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Is Marx a Moral Consequentialist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jeffrey S. Vogel
Jeffrey S. Vogel*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN47405, USA
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Extract

Derek Allen, Richard Boyd, and Alan Gilbert have suggested that Marx’s normative political views should be reconstructed as a sophisticated version of moral consequentialism. This paper investigates whether Marx’s ostensible anti-moralism differs in any interesting way from Mill’s sophisticated utilitarianism plus some Marxist social science. I present an account of the social meaning and implications of moral language and argument, based on Marx’s description of morality as a social practice based on distinctive motives, emotions and sanctions, to explain why Marx would reject moral consequentialism. This account will explain how Marx can consistently reject morality yet retain a normative basis for his social criticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 541 - 563
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 See Allen, Derek P .H. ‘The Utilitarianism of Marx and Engels,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1973) 189-99Google Scholar; Boyd, Richard ‘How to Be a Moral Realist,’ in Sayre-McCord, G. ed., Essays in Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988)Google Scholar; and Gilbert, Alan ‘An Ambiguity in Marx’s and Engels’s Account of Justice and Equality,’ The American Political Science Review 76 (1982) 328-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Marx’s Moral Realism: Eudaimonism and Moral Progress,’ in Ball, Terence and Farr, James eds., After Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984) 154-83Google Scholar.

2 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick Selected Works (New York: International Publishers 1986)Google Scholar; cited in the text as SW.

3 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick Marx-Engels Collected Works, 50 volumes (New York: International Publishers 1975-)Google Scholar; cited in the text as MECW followed by volume and page number.

4 Quoted in Lukes, Steven Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon 1985), at 27Google Scholar.

5 Nielsen, Kai Marxism and the Moral Point of View (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1989), 2Google Scholar

6 Geras, Norman ‘The Controversy About Marx and Justice,’ reprinted in Literature or Revolution (London: Verso 1986), 36Google Scholar and 24. Though Geras is speaking only of justice, a more general interpretation along these lines is easily suggested: Marx thinks capitalism is morally wrong, but did not think he thought so.

7 See Gilbert’s’ An Ambiguity’ and ‘Marx’s Moral Realism.’

8 See Cohen, G.A. ‘Freedom, Justice, and Capitalism,’ New Left Review 126 (1981) 3-16Google Scholar; Elster, Jon Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)Google Scholar; Peffer, R.J. Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brenkert, George Marx’s Ethic of Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983)Google Scholar; Otto Bauer, in Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode, eds., Austro-Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon 1978); and Richard Boyd, ‘How to Be a Moral Realist.’

9 Allen Wood, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice,’ reprinted in Cohen, Marshall Nagel, Thomas and Scanlon, Thomas eds., Marx, Justice, and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980) 3-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981)

10 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3. Trans. David Fembach (New York: Vintage 1981), 460-1

11 Miller, Richard W. ‘Rawls and Marxism,’ in Daniels, Norman ed., Reading Rawls (New York: Basic Books 1975) 206-29Google Scholar; and Analyzing Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984)

12 See Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 477Google Scholar.

13 A moral-Marxist might reply to Miller’s analysis that capitalists do have a moral reason for action to work for socialism, but that it is not influential, that it doesn’t actually motivate them very much. However, this suggestion offers an obscure sense of ‘reasons for action’ that has little realistic substance as a meaningful claim about how society works.

14 See Stuart Mill, John On Liberty (Buffalo: Prometheus 1859)Google Scholar; and Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1957); Rawls, John ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,’ Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1989) 1-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and A Theory of Justice.

15 Some moral-Marxists argue that one single value— community or self-realization-provides the moral key to all Marx’s social criticism. But there is no evidence for this claim, which makes Marx’s manifold normative values look more like a traditional moral system than it is on the surface.

16 Marx, Karl Capital. Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage 1977), 759Google Scholar

17 Stuart Mill, John Considerations on Representative Government (New York: The Liberal Arts Press 1958)Google Scholar

18 See Grice, H.P. ‘Logic and Conversation,’ reprinted in Martinich, A.P. ed., The Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985) 159-70Google Scholar.

19 Williams, Bernard Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985), 212Google Scholar

20 Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton 1930)

21 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1980), 293

22 Bernard Williams (in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy) and Susan Wolf (’Moral Saints,’ Journal of Philosophy 79 [1982] 419-39) are two recent philosophers with perspectives very different from Marx’s who have also strongly criticized this feature of morality. Williams is the source for the title of this section.

23 Beyond Good and Evil (Middlesex: Penguin 1973)

24 The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett 1981), 413

25 Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 43; italics his

27 I would like to thank Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, Allen Wood, and an audience at the University of Pennsylvania for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The penultimate version was also helped by detailed comments from an anonymous referee for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.