I. The ‘paradox view’

The paradox view holds that Hegel’s theory of recognition aims to resolve the ‘paradox of autonomy’. This interpretation relies on an understanding of autonomy, commonly attributed to Kant and attributed to Hegel. In this paper, I will not assess whether this view is appropriately ascribed to Kant.Footnote ⁴ Instead, my claims will be restricted to the ‘paradox view’.

According to the paradox view, autonomy, understood as self-legislation, explains the binding force of norms.Footnote ⁵ On this reading, Kant’s decisive innovation is the claim that the will is bound only by laws that it gives to itself.Footnote ⁶ Whereas we can always ask why we ought to obey an external authority,Footnote ⁷ theories that model freedom as self-legislation avoid this question by situating the authority of norms within the agent. Pinkard, for example, suggests that Kantian moral duty requires ‘not just freedom but autonomy, self-determination, giving the practical law to oneself instead of having any element of it imposed on oneself from outside oneself’ (Reference Pinkard2002: 52).Footnote ⁸

Several authors have argued that understanding autonomy as self-legislation leads to a paradox. Pinkard observes that

The paradox arises because autonomy requires that we bind ourselves to norms for reasons that stem from our will. As Pinkard shows, it is impossible to have self-legislated reasons on such an account of autonomy, as any self-legislated reason requires a prior act of self-legislation that is itself supported by reasons. There appears to be a regress that can only be stopped by introducing a reason that is not itself the result of self-legislation. But then autonomy, understood as self-legislation, would depend on reasons whose binding force does not stem from autonomy. This would imply the falsity of Kant’s claim that only self-legislated reasons can be binding. Any successful account of autonomy must therefore explain how this regress is avoided without appealing to reasons whose authority is independent of self-legislation.

A second but related problem that arises if we want to explain the binding force of norms by reference to self-legislation is put forward by Brandom. Brandom argues that if both the force and content of norms were up to us ‘then to paraphrase Wittgenstein “whatever seems right to us would be right”’ (Brandom Reference Brandom2010: 64).Footnote ⁹ It follows that we can only bind ourselves to norms in the sense presupposed by the self-legislation view if those norms already have a specific content on which we can draw. Crucially, the content of the norms to which we bind ourselves cannot be up to us.

If autonomy consists in binding ourselves to norms whose content is not up to us, however, then autonomy, again, depends on a form of heteronomy. The heteronomy of the content of norms therefore conflicts with the requirement that what we bind ourselves to must be up to us. The challenge is to explain how normative content can be sufficiently independent while remaining compatible with the requirement that norms be, in some sense, up to us.

II. Can the theory of recognition solve the paradox of autonomy?

In this section, I argue that Hegel’s theory of recognition does not solve the paradox of autonomy. This suggests that he may not have intended to solve this paradox in the first place. I develop this claim in two steps. First, I argue that being part of a recognitive community of mutually shared norms does not solve the justificatory regress problem. Second, I argue that even if we are part of a community of mutual recognition, norms can take on a heteronomous character. When this happens, we find ourselves bound by norms whose content we have not determined. This in turn implies that the autonomy requirement cannot be satisfied.

As illustrated, autonomy requires that subjects be guided by reasons when binding themselves to norms, where those reasons must be the subject’s own. According to the paradox view, such reasons can be provided by the social practices in which they participate. By treating agency as a socially achieved status, we can rationally reconstruct how this status is achieved, thus showing that we have reasons to bind ourselves to specific norms. These norms can be regarded as our own because they are provided to us by a community that we recognize as authoritative.

However, it is unclear how this solution solves the original problem. Even if social institutions provide us with reasons, the question remains why we should take these reasons to be authoritative for us. The difficulty here is not merely that a further justification might be desirable, but that the paradox of autonomy itself demands such a justification. It is unclear, in other words, why the reasons offered by social institutions should be regarded as the final grounds of our self-legislation. Consequently, Pippin’s claim that ‘being an individual subject is something like a collective or social normative achievement’ and that ‘the putative independence of such subject is thus always intertwined with a distinct sort of profound, even ontological dependence’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 9) does not solve the paradox of autonomy.

