Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"If -- not merely for practical purposes but as a matter of speculative certainty -- we identify its injunction with any particular duty, circumstances will be found upon which the bindingness of that duty is contingent, and the too hasty identification of the categorical imperative with it will issue in a suspicion that, after all, there is no categorical imperative, no absolute duty, at all. After the explanations just given, however, we need not shrink from asserting as the basis of morality an unconditional duty, which yet is not a duty to do anything unconditionally except to fulfil that unconditional duty." -- Prolegomena to Ethics , from Principles of Political Obligation and other writings , p. 261 This captures very nicely a point I have been making about morality: it is both timeless and universal and dependent upon circumstances. The view that it must be one or the other ignores Hegel's philosophical breakthrough in conceiving the concrete universal.