Thanks to Ted for steering our thoughts away from the narrow ground of the sale of labour power to the broader horizon of the traditional Aristotelian idea of justice, or right (as in Hegel's philosophy of right), which Marx was familiar with.
Steven Lukes's extended treatment of his distinction between "morality of Recht and morality of emancipation" (Marxism and Morality, 27) is useful in this connection. The distinction drawn could also be seen as one between a narrow conception of justice and a broad one, such that the narrow conception can be seen as corresponding to the commutative justice of the bourgeois market, and the broad as corresponding to Marx's Feuerbachian "humanism", the "I-thou" relationship. The distinction seems to me to be in important respects continuous with the traditional one first drawn by Socrates and Plato to distinguish natural justice and the concept of "positive freedom" (Lukes's "emancipation") from the conventionalism of the Sophists and the concept of "negative freedom" (Lukes's Recht).
But the broader conception persisted in the tradition of natural law (Naturrecht, which figures in the full title of Hegel's philosophy of right), in which the notion of Recht (Jus) (objective Right, based on recta ratio, Aristotelian Right Reason) is central. Hence, "morality of Recht" is to my mind a very unfortunate misnomer for the narrow tradition in Lukes's account. Lukes's concern of course is with Marx's attack on egoistic bourgeois rights, especially those of property, as in On the Jewish Question. But he missed the chance to restore the word "Right" to its original meaning, which has connections with Aristotle's general justice, and the notion of righteousness.
For Hobbes introduced the disastrous idea that right is the freedom of the individual in a postulated state of nature, "liberty against other men". It is not to be confounded -- as Hobbes alleged Right had traditionally been -- with law; law now became for Hobbes the opposite of a right, something binding on the hitherto asocial individuals, and hence taking away some of their natural rights, leaving others.
This destruction of the traditional idea of right as the objective rational basis of law has come to dictate the canonical use of the word in the English language, though not in other European languages. That is the source of the commented on "ring" to the archaic-sounding "Let right be done" in Rattigan's The Winslow Boy -- so much more impressive than "Let justice be done".
On 23/07/2007 05:32:45, Ted Winslow (egwinslow at rogers.com) wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Yeah
> that's the standard line, but do you really believe it? Sure he
> > was annoyed by the screeching moralists of his day, as am I by their
> > counterparts today, but why object to capitalism if it didn't
> offend
> > you in some moral/ethical sense? What other basis is there for
> > revolutionary politics?
>
> Marx's conception of ethics is wholly positive. For him, ideally
> good relations - relations of mutual recognition - are an essential
> aspect of the good life, of "flourishing". For this reason, there
> are no rational grounds for moralistic condemnation of individuals
> for violating ethical principles, i.e. for acting "unjustly" in the
> sense of Aristotle. In fact, like punishment, moralistic
> condemnation hides unmastered sadism.
>
> In his recent The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton comes close to
> what's
> involved in
> Marx's idea of "flourishing" (as summarized, for
> instance, in his Comments on James Mill).
>
> "What we have called love is the way we can reconcile our search for
> individual fulfilment with the fact that we are social animals. For
> love means creating for another the space in which he might flourish,
> at the same time he