themselves, by a decision of the will, from all those “needs, desires, and drives” that might be experienced as a restriction of the independence of the self; Hegel is convinced that this definition has captured an elementary component of individual freedom, as is shown, for example, by the human capacity for suicide, but in effect it leads to total inactivity because action of any kind is tied to the positing of restrictive purposes (§ 5). On the other hand, merely as the counterpart of the first, solely negative version of free will, Hegel sees a definition that offers the possibility of understanding individual self-determination as the ability to make an informed choice between “given contents”; as § 6 of the Philosophy of Right indicates, this category contains, among other things, the approaches to the moral philosophy of Kant and Fichte, who can think of freedom of the will only in terms of a moral deliberation about impulses or inclinations over which the individual has no control. Hegel’s objections to what we might call an “optional” model of “free will” leads to his own characterization of the autonomy of the individual, which to a certain extent provides the pivotal point of the entire construction of the Philosophy of Right; for what it means to explain a just or “good” social order by a “representation” of the “existence of free will” is measured above all else by the way the concept of “free will” is understood in detail.