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Marxian Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1979

Hilliard Aronovitch
Hilliard Aronovitch*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Extract

“Marxists,” Eugene Kamenka has written, “have failed to develop an original or comparatively coherent view of ethics that can be ranked as a type of ethical theory finding its natural place beside utilitarian ethics, ethical intuitionism, existentialist ethics, or even Greek ethics.” This judgment, that Marxism has no theory of ethics or no coherent one or that if it does have a coherent theory that theory is just a version of some type of ethical theory that is independent of Marxism, seems supported by various recent philosophical discussions of Marx or Marxism and morality. Thus, Marx himself has been taken to be everything from a moral skeptic or relativist to an ethical intuitionist to a utilitarian to a proponent of a quasi-Aristotelian morality based on a notion of the function of man.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1980, pp. 357 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 Marxism and Ethics (New York: St. Martin's, 1969), p. 1.

2 In addition to Kamenka, both in the above and in The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Praeger, 1962), Oilman, B. in Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),Google Scholar ch. 4 and Plamenatz, J. in Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),Google Scholar ch. 8 hold that Marx Just does not have a theory of ethics. For Marx as an ethical relativist, see Acton, H. B. The Illusion of the Epoch (London and Boston; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973),Google Scholar pt. II, ch. II, and Wood, A. “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1972), pp. 244–282.Google Scholar For Marx as an ethical intuitionist, see Lerner, M. P. “Marxism and Ethical Reasoning,” Social Praxis, 2 (1975), pp. 63–89.Google Scholar For Marx as a utilitarian see D. P., Allen “The Utilitarianism of Marx and Engels,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 10 (1973), pp. 189–199.Google Scholar For Marx as a quasiAristotelian, see Nasser, A. “Marx's Ethical Anthropology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 35 (1975), pp. 454–500.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 The German Ideology (hereafter G.I.) in Marx Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975-) Vol. 5, p. 247. (Collected Works hereafter cited as C. W.).

4 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (hereafter EPM) in C. W., Vol. 3, p. 310.

5 Letter From Marx to His Father (1837) in C. W., Vol. I, p. 12.

6 G.I. in C. W., Vol. 5, pp. 36–37.

7 Capital, tr. S. Moore and E. Aveling (Moscow: Progress, 1954), Vol. I, p. 460.

8 Ibid., p. 555.

9 Manifesto of the Communist Party, in C. W., Vol. 6, p. 506.

10 Engels, F. Anti-Dühring (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), pp. 132-33.Google Scholar

11 G.I. in C.W.,Vol. 5, p.41.

12 Manifesto in C. W., Vol. 6, p. 511.

13 Theses on Feuerbach in C. W., Vol. 5, p. 7.

14 The presence of this general conception of human nature in Marx has been given some discussion of late. See, for example, Avineri, S. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. ch. 3. More recently, McMurtry, J. in The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1978)Google Scholar and Gould, C. in Marx's Social Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1978)Google Scholar have even maintained that such a conception provides the foundation for a Marxian ethic, of a self-realizationist kind. But, as I see it, both authors leave unanswered some of the general problems, which I deal with in the next section, about an ethic of self-realization, and also some of the specific problems, which I treat in the next section and the following one, about Marx's version of self-realization.

15 Capital, Vol. I, p. 173.

16 EPM, in C. W., Vol. 3, p. 305.

17 Manifesto, in C. W., Vol. 6, pp. 489–490; Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Nicolaus, M. (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 196-7.Google Scholar

18 See Nielsen, K. “Alienation and Self-Realization,” Philosophy, 48 (1973), pp. 21–33,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Quinton, A. “Has Man an Essence?” Peters, R. S. ed. Nature and Conduct, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. VIII (New York: St. Martin's, 1975), pp. 14–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 K. Nielsen, op. cit., p. 23.

20 Cf. Williams, B. “Egoism and Altruism,” in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 250–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Gould, op. cit., also employs these terms and stresses, as I go on to do, the value of self-determination as positive freedom, but she does not distinguish self-determination from self-actualization in the way I do.

22 Grundrisse, p. 611.

23 Some arguments for the philosophical case have been forcefully developed by MacPherson, C. B. in Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).Google Scholar

24 Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), ch. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Cf. Montefiore, A. “Self-Reality, Self-Respect and Respect for Others,” in French, P. et. al. ed., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. III (Morris, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1978), pp. 195–208.Google Scholar

26 This point about capacities that are incompatible in practice is stressed by Nielsen, op. cit.