The ethical foundations of Marxism

Abstract

The relationship between Marxism and ethics is often alluded to and rarely explored. The disputes that surround it have produced little precision or clarity concerning the issues involved; so far they have illuminated neither Marxism nor ethics. Marx himself wrote nothing devoted directly to the problems of moral philosophy. Nowhere did he consider carefully the concept of moral obligations or the criteria for distinguishing moral demands from other demands. He did, it is true, emphatically reject the conception of ethics as a “normative science”; he denied completely the existence of “values”, “norms” and “ideals” above or outside the empirical realm of facts. He prided himself that he had not asked “what ought to be”, but only “what is”. Yet the answers he gave to his questions have seemed to many of his disciples and critics implicitly ethical and /or advocative…