If normative authority is to be grounded in reasons that are genuinely ‘ours’, it must be possible to explain why socially mediated reasons have authority over us. Establishing that our identities are socially mediated does not entail that social norms should have authoritative force for us. As Brian O’Connor puts it, ‘Pippin is not obliged to move from a rejection of an a priori theory of selfhood to one of ontological dependence’ (Reference O’Connor2015: 178). His position makes a leap from acknowledging the social constitution of the self to asserting the normative authority of socially mediated reasons. It is not obvious, however, why we should think that the reasons that stem from our socially mediated identities have authority over us in the first place.

Proponents of the paradox view may respond that this demand for further justification is misplaced. On such a view, the best we can do is to bind ourselves to norms that we can make sense of from within our shared practices. Moreover, agents are not merely passive recipients of norms but participate in their interpretation, and can therefore be understood as co-authors of the norms that bind them.Footnote ¹⁴ However, this does not resolve the problem. Even if agents contribute to the interpretation of norms, it remains unclear why norms shaped by historically contingent social practices should have authority over them. The appeal to historically instituted norms may describe how normativity functions in practice, but it does not explain why such norms are authoritative in the sense required by the paradox view.

Resolving the paradox of autonomy requires locating a definitive foundation on which to build, thus stopping the regress discussed in the previous section. Because Pippin formulates the alleged Hegelian response to the paradox of autonomy such that all ultimate reasons stem from one’s social identity, it appears that individuals are compelled to recognize one another as possessing a certain status whenever the socially established conditions for that status are met. According to O’Connor, Pippin ‘excludes any kind of reasons that declare a validity not grounded within specifiable institutional forms of life or social roles. This deprives agents, in principle, of legitimate normative assessment of the norms that have played a role in their practical identities hitherto’ (Reference O’Connor2015: 179).

If this is indeed the case, then there is no legitimate space left for individuals to question the norms and roles that are deemed rational, from a perspective that is not grounded in institutions. This removes the element of reflexivity that would otherwise allow individuals to act on reasons that do not necessarily align with the dominant framework.Footnote ¹⁵ Resolving the paradox, however, requires precisely such a reason that cannot stem from our socially instituted identities. Socially instituted identities do not provide such a foundation, as we can always ask why we should accept any specific identity as valid. If Pippin’s approach is to succeed, we must have a reason to regard our social identities as binding—a reason that does not itself stem from those identities. Only an independent reason can provide an answer to the question of why we should accept our social identities as important to us.

Second, consider the solution to the problem of how we can gain access to content-bearing norms. According to the paradox view, the content of norms is determined by communal practices of recognition, in which individuals mutually recognize each other’s normative authority to interpret, and thus collectively establish the content of the norms that bind them. According to Brandom, the theory of recognition enables autonomy because it regards autonomy and heteronomy as bound together in a specific way.Footnote ¹⁶ Brandom suggests that membership in a community of mutual recognition reconciles the requirement that we bind ourselves to norms with the requirement that their content cannot be up to us. This is because it is assumed that the content of these norms is determined by communities that we recognize as authoritative.

The problem with this solution is that autonomy is thereby reduced to binding ourselves to norms whose content is not up to us—leaving us unable to determine, in any meaningful sense, what we have bound ourselves to. On Brandom’s account, there is a gap between what I take a norm to mean and what it actually means in a given community.Footnote ¹⁷ Because the content of norms is not fully under my control, it is always possible that I discover that I committed myself to something other than what I took myself to be committed to. It follows that, when binding myself to a norm, the content of that norm is independent of what I believe it to be at any given moment. Autonomy then means that, while one can choose whether to bind oneself to a norm, one cannot determine what that norm demands.

The concern here is not merely psychological. The issue is not that agents may feel alienated from norms, but that it is always possible that a structural mismatch occurs between the agent’s commitment and the content of the norm. In such cases, the agent’s endorsement does not determine the content of the obligation, and the authority of the norm appears independent of her rational will. The theory of recognition cannot resolve this tension: even within a shared community, the norms it sustains can take on a heteronomous character.

