Adorno's texts, including Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, express profound moral concern in the broadest sense of right living. Adorno criticises those elements of social life that threaten the autonomy of the individual and which encourage individuals to adopt instrumental relations to other people and things. The moral concerns arise in these texts because universal concepts,'mutilate', 'dominate' and 'liquidate' the concrete particulars they subsume, and because thinking stands accused of being in league with institutional and social structures of domination. However,the normative basis of his work remains obscure.

Whilst reading on, and around, Adorno's negative moral philosophy and its immanent critique of modernity I was suprised to find little engagement by Adorno with Hegel's ethics: the conception of ethical life, ethics as a form of self-actualization, the emphasis on the value of freedom, it's conception of self whose identity is expressed or embodied in action.

According to Gerhard Schweppenhauser's account of Adorno's negative moral philosophy in in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno Adorno judges Hegel in terms of the latter's apology for power as it evolves in the Philosophy of Right On this interpretation of Hegel, Hegel disregards individuals and their experiences in favour of the overwhelming force of the social and historical universal. Adorno sided with the individual against Hegel's false reconciliation of the individual with totality, and turns to Kant to affirm indiivdual autonomy.

Fair enough. But it is not much of an immanent critique of Hegel's historicized naturalist ethical philosophy, which in the Philosophy of Right, traces the way the self-knowing agent is a person possessing abstract right, then a subject with moral vocation, then in the the concrete spheres of ethical life as a family member, then a burgher and finally a citizen.

Where is the rational kernel in Hegel's ethics that an immanent critique undercovers? Adorno endorses Hegel's well known criticisms of Kant's moral theory and he accepts Hegel's denial that the task of philosophy is to "issue instructions as to how the world ought to be."

Adorno is silent On Schweppenhauser's account. Is this a reliable account? I have a copy of Adorno's Problems of Moral Philosophy to find out.