What is the Marxist Ethic? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15074575
Do Marxists simply resort to modern moral theories and fill it with concepts and content associated with the working class ie solidarity.

[url]https://epistemh.pbworks.com/f/4.+Macintyre.pdf
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Thirdly there will certainly be a quite different set of critics who will begin by agreeing substantially with what I have to say about liberal in dividualism, but who will deny not only that the Aristotelian tradition is a viable alternative, but also that it is in terms of an opposition between liberal individualism and that tradition that the problems of modernity ought to be approached. The key intellectual opposition of our age, such critics will declare, is that between liberal individualism and some version of Marxism or neo-Marxism. The most intellectually compelling expo- nents of this point of view are likely to be those who trace a genealogy of ideas from Kant and Hegel through Marx and claim that by means of Marxism the notion of human autonomy can be rescued from its original individualist formulations and restored within the context of an appeal to a possible form ofcommunity in which alienation has been overcome, false consciousness abolished and the values of equality and fraternity realized.
My answers to the first two kinds of critic are to some large degree con- tained, implicity or explicitly, in what I have already written. My answers to the third type of criticism need to be spelled out a little further. They fall into two parts.


The first is that the claim of Marxism to a morally distinctive standpoint is undermined by Marxism's own moral history. In all those crises in which Marxists have had to take explicit moral stances-that over Bernstein's revisionism in German social democracy at the turn of the century or that over Khruschev's repudiation of Stalin and the Hungarian revolt in 1956 , for example-Marxists have always fallen back into relatively straight- forward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism. Nor is this surprising. Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism. In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like 'when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but per- fectly intelligible and reasonable relations' what he pictures is 'a community of free individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and dis-
tribution. This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robin- son Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied. It is unsurprising that ab- stract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of associa- tion which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitu~e which they condemn in others as ideological.

Secondly, I remarked earlier that as Marxists move towards power they always tend to become Weberians. Here I was of course speaking of Marx- ists at their best in, say, Yugoslavia or Italy; the barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow can be taken to be as irrele- vant to the question of the moral substance of Marxism as the life of the Borgia pope was to that of the moral substance of Christianity. Nonetheless Marxism has recommended itself precisely as a guide to practice, as a politics of a peculiarly illuminating kind. Yet it is just here that it has been of singularly little help for some time now. Trotsky, in the very last years of his life, facing the question of whether the Soviet Union was in any sense a socialist country, also faced implicitly the question of whether the categories of Marxism could illuminate the future. He himself made everything turn on the outcome of a set of hypothetical predictions about possible future events in the Soviet Union, predictions which were tested only after Trotsky's death . The answer that they returned was clear: Trot- sky's own premises entailed that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was to have illuminated the path to human libera- tion had in fact led into darkness.

Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thorough- going its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is com- mitted to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being ac- cumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermenscb: Lukacs's ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fan-
tasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky's cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies.

A Marxist who took Trotsky's last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own. For I too not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and con- flicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners- this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society- but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.
#15296747
Zaira Rodríguez Ugidos
The contraposing of truth and value, science and ideology, has penetrated common sense as the premise of “objectivity” – treated as a synonym for neutrality – in science, leading to an a priori dismissal of any evaluative position as a bias, a prejudice obstructing the process of knowledge. This opposition is present, for instance, in neo-positivism’s isolation of fact from value, where the latter appears as a subjective attitude (often a mere personal state of mind) towards the former. Thus, it eliminates the possibility of an objective evaluation of any action or historical process, leading to moral and political relativism. This contradiction between scientific thought and humanist action expresses a conservative divorce between theory and practice. To be faithful to the theory, according to such divorce, one has to be unfaithful to humanistic morality, and, conversely, if one wants to be consistently humanist in practice, one has to abandon science. The denial of the evaluative content of scientific knowledge and the cognitive content of evaluation, derives from a contemplative understanding of science. Hence, the positivist ideal of a scientist is the individual isolated in his/her “ivory tower,” insensitive to any external conditioning to the logic of scientific activity, that is, of her or his political, moral, and emotional interest.

Eventually, this (objectivistic) trend inevitably finds its logical counterpart, its external complement, in the (subjectivist) approach to human activity’s evaluative aspects as a matter of merely personal, arbitrary inclination. In this way, as a counterpart to objectivist positions, we could name postmodernism. Let us note the essential point: as much as postmodernists loudly proclaimed their differences with neo-positivism and other forms of “rationalism,” they presupposed, just like them, the rigid separation between knowledge and valuation. The difference is that the postmodern absolutises the opposite pole, the evaluative moment.[52]


How does one resolve these in practice?
Humanism and Science by Evald Ilyenkov
There can be no simple prescription or mathematical formula capable of meeting every occasion. If you run into a conflict of this nature, do not assume that in each instance “science” is correct and “conscience” rubbish, or at best a fairy tale for children. The opposite is no closer to the truth, namely that “moral sentiment” is always correct, that science, if it runs into conflict with the former is the heartless and brutal “devil” of Ivan Karamazov, engendering types like Smerdyakov. Only through a concrete examination of the causes of the conflict itself may we find a dialectical resolution, that is to say, the wisest and the most humane solution. Only thus may we find, to phrase it in current jargon, the “optimal variant” of correspondence between the demands of the intellect and of the conscience.

