The moral will has a high right. It need only recognize what it sees to be good itself. And we should impute an action to it according to what it knew of the action’s value.

This is the highest right of a person:

To recognize nothing that I do not see to be rational. We can grasp the good only in thought. Whoever says that man cannot know the truth takes away his dignity. Whoever says that thinking harms the good will does the same.

But there is a limit:

My insight may be true. But it may also be an error. So the right of the rational also holds against me. Someone who acts in the world submits to its laws. He cannot say: The law does not hold because I do not see its point.

In court:

In court, too, what someone himself thought right is not all that counts. And no excuse cancels the guilt: not the bad example, not the rage, not the drunkenness. Whoever judges like this does not treat the offender as a human being. He turns him into an animal that we can only make harmless. A human being is more than his passing mood.

Summary: A person has the right to recognize only what he sees to be good. But his insight can err. So the right of the rational against him remains in force.

§ 508. But the good is indeed the universal of the will determined in itself, and thus includes particularity within itself; insofar, however, as this is at first still itself abstract, no principle of determination is present; determining also occurs outside that universal, and, as a determining by the free will that exists for itself in opposition to it, the deepest contradiction awakens here. a) For the sake of the indeterminate determining of the good there is, in general, manifold good and manifold duties, whose difference is dialectically opposed to one another and brings them into collision. At the same time they ought to stand in agreement for the sake of the unity of the good, and yet each, though it is indeed a particular one, is, as duty and as a good, absolute. The subject ought to be the dialectic that resolves upon a connection of these, involving the exclusion of the others and thus the sublation of this absolute validity.

§ 508. The good is, α) to be sure, the universal of the will determined in itself, and thus includes particularity within itself. But insofar as this is at first still itself abstract, no principle of its determination is present. There is therefore, in general, manifold good and manifold duties, whose difference is dialectically opposed to one another, and brings them into collision. At the same time they ought to stand in agreement for the sake of the unity of the good, and at the same time each is, as duty and as a good, absolute. The subject ought to be the dialectic that resolves upon a connection of these, to the exclusion of the others, and thereby upon a sublation of their absolute validity.

[zu § 132 Anm.] Knowledge as implicit – recognition in general – the rest belongs to the contingency of the subject – belief. First, against opinions, each with his own particular insight, conviction – unity, cohesion, a will alien [to him], a good alien [to him] – thus force –
I can err, but so can the laws, the rulers –
The subject’s right to insight, to conviction – is formal, one-sided – Something can be very true and yet not be grasped by an individual’s insight. One regards the right of subjective insight as something infinite, absolute, on which alone it is supposed to depend whether I am obligated to something or not – i.e. not merely externally, but inwardly. Now, α) the possibility of error must be conceded – and it soon turns out that one person is convinced this way, another that way. – Hence [there is] contingency of insight and conviction, and yet for me – because it is for me – this contingent thing is supposed to be the ultimate. I myself am thus something contingent that persists in its contingency. But the good, the grounds themselves, is precisely that in which contingency is supposed to have vanished – a universal.
Insight, conviction – to clear away that persistence as something contingent – this concerns raising the particular into the universal, [that is,] culture/education [Bildung]; – vanity, arrogance, other such dispositions – refuse to be convinced, to be brought to insight – it is the most sublime, most flattering [thing] – I need only follow my own insight –
Culture/education [Bildung] often has to begin quite from the beginning, through discipline, to learn and become habituated to taking one’s own insight as something contingent, which does not hold, does not carry weight – the reasoning understanding is unconquerable – or [it is mere] obstinacy: I simply do not see it – The idea underlying that discipline is the good itself – the idea that what is right holds [good]. My conviction, insofar as it deviates from, or has not yet arrived at, what is [generally] valid, is only one authority – a subjective reliance on grounds – the others, the state, the world, are also authority, an immense authority – it is only my authority that I set up against that one. The feeling of the higher [character] of such authority as against mine – is reverence, respect in general – this vanishes in the face of that subjectivity, – [mere] dread of the universal, fear for its own particularity.
What is the holy? – that which holds human beings together, were it only lightly, as the rush binds the wreath – what is the holiest? – that which forever makes spirits at one and ever more at one* – a truly substantial bond – in which precisely that self-isolating subjectivity, which I want to preserve for myself, has gone under and is absolutely satisfied – so infinitely powerful in itself that I myself am wholly within it.
An empty notion, [to think] that I depend only on my own conviction and insight – as on something particular. Those grounds, notions (are such trivial, familiar ways of representing, that) are, on closer inspection, themselves drawn from the general stream of representation, and if they indeed lie so far outside of what is generally valid, they are skimmed off from the sweepings, from the dross and scum floating right on the surface – a child of the age, and indeed of its most superficial shape. – In any case, whatever is still positive, substantial in and about me belongs – I myself owe [it] to it – to that substantial coherence, to the holy. [It would be] utterly crude, common unconsciousness about what I am, what my being convinced, my grounds, my insight, and the like, [really] is.
The right of the subjective will [is] that it know, has known – has been able to know – that something is good or not good – lawful or not rightful, and so forth. Here it is left wholly indeterminate of what kind and manner this knowledge is. If I demand – from the standpoint of reflection – that I be convinced on grounds, that I possess insight – then that is my own affair, left to me – for in doing so I place myself on the particular standpoint. It may be desirable that people know the grounds, the deeper source of right – [but] this is not objectively necessary. Trust, belief, sound reason, custom [Sitte] is the general, objective mode of justification.
*: Here and later Hegel is alluding to Goethe’s Distichs 76 and 77 from the “Seasons” [“Die Jahreszeiten”]:
What is holy? It is that which binds many souls
together; even if it bound them only lightly, as the rush binds the wreath.
What is the holiest? That which, today and forever, ever more deeply felt,
makes spirits only ever more at one.