Here are two papers that I think might help you get caught up. They are both from the "optional readings" folder on Brightspace. Why don't you read them and write a (3-4 page?) review of each of the papers, or maybe some part of the papers? A review of this sort, as I'm imagining it, would include a summary of (some part of) the paper along with some questions that the paper has left you with after reading it. If you prefer to write on one of the other papers in the "optional readings" folder, you are welcome to do so. If you decide to go with the paper from Neuhouser that I've attached, you can skip the section titled "Presuppositions of the Philosophy of Right."

Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name October 9, 2024 Additional Readings * Sally Sedgwick’s On Becoming Ethical: The Emergence of Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Sally Sedgwick's paper, The Emergence of Freedom in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, presents a helpful approach to understanding how Hegel enshrines the theme of the ethical will within his overall philosophical system of thought. Her main concern is to challenge Hegel and reveal that he never thought the process of becoming ethical is passive but rather volitional. With a subtle unraveling of Hegel's raciology, Sedgwick underlines that humans, unlike animals, are reflective creatures. By reflexivity, however, humans can think about what they want and, to some extent, exercise choice. This reflective capacity mediates over the creation of the will; for Hegel, this is a necessary condition of ethical becoming. As quoted by Sedgwick, Hegel postulates that an individual needs to be universal to expound ethical freedom. The Universal here, therefore, refers to the common good manifested through the social structures of law. Ethical behavior, for Hegel, does not mean people's satisfaction with self-interests or conforming to specific cultural practices. However, ethical motivation entails the subject's will to be moral and conform to the general good of society. In this sense, Hegelian freedom is not only freedom of the individual; it is freedom for Hegelian freedom, which is the freedom to do the will of the greater whole to which the individual belongs. According to Sedgwick, Hegel must stress that being ethical means acknowledging that one is worth and purposes have their basis in the universe. As Sedgwick points out, one of the most noteworthy features of Hegel's account is the work of social formations – the plurality of civil society institutions, the state as one of them, in forming the ethical will. According to Hegel's conception of ethical development, it was not independent of social and institutional contexts that envelop an individual. In Hegel's view, the state is only necessary for people to find their individual will, seeking their reflection in the universal. According to Sedgwick and Hegel, if there are no such social structures, laws are felt as external and oppressive and have no reason to identify one's particular will with the universal one. This brings out a critical issue: freedom and ethical conduct can only be determined by external circumstances, that is, the presence of right-minded organizations capable of balancing individual self-interest and societal needs. Deriving from Sedgwick, according to Kant, the author compares the Hegelian and Kantian conceptions of ethical progression, focusing on Hegel's critique of the dualistic structure of the will. Although both philosophers think the ethical will must correspond to the universal, Hegel criticized Kant's conception of the will and its parts. According to Kant, the will which produces the laws is a pure will, separate from the will part of the individual. It creates a problematic accordance in which the individual has to confront universal laws as if the latter were external, arbitrarily imposed, simply because there is no natural identification of the individual with the universal. According to Sedgwick, in an attempt to solve this issue, Hegel puts forward the concept of the organic conception of the will as the self that combines and is organized as the universal and the particular. In this organic model, the individual does not simply bow before the universal; on the contrary, the universal and the particular reciprocally condition one another and constitute a unity required for ethical life. Sedgwick provides a convincing account of the potential of Hegel's ethical theory, although her paper raises several questions that need to be answered. The first of these questions concerns identifying the reasons for ethical construction. From the context of abstract rights, Hegel may imply that the insufficiencies of abstract rights – including the inability to offer permanent satisfaction – force people to attain a higher type of reconciliation with the universal. However, Sedgwick fails to explain what sets this transformation in motion, or in the language of classical rhetorical theory, the call to action that sets the speechéMission in motion. Is there a newfound consciousness of individualistic objectives and constraints, or are subconscious social and psychological processes involved? This question is decisive in instantiating how people are mobilized to become good on earth and ethical in action. Another easily derived question from Sedgwick's discussion is what it means to encounter the universal. Hegel has proposed an organic model where, just as the parts of...