To be sure finding a concrete, dialectical unity between the principles of mind and conscience in each instance is not an easy matter. Unfortunately there is no magic wand, there is no simple algorithm, either of a “scientific” or a “moral” nature.
#15297342
I sympathize with a point of a commenter in the first video about positing changes in technology and relations producing new moral quandaries doesn’t really emphasize the objectivity of morality.

However I see in the youtubers comments how they wish to emphasize the masses but not sure they articulate why that is important because many readily interpret collectivity in terms of shared belief and thus shared subjective evaluation.
Of course morality isn’t a entirely independent object compelling all things but is derived from human relations. The second video in emphasizing how the project to change the world and imagine a better world as a precondition to moraity is interesting in that I do thing efforts to change things stem often from a concept and regulative ideal in opposition to the problem.

So a feminist might fantasize of a world without sexism because we have a concept of sexism as a problem. It is an abstract concept that becomes more concrete as its introduced into practice throughout parts of a society and mediated by artefacts such as policies and such that help maintain it as a habit of human practice and reproduce the ideal/value.
Just as a communist may imagine a communist society in a very abstract and simple way in motivating their opposition to the present economic system. It doesn’t require believing the utopian state will arrive easily or immediately but it helps condition how one thinks to act in the present.

However I think the basis of morality is based in the projects that mediate human beings, it confers what is right and wrong within that project and how one should act. Moral standards are not external to the tasks people participate in. However if a project is independent a person then it has little moral bearing on them and becomes more hypothetical.
A question like what should a socialist in Iraq do today is meaningless to a person who isn’t in some way situated within a socialist project in Iraq.

Meaningful moral statements have to be based on those who actually participate within something. This can still be distant such as some level of moral obligation to a nations own foreign policy by representatives of ones nation. And of course there are many projects which people act within to struggle for control over the state apparatus and its policies. The point is that theologians and philosophers don’t create anything new but merely generalize and notice something which is already objective in human life. Thought can only generalize from present conditions and somethings emerge as new before they do elsewhere.

The objectivity is that a project is both ideals or universals and particular social practices embedded within individuals acting with tools and signs/artefacts. As such the individual cannot simply will away the internal good of a project and what is good is subject to crisis and critique by participants of what is good. The project exists on a larger scale than individual belief/consciousness and it also isn’t merely a additive collection of beliefs exactly but is institutionalized in how people act. People may regularly fail to meet the ideal or perfect concept of s project but the ideals remain, the internal goods of a project do not cease to exist and may motivate a revolution or return to the values to undo decay of the institutional norms failing to strive for the ideals. If one doesn’t believe such things exist, try and just not act according to the norms of an institution and its adherents and see what happens. One cannot meaningfully ignore the values of projects and one must be aware of what projects one is acting within or risk consequences. And projects extend across generations, they can be traditions going on for hundreds of years although they may have developed and changed in response to crises of its own norms and standards presented by problems in the world and required debate and reform. For example, when asked what makes a good Christian, one can draw upon the entire tradition of the religion for wisdom just as a union member can look to the larger workets movement across history on wisdom on how to act. The individual does not act purely as an individual abstracted relations and influences and can drawn upon the wisdom resolved in past practices, critiques and corrections based on past predicaments. And that is in large part where morality guides the individual, to face predicaments, even tragic ones with no perfect solution but best navigate it through the wisdom of ones tradition that goes beyond whatever an individual comes to on their own. Often an individual will repeat the same solutions and mistakes of their tradition unless they learn it consciously and navigate life more intentionally.

And then to competing theories, morals must be based on a true conception of human nature not as a static thing but as to how we develop and against moral theories that misconstrue our nature. What human beings are sets the conditions of what is right. This is where the youtuber is right about somethings like life expectancy becoming a moral issue with longer life expectancy because the possibility of a longer life as a norm becomes normative and to have less means that one isn’t best realizing human potential and posits a harm to a people to be rectified. Otherwise one would stand at the impossible of saying its immoral that we’re not immortal but it is not yet a possibility to be considered in practice. What we are and can be sets the boundaries of practice and what we ought to do rather than just utopian dreaming.
[url]d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf[/url]
The question that may be asked here, of course, is whether human flourishing—the development of “rich individuality”—really is the highest aim for human beings and whether it really can play the role of a supreme moral principle in any moral theory worth the name. A further question is whether building a movement for communism really is the best way to realize this aim. I will treat the three questions separately, although as I will show they are closely related.