It might be objected that this conclusion rests on an overly demanding conception of autonomy. Perhaps all accounts of normativity must accept some gap between individual attitudes and normative content. If so, the dependence of agents on social institutions would not be a defect but a condition of the possibility of normativity. However, the problem is not that agents depend on social institutions as such, but that the authority of norms, on this view, appears to outstrip the agent’s capacity to rationally endorse them. What is at stake is therefore not dependence per se, but whether such dependence can be reconciled with the requirement that norms be authoritative for the agent as a rational subject.

I have shown that the socialized account of self-legislation does not solve the paradox of autonomy. If the interpretation I have called the ‘paradox view’ were in fact Hegel’s position, Hegel’s philosophy would be unable to resolve the underlying problem generated by the Kantian paradox. As I will attempt to show in the next section, however, Hegel is best read not as attempting to solve the paradox of autonomy but as offering a solution to a different problem: one related to the derivation of duty.

III. Hegel’s alternative account of freedom

If my argument is correct, Hegel’s theory of recognition does not solve the paradox of autonomy. We might wonder whether this constitutes a failure on Hegel’s part. Did he in fact share the view that there is a paradox to be resolved? Pinkard and Pippin clearly suggest that he did. As Pinkard writes, Hegel regarded ‘the “Kantian paradox” as the basic problem that all post-Kantian philosophies had to solve; and the solution had to be to face up to the paradox and see how we might make it less lethal to our conception of agency while still holding onto it’ (Reference Pinkard2002: 226–27). Pippin also makes clear that the paradox of autonomy is central to Hegel’s project when he speaks of Hegel’s decision

As I have argued above, however, the solution that Pippin puts forward is unsuccessful. It is therefore worth examining whether we can read Hegel’s practical philosophy in a different way. Against the paradox view, there are reasons to think that Hegel did not share the view that normative authority must be grounded in self-legislation. If this is correct, then Hegel is not confronted with the paradox of autonomy that arises when one seeks to explain normativity in terms of self-imposed authority.

The idea that one is both subject to and author of the moral law need not be understood as implying that an initially lawless subject first authors a law and then binds himself to it.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, as Hegel would seem to present Kant’s position, being bound by the moral law is a condition of freedom itself. We are bound to the moral law precisely because our status as rational subjects is inseparable from our subjection to moral norms. In other words, being a subject means being subject to the moral law. This does not imply that subjects are always successful in acting in accordance with moral norms. Rather, it concerns the normative structure of agency itself: to count as an agent is to be subject to norms, even if one can fail to comply with them.

Hegel’s remarks on the nature of freedom in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right support this latter understanding. There, he claims that ‘the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny [Bestimmung] and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature’ (PR: §4).Footnote ¹⁹ Ethical structures are therefore not external constraints imposed on an otherwise independent will. Rather, they are the social realization of the conditions under which agency is possible. To say that freedom is the ‘substance and destiny’ of the will is to say that the will can only exist as free, that is, as responsive to reasons.

When Hegel claims that a ‘Will without freedom is an empty word, just as freedom is actual only as will or as subject’ (PR: §4), the point is not that agents must always act freely in the sense of successfully following the right norms. Agents can fail to recognize or act on reasons, and thus act irrationally. But even such failures presuppose a capacity for reasons-responsiveness. The distinction, therefore, is not between free and unfree wills as two kinds of entities, but between successful and unsuccessful exercises of a capacity that defines agency itself.

Crucially, Hegel does not think that this implies a self that authors a law to which it then subjects itself. Instead, for the self to be free it is sufficient that it will its own freedom. To will one’s own freedom, in this sense, is to be committed to the norms that make reasons-responsive agency possible. Freedom requires, then, that (a) freedom-compatible norms exist and (b) we recognize their rational authority, without this recognition’s being understood as a form of self-legislation. This is what is implied by Hegel’s assertion that ‘[t]he abstract concept of the Idea of the will is in general the free will which wills the free will’ (PR: §28). The self is free if the conditions that make it free are in place and if it acknowledges their rational necessity.

