> They will just see things
> differently because answers to questions about What Is
> Good and What Is The Meaning of Life are inherently
> disputable. Even if there are Right answers -- which I
> believe, actually, or anyway that there are wrong ones
> -- in a free society we let people make their own
> mistakes. (That's Mill.)
As I've pointed out before, the concept of the "good" embodied in Marx's idea of the "universally developed individual" is inconsistent with imposing it on anyone. Its essence is the ethical idea of "mutual recognition," a relation completely free from domination and coercion.
It can only be realized if individuals self-consciously desire it and are able to arrange their conditions of life, including their developmental conditions, in accordance with its requirements.
It's obviously impracticable at the moment. It may remain impracticable always. The reasons for this have nothing to do with any need for coercive imposition, however.
Its claims about "rational self-interest" are very different from Rawls's. It claims a rational person would wish to live creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition. Marx's ideal distribution rule, for instance, is designed to realize this end. It enables individuals to live lives of this kind.
It's combined with a developmental view of rational self-consciousness so that the obstacles to the realization of the ideal derive from less than full development of such consciousness. Viewed within this framework, willing dominated by greed or by a will to power is irrational. In so far as such willing is the outcome of conditions of development it can be eliminated by improving these conditions. Even if all irrationality is the outcome of inadequate conditions of development, however, it isn't obvious how conditions can be changed in the way required.
This is the "practical" question the approach raises (given that its claims about rational self-interest are true).
Ted