'I want to be rich; I can defraud my employer with a million dollars without being detected; therefore I should defraud my employer.' Here the reasoning starts from my desire to be rich. There is nothing universal with this desire. (Don't be misled by the fact that many people desire to be rich; the desire from which I begin my reasoning is the desire that I, Peter Singer, should be rich. Very, very few people share this desire.)

On Marx's tombstone are engraved words of his famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.' Marx certainly had Hegel in mind as one of 'the philosophers', and it is undeniable that Marx wished to change the world far more radically than Hegel dit; Hegel could none the less have pointed out that the underlying idea of Marx's words can be found in the Phenomenology, at the point where the self-conscious being finds that to realize itself fully it must set itself about changing the external world and making it its own.

If this seems obscure, don't worry. It is even more obscure in Hegel's text.