At this point, it may seem that conceiving norms as objective conditions of freedom renders them external to the agent and thereby introduces a form of heteronomy. If norms are not self-legislated but instead ‘given’ through social institutions, it might appear that agents are subject to them in a way that undermines their autonomy. However, though on this picture autonomy depends on social norms and institutions, the relevant question is whether those structures can be understood as rationally necessary for agency itself.

If norms constitute the conditions under which agents can count as reasons-responsive beings at all, then their authority does not stand in opposition to autonomy but expresses it. Self-determination consists in determining which norms are necessary for freedom and which are not. In this sense, dependence on such norms is not a limitation on freedom but a condition of its possibility. On this view, autonomy does not consist in legislating norms for oneself, but in recognizing and endorsing norms as rationally necessary conditions of one’s own agency.

It is important to note that the conditions of the objective bindingness of norms must be distinguished from our subjective recognition of their authority. Laws can be objectively binding on us without our having authored them. Rather, they are binding only in so far as they constitute necessary conditions for realizing freedom. A free will that coherently wills its own freedom must rationally recognize these laws as authoritative, although individuals may, for contingent reasons, fail to recognize their authority. The bindingness of norms thus relies on the objective fact that they are necessary for our freedom. Our recognition of them is a rational response to this objective normative reality rather than the source of their bindingness.

Pippin cites formulations such as ‘spirit is a product of itself’, ‘spirit is its own result’, ‘[Its] actuality is only that it has made itself what it is’, ‘[S]pirit is only what it knows itself to be’ (Reference Pippin and Ameriks2017: 261) as evidence of Hegel’s agreement with the self-legislation model, the paradoxes of which Hegel is then read as having solved by providing a social-historical account of how such norms came to be. Given Hegel’s remarks on the nature of freedom cited above, however, it is not clear that the assertion that ‘spirit is a product of itself’ implies that it must be the result of a historical process of self-legislation. As Patten has argued, Hegel distinguishes between historical explanations of how institutions arise and philosophical accounts of why they are rational (Reference Patten2002: 27–34). Patten shows that, for Hegel, describing the historical emergence of institutions falls short of ‘truly essential’ philosophical understanding. Instead, understanding ‘the concept of the thing’ matters more than tracing its historical development.Footnote ²⁰

Taken together, these considerations suggest that Hegel should not be read as attempting to solve the paradox of autonomy. In the following section, I will show that Hegel points towards a conception of normative bindingness that focuses on whether norms are necessary conditions of freedom rather than whether they are imposed by acts of self-legislation. This shift away from the self-legislation model marks a fundamental change in how freedom is understood. In the following section, I develop this claim further by examining Hegel’s critique of Kantian formalism and his account of the derivation of duty.

IV. Hegel on the derivation of duty

Although I agree with Pippin and Pinkard that Hegel’s move from the individual to the social level is crucial, I argue that this shift is meant to address not the paradox of autonomy but a different problem: that of deriving concrete duties. The distinction between these two problems is central to my argument that Hegel offers an alternative account of normative bindingness. In particular, it shows that Hegel’s move to ethical life is motivated by the need to supply the content that formal morality lacks, rather than by a concern with grounding the authority of norms in self-legislation.

In this section, I focus on Hegel’s critique of Kantian formalism in order to clarify the problem he is actually trying to solve. By examining his ‘empty formalism’ objection, I show that Hegel’s primary concern is not the bindingness of morality but rather the derivation of specific duties. This analysis prepares the ground for my subsequent claim that Hegel’s social account of ethical life provides an alternative framework for normative bindingness that avoids the paradox of autonomy entirely.

