Action and Imputation between Morality and Ethical Life: Hegel

This paper deals with Hegel’s action theory starting from Francesca Menegoni’s fruitful studies in the field of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In the last decade, this part of Hegel’s philosophy has proved its relevance to the concepts of action, responsibility, and imputation both in the moral and in the legal fields. After defining Hegel’s concept of Handlung as intentional action starting from Menegoni’s understanding of it, this paper shows that Hegel’s action theory actually accounts for imputation of some forms of unintentional agency too. This is because the evaluation of an action is not limited to the moral perspective, which is on the contrary sublated in Ethical Life. At this point, I will explain which kind of sublation this is and in which sense Ethical Life preserves features both of the moral and of the juridical perspectives from Morality and Abstract Right. I will also explain what the consequences of this are for the evaluation of an action: the last part of the paper deals, therefore, with the administration of justice and the legal process in Ethical Life.