%(d) The Doctrine of Objective Spirit%, comprehending ethics, the philosophy of right, of the state, and of history, is Hegel’s most brilliant achievement.  It divides as follows:  (1) Right (property, contract, punishment); (2) Morality (purpose, intention and welfare, good and evil); (3) Social Morality:  (a) the family; (b) civil society; (c) the state (internal and external polity, and the history of the world).  In right the will or freedom attains to outer actuality, in morality it attains to inner actuality, in social morality to objective and subjective actuality at once, hence to complete actuality.

Right, as it were a second, higher nature, because a necessity posited and acknowledged by spirit, is originally a sum of prohibitions; wherever it seems to command the negative has only received a positive expression.  Private right contains two things—­the warrant to be a person, and the injunction to respect other persons as such.  Property is the external sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality.  Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right (Unrecht), and the latter shown to be a nullity.  The criminal is treated according to the same maxim as that of his action—­that coercion is allowable.

In the stadium of morality the good exists in the form of a requirement which can never be perfectly fulfilled, as a mere imperative; there remains an irrepressible opposition between the moral law and the individual will, between intention and execution.  Here the judge of good and evil is the conscience, which is not secure against error.  That which is objectively evil may seem good and a duty to subjective conviction. (According to Fichte this was impossible).

On account of the conflict between duty and will, which is at this stage irrepressible, Hegel is unable to consider morality, the sphere of the subjective disposition, supreme.  He thinks he knows a higher sphere, wherein legality and morality become one:  “social morality” (Sittlichkeit).  This sphere takes its name from Sitte, that custom ruling in the community which is felt by the individual not as a command from without, but as his own nature.  Here the good appears as the spirit of the family and of the people, pervading individuals as its substance.  Marriage is neither a merely legal nor a merely sentimental relation, but an “ethical” (sittliches) institution.  While love rules in the family, in civil society each aims at the satisfaction of his private wants, and yet, in working for himself, subserves the good of the whole.  Class distinctions are based on the division of labor demanded by the variant needs of men (the agricultural, industrial, and thinking classes).  Class and party honor is, in Hegel’s view, among the most essential supports of general morality.  Strange to say, he brings the administration of justice and the police into the same sphere.