In his affirmative reconstruction of what he takes to be Kant’s position, Hegel writes that ‘the good is the essential character of the subject’s will, which thus has an unqualified obligation in this connection’ (PR: §133). He goes on to claim that ‘the essential element of the will for me is duty […]. In doing my duty, I am with myself and free. The merit and exalted viewpoint of Kant’s moral philosophy are that it has emphasized this significance of duty’ (PR: §133). Hegel thus praises Kant for having recognized the significance of duty. On Hegel’s reconstruction, we have a duty to pursue the good, and because the good is the essential character of the will, the free will must pursue it.

The difficulty arises when one asks what this means for concrete actions. Hegel writes that ‘since action for itself requires particular content and a determinate end, whereas duty in the abstract contains nothing of the kind, the question arises: what is duty?’ (PR: §133A). Hegel’s point is that agents can act only if they are guided by contentful norms.Footnote ²¹ Hegel reads Kant as attempting to derive such content from the mere form of duty, but sees this attempt as unsuccessful: ‘These determinations, however, are not contained in the determination of duty itself’ (PR: §135).

Significantly, Hegel’s remarks are directed against a certain formalism that he takes to be characteristic of Kantian moral philosophy.Footnote ²² In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he claims that Kant established the principle that ‘freedom is the last hinge on which man turns […] thus man bows to no authority, and acknowledges no obligations, where his freedom is not respected’. Hegel then goes on to claim that for Kant, ‘practical Reason, as law-giving, is immediately regarded as concrete; the law which it gives to itself is the moral law’ (LHP: 459). Consequently, the problem Hegel identifies is that the moral law remains empty, or lacks normative content: ‘But what is the content of this law? Here we at once come back to the lack of content’ (LHP: 459). This remark reveals that Hegel is concerned with the problem of the derivation of duty.

This point is reiterated in Hegel’s discussion of the universalizability test in the Philosophy of Right §135A. Hegel argues that the universalizability test can determine specific moral duties only if we presuppose pre-existing normative content, such as the idea that ‘property and human life should exist and be respected’. The formal test can identify contradictions only if there are already established principles against which they can be detected.

Hegel illustrates this with a discussion of Kant’s famous case of a man who receives a deposit for which there is no proof.Footnote ²³ Kant argues that universalizing the maxim ‘anyone may deny having received a deposit for which there is no proof’ would be self-defeating: ‘such a principle as a law would destroy itself since the result would be that no deposits would exist’. However, Hegel argues, ‘where is the contradiction if there were no deposits?’ (NL: 437). Hegel’s point is that, even though universalizing this maxim would lead to a situation in which deposits no longer exist, this is not enough to determine that the maxim is morally impermissible. This would follow only if we were to presuppose another normative claim, namely that deposits should exist.

In fact, Hegel thinks that ‘any maxim’, even seemingly virtuous maxims like ‘help the poor’, can be shown to generate such a contradiction. Hegel writes that ‘[i]f the thought is that the poor generally should be helped, then either there are no poor left or there are nothing but poor; in the latter event no one is left to help them. In both cases the help disappears. Thus the maxim, universalized, cancels itself’ (NL: 439). Hegel’s objections amount to the view that if we rely on the universalizability test alone, we cannot determine what our duty is. This would require that we presuppose normative content. The derivation of duty is not possible by means of a commitment to formalism.

Hegel’s empty formalism objection can be interpreted in different ways, and it is debatable how accurate a criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy it actually is.Footnote ²⁴ For the purposes of this paper, I will not attempt to determine whether Hegel’s charge has merit. Instead, I reconstruct what I take to be the upshot of Hegel’s criticisms and show that his account of sociality, which is his solution to the problems stemming from Kant, is not best read as an attempt to solve the paradox of autonomy.

The essence of Hegel’s empty formalism objection is the notion that Kant’s moral theory cannot derive concrete duties from pure reason alone. Hegel argues against the perceived formalism of the moral point of view. Even though he seeks to preserve Kant’s insight that the good will is guided by the idea of duty, he claims that we cannot determine which maxims are permissible solely by means of assessing the form of an abstract principle.Footnote ²⁵ According to Hegel, pure reason abstracts from content He writes that, even though ‘the maxim of the arbitrary Will (Willkühr) in choosing has a content and includes a specific action, but the pure will (Wille) is free from specification’ (NL: 435). This means that pure reason only requires that one’s maxims have a specific form. As Hegel claims, however, because we want to know what our duties are, we must ‘have a content’, which is something that cannot be provided by the formalism of the moral point of view. In order to derive our duties, it is necessary to bring in a normative principle that is not itself contained in pure reason. It is in this sense that Hegel thinks that Kant must ‘presuppose normative content’.

