomes clearly dominant For uprightness consists of self-harmony in one’s social life; it concerns the concrete, external aspect of ethical behaviour, and this must take place in an institutional setting This section of the Philosophy of Right examines the nature of three social structures in which individuals Wnd themselves: the family, civil society, and the state Its exposition belongs, therefore, rather to the succeeding chapter on political philosophy than to the present chapter on ethics The period covered by this volume is an instructive one for anyone who wishes to inquire to what extent metaphysics is a guide to ethics Of the great seventeenth-century metaphysicians, Descartes produced an ethical system which, despite the recent respectful attention of scholars, is generally regard as too jejune to be a key to life, while Spinoza devised an ethics which is so closely interwoven with his metaphysics that it can give guidance only to those who share his cosmic outlook On the other hand, two great philosophers of the eighteenth century still exercise substantial inXuence on moral philosophy, precisely because their ethics stands at a distance from metaphysics Hume insisted that moral prescriptions should be quite separate from any judgements of fact, whether physical or (if such were possible) metaphysical: an ‘ought’ never followed from an ‘is’ Kant, on the other hand, though the greatest metaphysician of 271