Marxism and ethics

Readers of a series devoted to the various types of ethical theory from the Greeks to the present day may well have expected this component study to bear the simple title, Marxist Ethics. Such a title would have been misleading. Marx himself wrote nothing substantial or systematic on the problems of ethical theory or moral philosophy as such; his disciples, beginning with Engels, have distinguished themselves in this field mainly by their philo sophical dilettantism and consequent naïveté. At a time when serious philosophers were beginning to see that further progress in ethics required careful logical analysis, the disentangling of issues and the solution of certain quite fundamental logical problems, Marxist writers approached the subject with complete disdain for technical questions and a fundamental inability to grasp the difficulty of the problems they were pretending to tackle. Much, indeed most, of their writing was popular in character and pamphleteering in spirit, directed against the moral pundit and the street-corner revivalist, against 'Christian' or 'bourgeois' ethics in their crudest form. In relation to the genuine logical concerns and insights of a Plato, a Butler, a Hume or at Kant most of the Marxist arguments were simply part of a tedious ignoratio elencbi.

The penalty imposed on the amateur is that he relives, un wittingly, the history of the subject. He sincerely presents as his own discoveries views that have already been held, elaborated, discussed and exposed at a higher level; he jumbles together what the professional, with care and devotion, has long since shown to be distinct and mutually inconsistent. Marxists, in fact, 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 logical place beside utilitarian ethics, ethical intuitionism, existentialist ethics, or even Greek ethics.