Taken together, Hegel’s remarks on freedom in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right and his critique of formalism in the ‘morality’ section clarify why he thinks that a transition to ethical life is necessary. Hegel’s reasons for arguing that Kant must presuppose normative content are related not to the origin of morality’s binding force but to deriving the content of specific duties. Indeed, Hegel explicitly praises Kant for formulating the idea that it is our duty to pursue the good. The interpretation I will present avoids the paradox that arises when we understand autonomy in terms of self-legislation.

Hegel’s claim, building on the notion that we necessarily regard our will as free, is that the realization of this freedom depends on our having access to norms in a shared form of ethical life. Hegel’s claim, which I will develop more fully in the remainder of this paper, depends on the identification of specific institutional arrangements that enable freedom. It is important to highlight that Hegel does not say that agents are simply bound by whatever norms happen to prevail in their society. Hegel’s claim is stronger and more demanding: only rational institutions can play this role. Institutions embody freedom not merely by existing, but in so far as they secure the social conditions under which agents can exercise their capacity for reasons-responsive action. Morality does not disappear in ethical life; moral reflection remains necessary because institutions must be assessed in light of whether they genuinely realize the conditions of freedom. Morality does not stand outside ethical life as a wholly independent standpoint, but it operates within it as the capacity to reflect on and evaluate whether existing institutions are rational. Ethical life thus supplies the content formal morality lacks, while morality preserves the possibility of critical assessment.

Taken together, Hegel’s critique of formalism and his account of freedom support an alternative conception of normative bindingness. According to this alternative conception, we are bound by these institutional arrangements only in so far as they are objectively rational, in the sense that they objectively meet the necessary conditions of the possibility of freedom. On this picture, self-legislation is neither necessary nor sufficient for normative bindingness. Instead, for norms to be binding, the social institutions that are in place must be the right ones in the sense that they meet the conditions of freedom. In the remainder of this paper, I will provide an analysis of the social account that Hegel offers in his discussion of ethical life.

V. Ethical life and the actualization of freedom

I have shown that Hegel objects to Kant’s formalism because of its inability to determine what our duties are. Hegel therefore introduces the notion of ethical life to account for the possibility of determining what our duties are. His primary concern is not to ground normativity in self-legislation, but to identify the institutional conditions necessary for the actualization of freedom. In doing so, Hegel offers an alternative conception of normative bindingness: for Hegel, norms are binding only if they are necessary for the freedom of our will.

The idea that free individuals must be immersed in a community bound by norms of a specific kind falls under the category of what Hegel calls ethical life, or the ‘realm of actualized freedom’ (PR: §4). Hegel’s account of ethical life provides an answer to the question of what our duties are because it gives determinate shape to freedom in the form of social institutions. According to Hegel, Ethical life is ‘the Idea of freedom as the living good which has its knowledge and volition in self-consciousness, and its actuality through self-conscious action’ (PR: §142).Footnote ²⁶ The claim is therefore not merely that norms exist socially, but that only those norms embedded in appropriate social institutions can count as expressions of freedom.

Neuhouser’s account of social freedom helps to clarify this claim.Footnote ²⁷ According to Neuhouser, ‘social freedom is to be understood as distinguishable from, though not conceptually or existentially independent of, the other two main conceptions of practical freedom that appear in the Philosophy of Right and serve as the grounding concepts of abstract right and morality, namely: personal freedom and moral freedom’ (Reference Neuhouser2000: 18). Personal freedom refers to the ability to freely choose among different ends, whereas moral freedom refers to moral subjects’ ability to choose ends in accordance with principles that ‘come from themselves’ (Reference Neuhouser2008: 206).

