-- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
"There is no contradiction, nor does this offer any support for seeing Marx as offering ethical judgments (i.e., judgments of human conduct from a basis prior to practice."
Wherever and whenever we find ourselves we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations; we _never_ start from scratch or from a 'foundation' ouside of and independent of those relations. There exists no platfrom from which the ethicist can make his/her pronouncements."
That we find ourselves in a position (ensemble of relations; history) resisting capitalism is a fact, not a deduction from any independent moral principle or "value." Our condemnation of murder is an historical fact, not a universal principle that we can appeal to in abstraction from history. That historical fact gives a far firmer basis for the condemnation than would any abstract moral principle."
Interestingly enough this approach to was originally a conservative position. For instance, Edmund Burke in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," condemned Rousseau because the latter had appealed to abstract moral principles to ground his demands for fundamental political and social changes. And Burke also criticized the French revolutionaries for doing likewise when they promulgated their Declaration of the Rights of Man. Burke claimed that political rights in Britain were better supported because they were grounded in the "rights of Englishmen" which had, in Burke's opinion, a very definite basis in British history, as opposed to the French tendency to ground rights in abstract moral principles like the "rights of man," which in his view had little historical basis.
Burke formulated his arguments to defend his conservative opposition to the French Revolution, but similar reasoning can in fact uphold radical, and indeed, revolutionary demands, but that didn't really become apparent until Marx.
Jim F.
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