As regards the narrow areas of professional ethics, I will say that legal ethics is particularly impoverished, and if people writing in the area restrict themseks to U or K, that says more about them than the poverty of the alternatives. Similarly, medical ethics as it is usually defined restricts itself to physician's and patient's individual choices; tending to define policy issues like national health as out of bounds for the area. Marxists have a term for this" ideology. There are other professional ethics issues where non-U and non-K approaches have been fruitfully used: business ethics, interestingly enough, is one where Marxists and others have made contributions, including ones using Marxian and Ollmanian notions of disalienation. My friend Tony Smith, a Hegelian Marxist, has brought hsi commitments to bear in agricultural ethics. (He teachesa t Iowa State.)
Gordon: the glib dismissal of Marx has either rejecting ethics or having not thought about it seriously is not tenable after the last 30 years, starting with Ollman's book. There is a large literature--Leo calls it small, but you could spend a long time it--on Marxian moral philosophy, and Marx's moral philosophy. I taught a seminar on thsi stuff at Ohio State, when I was teaching there.
As to Hegel, a lot of people have your reaction to him, although I love him, but to get a grip on Hegel's moral theory, read Charles Taylor's very accessible Hegel and the Modern State, a short version of his big treatise on Hegel. Allen Wood's Hegel's Ethical Thought is perhaps the main treatise in Englsih devoted directly to the subject.
Contrary to Leo's suggestions, Hegelians have a lot that is very concrete and practical to say about ethical issues that Hegel touched on: the family, law and punishment, property rights, democracy, inequality and respect, slavery and subordination, etc.
--jks
>
>LeoCasey at aol.com:
> > There is a small but vibrant literature within Marxian scholarship on
>Marx
> > and ethics/morality, of which Bertell Ollman is a part. But this
>literature
> > operates on the highest level of abstraction, focusing on the question
>of
> > whether or not there are ethical or moral presuppositions within Marxian
> > analysis, and might properly be called meta-ethical. What does not
>exist, as
> > far as I know [I have not seen the Fisk book which Justin cited] is any
> > systemic effort to develop a working philosophy of Marxian ethics, one
>which
> > could be applied to all sorts of practical ethical issues. ...
>
>There's a note about Marx's ethical ideas at
>http://www.panix.com/~squigle/vcs/marxethics.html
>which seems to have been copped from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
>It seems that Marx (and Engels) whiffed the issue, with a sort
>half-wave to Hegel; but that may be the writer's prejudice.
>Otherwise Marx's ethics seem to be emotional and intuitive,
>like most people's.
>
>Searching on the Net for Hegel's ethics, I get the
>predictably depressing http://www.connect.net/ron/hegel.html:
> ...
> Ethics and Politics
>
> Hegel's social and political views emerge most clearly in his
> discussion of morality (Moralitt) and social ethics (Sittlichkeit).
> At the level of morality, right and wrong is a matter of
> individual conscience. One must, however, move beyond this to
> the level of social ethics, for duty, according to Hegel, is
> not essentially the product of individual judgment. Individuals
> are complete only in the midst of social relationships; thus,
> the only context in which duty can truly exist is a social
> one. Hegel considered membership in the state one of the
> individual's highest duties. Ideally, the state is the
> manifestation of the general will, which is the highest
> expression of the ethical spirit. Obedience to this general
> will is the act of a free and rational individual. Hegel
> emerges as a conservative, but he should not be interpreted
> as sanctioning totalitarianism, for he also argued that the
> abridgment of freedom by any actual state is morally
> unacceptable.
>
>I am unable to read more than a page of Hegel at a time, and
>then I have to recover for a week or two; can someone tell me
>if he actually argued stone plain dumb contradictions like
>"[M]embership in the state one of the individual's highest
>duties. ... [T]he state is the manifestation of the general
>will, which is the highest expression of the ethical spirit.
>Obedience to this general will is the act of a free and rational
>individual.... [But] the abridgment of freedom by any actual
>state is morally unacceptable"? This kind of doubletalk seems
>like charlatanry, as Popper says; and I hate to agree with
>Popper.
>
>Because I like the idea of deriving ethics from will. We all
>experience will; nobody experiences the greatest good for the
>greatest number (as such). This prejudices me a lot in favor
>of the former; it might be "real". Maybe the will escaped
>from Hegel's traps and can be found somewhere, breathing
>quickly, perhaps, but alive and well....
>
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