I will do my best to motivate the first question, which more bluntly stated, is this: What is so good, anyway, about satisfying human needs and developing human capacities? Why should that be the basis of our moral theory? Why not maximizing happiness? Or instantiating the virtues? Or following divine commands, for that matter?

The answer, though some will find it unsatisfying, is that we should care about the full flourishing of human beings because they're us. And we are more than just happiness- experiencing blobs; we are capable of a vast array of activities and experiences and it is only through the full exploration of these that we can realize our human essence as social individuals in a productive engagement with the world around us.
I think Marx would argue that the question, Why promote human flourishing?, doesn't arise unless a person already has such an alienated and un-human perspective on her own species and on the world that for her, knowing that some path of action is most likely to preserve the continued existence of human beings and to further their full development in the natural world is not enough to answer the question, Ought this path to be taken? And of course, there are people like these. The religious-minded, for instance, may think that the this-worldly orientation of rich individuality is misguided, and that the existence of man as an essentially spiritual being is to be realized through the glorification of God and an eventual assumption into Heaven. Or, in a more mundane spin on skepticism about human flourishing in the natural world as a moral end, there is the tendency among members of the animal rights movement to regard human beings as just another type of animal among many animals, all of (at least) relatively equal moral worth. Marx, after all, is the consummate “speciesist,” insisting that value of any kind only comes onto the scene once human beings start producing in order to satisfy their needs. And this, I believe provides a significant part of Marx's answer to these types of criticisms. The mistake that these sorts of critics make is similar to the mistake made by the person who wants to know the answer to the theological question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”…

It is incoherent, and incommensurate with our scientific knowledge, to talk about value in a way that does not assume human beings and their productive activity as the source and ontological basis of all value in the world.
Of course, in suggesting that in the absence of a greatly disturbed relationship to the human species and to the natural world, there can be no doubt that human flourishing as Marx describes it is the highest goal for human beings, I have relied heavily on a conception of just what human beings are, exactly. As I have alluded to above, species of Utilitarianism fail as moral theories because they construe human beings too narrowly. In the place of the real human being himself, stands the human being's capacity to experience happiness, to avoid suffering, etc., abstracted away from the real human being. We are promised a theory about human beings, and instead we get a theory about sensitive blobs—and worse yet, blobs that are sensitive to only one type of experience, of happiness, or of suffering. A wide range of human social relations are reduced to just one relation of usefulness.

Kantianism suffers similar problems, in that it is a moral theory based on the free will, which is itself an abstraction away from the human being. As long as the free will is properly constituted, it matters not what the effects of that will are in the material world. It is a theory unsuited to address the questions which face human beings as, precisely, natural and social beings whose essence is a metabolism with the natural world through the labor process.

Throughout the various forms and appearances that human life has taken throughout history and across different societies, what remains the same is that human beings must constantly interact with the natural world in order to produce their own existence, and that in so doing, they produce new, historically arisen needs which are also then fulfilled through the labor process, a “metabolism” with the natural world which lays the basis for a continued course of change, progress, and development.

… Throughout the various forms and appearances that human life has taken throughout history and across different societies, what remains the same is that human beings must constantly interact with the natural world in order to produce their own existence, and that in so doing, they produce new, historically arisen needs which are also then fulfilled through the labor process, a “metabolism” with the natural world which lays the basis for a continued course of change, progress, and development.


So from a concept of what we are and concern with us rather than an alienated system that misconstrues our nature and how we and our needs change as well as our ability to meet those needs, so too do moral questions.

So from an idea of human needs as not merely biological but socially developed and in conjunction with how capitalism produces so many new needs and has the productive capacity to meet much of it, we see broadly the massive gap between is and what could be and argue that it ought to be because capitalist production isn’t neutral but actively retards human development amidst the great potential to radically develop a rich individuality of humanity. This also lends itself to the idea of seeking to support all people and a kind of humanism because say the idea of restricting women's autonomy and development doesn’t accord with respect for their nature as humans but tends to be motivated by the exploitation limiting of a people for ones own gain. This is a purposely attachment to what is in many cases where what could be far greater and ones defense really is I don’t want to give up my gains for someone else good. Where even American founding fathers who criticized slavery had slaves and didn’t like the institution and decried it publicly but couldn’t commit to giving it up. Just as today many wish to preserve the buying power of developed nations over less industrialized ones through imperialist foreign policy as one is focused on ones own consumption. To which the second video makes a point of the solipism of divorcing oneself from any consideration of others in a purely selfish sense. But one must commit to the fact that one is opposed to means which are good to the detriment of others and at least be honest of the immorality of their position.

