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Marxism and Moral Objectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

William H. Shaw
William H. Shaw*
Affiliation:
Tennessee State University
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Extract

Historical materialism tenders a sociological theory of morality. According to it, different types of society are characterized by different and distinctive moral codes, values, and norms, and these moral systems change as the societies with which they are linked evolve. Morality is not something immutable and eternal; rather, it is part of ‘the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ - part of the social consicousness - which is conditioned by the general mode of production of material life. It is no accident, but rather a functional requirement, that different forms of moral consciousness accompany different modes of production. Moreover, since all existing societies have been class societies, their moralities have been class moralities in the sense that they sustain and reflect the material relations that constitute the basis of the different forms of class rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 7: Marx and Morality , 1981 , pp. 19 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971), 20–21.Google Scholar

2 Singer, Peter is only the most recent moral philosopher to raise this issue; see his Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1979) 5.Google Scholar

3 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers 1975), Vol. 5, 247.Google Scholar

4 Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1970) 645.Google Scholar This is not to say, as Popper, Karl does, that ‘Capital is, in fact, largely a treatise on social ethics.' The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II (Princeton: Princeton U.P. 1966), 199.Google Scholar

5 In this passage from The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx refers to the market epoch as a ‘time of general corruption, of universal venality’ (Collected Works, Vol. 6, 113).

6 Collected Works, Vol. 5, 41.

7 See the pertinent descriptions of working-class conditions in Marx's Capital, Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, or Marx's inaugural address to the First International.

8 Engels, Frederick, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring] (Moscow and Leningrad: Cooperative Publishing Society 1934), 109.Google Scholar

9 Marx to Engels, November 4, 1864.

10 The Communist Manifesto, for instance, does not deign to answer the charge that ‘Communism … abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis’ (Collected Works, Vol. 6, 504).

11 Marx's Theory of History (Stanford: Stanford U.P. 1978).

12 Anti-Dühring, 109.

13 There may be, though, a kind of incoherence simply in advocating normative relativism. If we take NR1 or NR2 or if NR3 or NR4 reduce to the former, then as observed above there is a problem about what the normative relativist thinks he is saying when he says something is right.

14 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1969-70), Vol. 3, 19Google Scholar ('Critique of the Gotha Programme’).

15 Anti-Dühring, 206.

16 Trotsky, Leon, Dewey, John, and Novak, George, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Merit Publishers 1966) 38.Google Scholar

17 Anti-Dühring, 108.

18 Taylor, Charles, ‘Marxism and Empiricism’ in Williams, B. and Montefiore, A. ed. British Analytic Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press 1966) 245.Google Scholar See also Nasser, Alan G., ‘Marx's Ethical Anthropology,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 35 (1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 ‘Marxism and Empiricism,’ 242,245.

20 Cf. Allen, Derek P.H., ‘The Utilitarianism of Marx and Engels,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 10 (1973).Google Scholar

21 Anti-Dühring, 109.

22 Compare Barbara Winters’ argument that ‘it is impossible to believe that one believes p and that one's belief of p originated and is sustained in a way that has no connection with p's truth’ in ‘Believing at Will,’ Journal of Philosophy, 76 (1979). See also Kant, , Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Company 1959) 66-7.Google Scholar

23 Slote, M.A., ‘Morality and Ignorance,’ Journal of Philosophy, 74 (1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Brandt, Richard B., A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford U.P. 1979).Google Scholar

25 See, for example, Hancock, Roger, ‘Marx's Theory of Justice,’ Social Theory and Practice, 1 (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and VanDeVeer, Donald, ‘Marx's View of Justice,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 33 (1973).Google Scholar

26 Wood, Allen W., ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1972),Google ScholarTucker, Robert C., The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton 1969),Google Scholar esp. chapter two. Husami, Ziyad I. criticizes Wood in ‘Marx on Distributive Justice,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 8 (1978-9),Google Scholar and Wood replies later in the same volume. See also McBride, William L., ‘The Concept of Justice in Marx, Engels, and Others,’ Ethics, 85 (1974-5);Google ScholarYoung, Gary, ‘Justice and Capitalist Production: Marx and Bourgeois Ideology,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 8 (1978);Google Scholar and Buchanan, Allen, ‘Exploitation, Alienation and Injustice,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9 (1979).Google Scholar

27 Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1971) 340.Google Scholar

28 Selected Works, Vol. 2, 365.

29 Ibid., 366.

30 It may be, though, as G.A. Cohen has remarked, that Marxists wrongly thought that Marx did not believe capitalism was unjust, out of conceptual confusion about Justice.

31 Ibid., Vol. 3, 18.

32 Ibid., Vol. 2, 365-66.

33 See Husami, op. cit.

34 Selected Works, Vol. 2, 366.

35 I would like to thank John Arthur, G.A. Cohen, Frank Cunningham, Mark Overvold, and Peter Railton for useful comments on an earlier version of this essay.