[lbo-talk] On the Threat from Religion

[Miles Jackson]

Doug Henwood wrote:
> What's the difference, really? Sometimes I think that Marx's hostility 
> towards moral or ethical judgments comes from contempt for the 
> admittedly sentimental positions of utopians and a desire instead to 
> be scientific. But if you don't have some moral or ethical objection 
> to exploitation, why do you have a problem with capitalism?
>
> Doug 
How about this: Marx's contempt for moral philosophy is a facet of his 
critique of idealism.  Moral judgements are a precipitate of an ensemble 
of social relations, just as human nature is.  Thus philosophers 
positing some universal standards of morality and ethics stripped from 
social relations is as goofy to Marx as the notion that there is some 
human essence or nature independent of the real, sensuous activity of 
human social life. 

Does this mean that Marx had no moral and ethical objections to 
capitalism?  I think it's clear he did, protestations about "normative" 
versus "ethical" arguments notwithstanding.  However, the objections 
themselves are a product of the social relations in which he was 
embedded; they were not the divine ethical pronouncements of some Oracle 
outside of/detached from history and social relations.   Moreover, in 
practical terms, his moral objections had a social impact because they 
resonated with existing social relations (a string theory analogy comes 
to mind, but I'll let it go).   Although moral philosophers prefer to 
base their arguments on what they perceive to be universal moral 
precepts, that's more or less an odd quirk of their particular culture; 
it is not the standard by which actual moral discussions in other social 
contexts should be assessed. 

So did Marx make historically and socially contingent arguments based on 
moral assumptions?  Yes.  Did he claim that these moral assumptions 
float above history and social relations?  Absolutely not.

Miles