Kantians & Utilitarians (was Re: Singer's latest)

[Justin Schwartz]

George Brenkert has a book attempting to articulate what he takes to be a 
sort freedom-consequentialism as Marx's view; Phillip Kain argues that sort 
of thing in Marx and Ethics too. Richard Miller has a piece on Marx and 
Aristotle; and there is an anthology on Marx and the Ancients with various 
meditations on Marxist eudaimonism, including that one. Actually I am very 
attacted to eudaimonism myself, but I am also a liberal, so I wouldn't want 
to impose on couch potatoes, the religious, etc., and I hope they would 
return the favor (which is why I am a liberal). Milton Fisk has a general 
functionalist Marxist theory in his Ethics and Society that is sort of 
Humean naturalist; it's attractive in many ways, but hasn't caught on. Of 
course there is a line of Marxist antimoralism, on which morality is 
supposed to be ideology. Miller is also an advocate of that view; Peffer a 
critic. Point is, while we don't have a full blown alternative general 
theory, it's not like we've been sleep at the switch on the subject either.

--jks


>
>
>On Wed, 04 Apr 2001 14:47:56 -0000 "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>writes:
> > Is this a serious question about Marxist medical ethics, Leo? Milton
> > Fisk
> > has a new book out on medical ethics, arguing for national health
> > care.
> > Richard Schmitt has several books developing Marxist conceptions of
> > human
> > nature. I asked Yoshie the same question, but in fact there is good
> > Marxist
> > work at precisely the level you pitched the question. The authors I
> >
> > mentioned are only good examples. What is lacking is a general
> > ethical
> > theory that might rival  utilitarianism or Kantianism. At the level
> > of
> > specific problems and applied ethics, Marxists have been active
> > without a
> > general theory.
> >
> > --jks
> >
>
>At the level of general theory, Marxists have tended to draw either
>implicitly
>or explicitly upon either the utilitarian or the Kantian traditions.
>Thus, Kautsky
>when writing about ethics tended to draw upon utilitarianism, whereas the
>Austro-Marxists (i.e. Otto Bauer, Max Adler) tended to draw upon
>neo-Kantianism.  Herbert Marcuse, commended J.S. Mill's brand
>of utilitarianism.  More recently, RG Peffer in his *Marxism and
>Social Justice* attempted to present a kind of Rawlsian Marxism -
>Rawls of course being a kind of neo-Kantian.  Some Marxist
>writers have attempted to transcend the utilitarian-Kantian debate
>by pointing out that Marx's own implicit ethical position seemed to
>have been Aristotelian in character, and these writers have attempted to
>articulate what they see as Marx's Aristotelianism.
>
>Jim Farmelant
>________________________________________________________________
>GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO!
>Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less!
>Join Juno today!  For your FREE software, visit:
>http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com