Social freedom does not replace these forms of freedom but presupposes and completes them. It refers to the institutional realization of a social world in which personal choice and moral reflection can be effectively exercised. The three forms of freedom are therefore internally related: personal freedom concerns choice, moral freedom concerns justification, and social freedom concerns the social conditions that make both possible. Each form corrects a limitation of the previous one, while at the same time depending on it. Without social freedom, personal and moral freedom remain abstract and indeterminate; without personal and moral freedom, social freedom would lack its basis in individual agency.

The three forms of freedom are systematically connected in that social freedom concerns the social conditions that make both forms of freedom possible. This systematic relation is important for understanding how institutions can embody freedom. Institutions do so not merely by organizing social life, but by securing the conditions under which agents can act as responsive to reasons. They stabilize expectations, enable relations of mutual recognition, and provide determinate roles through which action can acquire intelligible content. Without such structures, freedom would remain abstract and practically indeterminate.

Freedom-enabling institutions are therefore not external constraints on an otherwise independent will, but the social realization of the conditions under which agency is possible. If norms are binding only in so far as they are embodied in rational institutions, then agents are not simply subject to whatever norms happen to prevail. Rather, they are bound only to those norms that can be justified as necessary conditions for the exercise of their own freedom. In this sense, dependence on social institutions does not undermine autonomy but expresses it. This is because such institutions do not impose external constraints on an otherwise independent will, but constitute the very conditions under which a will can count as autonomous in the first place. Norms are not alien to the subject when they can be understood as conditions of its own agency.

Hegel makes this point in his characterization of ethical life as a domain in which individuals are part of ‘an ethical substance and its laws and powers’ (PR: §146). Because they are embodiments of freedom, these ‘laws and powers’ allow the individual to determine duties that are ‘prescribed, expressly stated, and known [to the individual] within his situation’ (PR: §150). In so far as our duties stem from our membership in the ethical community, which is itself an embodiment of freedom, they are ‘not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, the subject bears spiritual witness to them as to its own essence’ (PR: §147). The point is not that all existing norms are authoritative, but that norms can be non-alien only if they arise from institutions that genuinely realize freedom.

This account of normative bindingness differs significantly from the paradox view. The central question is not how subjects can impose laws on themselves in the absence of previous normative constraint. Rather, Hegel’s key innovation is his account of what social institutions must look like if they are to enable freedom.

It is helpful to consider Neuhouser’s distinction between the objective and the subjective components of social freedom. According to Neuhouser, Hegel claims that ‘there is a sense in which rational laws and institutions objectively embody freedom, that is, they realize freedom independently of the subjective relation social members have to them’. The subjective component of social freedom, however, ‘is expressed in the demand that objective freedom acquire “an existence in self-consciousness befitting of freedom”’ (Reference Neuhouser2008: 213).

Applying this insight to the question of how to derive our duties allows us to see that only social structures that are sufficiently open to the interests and considerations of individuals can meet the requirements set by Hegel. Social freedom requires not only that institutions be rational, but also that they be capable of being understood and endorsed by those subject to them. The objective and subjective conditions for social freedom are therefore internally connected. In this way, Neuhouser’s framework allows us to understand how norms can be objectively binding while remaining open to critical assessment from the standpoint of the subject.

If duties are to be derived from the social institutions that make up ethical life, we cannot simply accept any given norm and do what follows from it. Instead, we can accept only specific norms, namely those that enable individuals to actualize their freedom. Individuals are bound by these specific norms only because they are conditions of freedom. Put differently, social norms, and the corresponding social institutions, should be accepted only if they objectively embody freedom.

There are therefore specific constraints on what social institutions that enable freedom can look like and, following from this, constraints on what our duties can be. Though Hegel claims that our duties can be derived from our social institutions—and that society can therefore insist that individuals take certain actions—there is space within this framework for individual considerations. Hegel writes that ‘[p]articular interests should certainly not be set aside, let alone suppressed; on the contrary, they should be harmonized with the universal, so that both they themselves and the universal are preserved’ (PR: §261A). This shows that a large part of Hegel’s project is to provide an account of what our social institutions must look like if they are to actualize freedom.

