On Wed, 20 Oct 1999 20:56:20 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes:
>
>Kant is Bentham's evil twin. Both theorized the moral principles of
>commodity exchange; they are each other's mirror image. And between
>the
>two, one can make a case that Bentham is the lesser evil, especially
>for
>feminists. (I think Mary Wollstonecraft would agree with me.) In the
>end,
>though, they are the evil of two lessers.
>
>Yoshie
>
>
Apparently there have been some Marxists who have also thought that of Kant and Bentham, the latter was the lesser evil. There have been several Marxist thinkers who have been utilitarians. Karl Kautsky for instance embraced a utilitarian ethic in contrast to Kant's. Thus in his *Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History*, he wrote:
"The Kantian moral law assumes thus, in the first
place, a harmonious society as desirable and possible.
But it also assumes that the moral law is the means to
create such a society, that this result can be achieved
through a rule which the individual sets to himself.
We see how thoroughly Kant was deceived, when he
thought that his moral law was independent from all
conditions pertaining to the world of sense, and that it
formed thus a princple which would apply to all timeless
spaceless spirits, including God Almighty himself."
Kautsky took Kant to task for embracing a dualism between the realm of phenomena and a realm of noumena. Likewise, Kautsly rejected Kant's attempt to justify ethics on a non-naturalistic basis. Kautsky as both a convinced positivist and an ardent Darwinian believed in the viability of a naturalist ethic in which fundamental moral norms would be seen as the most basic impulses of human nature as shaped by both biological and social evolution. The former having been explained by Darwin with the latter having been taken care of by Marx's materialist conception of history. For Kautsky, historical materialism was simply the extension of Darwin's methodology into the social sciences.
For Kautsky a naturalist ethic that would be compatible with materialism would necessarily be a hedonist one. Thus he wrote concerning Epicurus:
"This view of Ethics had the advantage that it appeared
quite natural and it was easy to reconcile it with the
needs of those who desired to content themselves
with the knowledge which our senses gives us of the
of the knowable world as the real and to whom human
evidence appeared only part of this world. On the
other hand, this view of ethics was bound to produce
in turn that materialist view of the world. Founding
Ethics on the longing for the pleasure or happiness
of the individual or on egoism and the materialist
world concept, conditioned and lent each other mutual
support. The conncection of both elements comes
most completely to expression in Epicurus (341-270 B.C.).
His materialist philosophy of nature is founded with a
directly ethical aim."
Thus for Kautsky materialism including the materialism of Marx is closely connected with the embracing of a hedonist or utilitarian ethic, and he was convinced that such an ethic provided the best basis for a socialist morality. Thus Kautsky was quite critical of Kant's ethic although he was very much an admirer of Kant's general epistemological project (like most positivists).
Interstingly enough other Marxist thinkers who were quite different from Kautsky have likewise been partial to utilitatarianism. Thus the Frankfurter, Herbert Marcuse took a favorable view of John Stuart Mill's brand of utilitarianism. And more redently the Marxist philosopher Derek Allen in his paper "The Utilitarianism of Marx and Engels," *American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1973) made the case that Marx & Engels were implicitly utilitarians in terms of the value judgements that they made in their work.
Jim Farmelant
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