And moral theories are competitive in what claims they make and can be in dialogue as some theories can effectively criticize the limitations of another on its own terms. And when one comes a better comprehension of human beings are made by their labor upon the world and thus change themselves, one has a very different conception of what humans are and can do than if they are reduce to utility seekers or purely rational beings.

From this there is no automatic answers to things because moral dilemmas require first an adequate understanding of the circumstances before determining the best course of action which is why the abstractness of moral theories is a weak point that appeals to those who dislike the ambiguity and difficulty of thinking through actual life.

https://epochemagazine.org/16/a-problem-based-reading-of-nussbaums-virtue-ethics/#:~:text=In%20Nussbaum's%20interpretation%20of%20Aristotle,particular%20sphere%20of%20human%20activity.
There is no claim here that individual virtues are positive, determinate phenomena (admitting of clean conceptual definition), instead it is the problems that are real (as the ‘grounding experiences’), and the virtue merely denotes the ‘ideal solution’ in a case by case basis. Thus, there are as many kinds of generosity as there are problematic situations calling for ‘generous’ conduct. Such an ‘ideal solution’, or set of proximate solutions, is implied by the very presence and apprehension of problems qua problems. It’s not that ‘generosity’ precedes there being problems requiring ‘generous’ conduct, it’s that there is a particular class of problems that inhere in life that, being problems, call us to action. The name for acting excellently towards this particular class of problems is ‘generosity’.

A number of conditions need to hold for this (encountering a problem calling for ‘generosity’) to arise: firstly, this problem is related to the division of property with others (as this is why the term ‘generosity’ makes an appearance, and not ‘magnanimity’, or ‘courage’), secondly, this division strikes us as problematic, engendering a choice between competing motivations, or outcomes.

When I make a gift to my little brother of suits that no longer fit me, knowing that they’ll fit him and that he’d appreciate the gift, I have not really overcome a ‘problem’. I had no use nor desire for them. There was no problem at all, and thus no generosity strictly speaking. Generosity is only needful when I feel my desire for this thing of mine conflict with my recognition that it would be appreciated or needed more by others (or some other recognition that basically turns my possession and distribution of the thing, vis-à-vis others, into a problem for me). We first need to have this recognition in order to experience the conflict that underlies the problem, the ‘excellent’ solution of which is termed ‘generosity’ (because this particular problem involves the distribution of our possessions among others, it is ‘native’ to that sphere of human ‘drama’).

It is not enough for me, when this problem arises, to remind myself of the maxim ‘be generous’, which I then interpret to universally mean ‘give away the thing that I want’, because excellence of conduct vis-à-vis this problem in this situation may not call for ‘generosity’ to be interpreted in this way (for example, in the distribution of attention and time between multiple people). In fact, from this perspective, this style of rational deliberation is entirely back to front. ‘Generosity’ is not a form of conduct I consult to match with my action when I encounter a problem, the form of conduct to be called ‘generosity’ is engendered by my overcoming of this problem excellently (and only I and those involved here in this predicament ultimately know what this consists in exactly). I don’t need the name of the virtue, or what others or I believe it entails (though this may provide assistance), merely intuit, when greeted with a problem, that there is some maximally ideal solution (notice, not necessarily “perfect”), given the situation, and things and actors within it. And, such an intuition is cooked into the very idea of encountering a problem as problem in the first place.

This is why the principlist objection that virtue ethics does not give a clear indication of what to do in moral test cases misses the mark. Not only is it not offering simple principles of the kind “be virtuous, be generous”, but it rejects the feasibility of the moral test cases as ‘false problems’. These moral test cases, stripped of all particularity, and with their assumption there must be some, one, clear solution, seemingly conflates the kinds of problems worthy of moral consideration (the problems of life) with ‘problems’ in the sense of a ‘math problem’ set for homework. Furthermore, as Annas has pointed out (2013), ‘flattening out’ the problems of life to the simplicity of a math-like homework problem is in itself a kind of attitude or pattern of conduct that can be evaluated by a more holistic virtue ethical approach. Towards what problems and when and where is it an ‘excellent response’ to flatten out the issue itself in this way? And when is doing so a vice? What does a Utilitarian buy for their spouse on their birthday, for example?


The above also accords to how mora conduct is based in life itself and isn’t a moral theory which then guides action because we can act morally without the theory because what we have is a working judgement of the situation and views and values of how best to act based in a way of living.
This is why moral standards may also change because the state of human life does change and we can argue that somethings are wrong to the extent that they were to the overall detriment of human development and well being. Not in a concise to a specific quantified way but definitely like a wise judge who evaluates the facts and tries to see what the best course of action is rather than merely rely on a total and simple adherence to following only an ends or a means.

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