The distinction between objective and subjective components of social freedom helps to clarify the role of morality within ethical life. Morality does not disappear at the level of ethical life, but it no longer bears the burden of deriving determinate duties from abstract principles alone. It is part of the subjective requirements for social freedom, namely the subject’s capacity for reflective assessment: the ability to evaluate whether existing norms and institutions genuinely realize the conditions of freedom.

Moral freedom is therefore preserved within ethical life as a moment of critique and justification and essentially related to an agent’s capacity for self-determination. Seen in this light, the capacity to take critical distance from existing norms is not external to social freedom but internal to it. The capacity to initiate new practices and to revise existing ones should itself be understood as a reflexive dimension of freedom, grounded in moral freedom and realized within social freedom. A social order counts as free only if it allows for such reflexive engagement by its members.

Although Hegel claims that an ethical life that consists of social institutions is necessary to overcome the problem of formalism, this is true only if social institutions are sufficiently attentive to subjective inputs, such that individuals experience them as their own, freely willed institutions. Only if individuals can regard the institutions of ethical life as their own, as freely willed rather than thing-like, can they experience ethical life as an embodiment of freedom.

As I have presented the issue here, Hegel claims that we are bound by norms only if they make freedom possible, and he aims to provide an account of the institutions that are necessary for our freedom. Because these institutions embody freedom, they are not external to our will but rather expressions of it.Footnote ²⁸ In my view, Hegel’s key innovation is his account of what social institutions must look like if they are to enable freedom. The socialized and historicized account of self-legislation, as defended by proponents of the paradox view, cannot provide an answer to this question. This is because the requirement that norms are binding only if they are self-legislated is taken to articulate a necessary and sufficient condition for freedom: if norms can somehow be shown to be the product of self-legislation, then they are binding on us.

The idea of self-legislation, however, cannot account for how individuals come to agree on the principles by which they guide their lives.Footnote ²⁹ This problem is connected to the requirement, central to the idea of self-legislation that characterizes the paradox view, that individuals must be both the subjects and the authors of the norms that bind them. If norms were truly self-legislated in this sense, there would be no need to ask whether they are compatible with freedom, since freedom, understood as self-legislation, would require only that the norms in place are ones we have ourselves authored. However, if we instead conceive of ourselves as members of an ethical community bound by norms that have emerged through a historical process of collective self-legislation, it becomes unclear how we can critically assess those norms. Put differently, the question of whether the norms that regulate our lives are actually good must be separated from the question of how norms gain authority over us.Footnote ³⁰

VI. Concluding remarks

In this paper, I have argued that Hegel’s theory of recognition is not best understood as providing a solution to the so-called paradox of autonomy. Central to the reading proposed by the paradox view is the idea that Hegel aims to ‘complete’ the Kantian notion of self-legislation by providing an account of the background social conditions necessary for self-legislation. Contrary to this reading, I propose that Hegel is better read as providing a different account of the bindingness of norms. Norms are binding, according to Hegel, if they are conditions of the possibility of freedom. Norms can only do so if they meet specific requirements. They must be sufficiently attentive to subjective inputs, such that individuals can experience social institutions as their own and as freely willed.

I argue that Hegel’s turn to the social has the function of enabling us to determine what our duties are. This is something that cannot be accomplished at the individual level alone. Hegel’s argument unfolds in two steps. First, he holds that the question of why norms are binding cannot be answered from within a purely individualistic framework. His response is that norms are binding in so far as they are necessary for the actualization of freedom. Second, Hegel provides an account of the specific institutional structures that must be in place for such freedom to be fully realized. The question of normative bindingness is therefore inseparable from the question of what our social institutions must look like in order to be intelligible as conditions of freedom. It follows that, on Hegel’s account, bindingness does not require self-legislation. Rather, norms are binding only if they can be shown to be necessary for freedom. They can do so only when embodied in social institutions of a certain kind.Footnote ³¹