>
> On Nov 21, 2008, at 9:44 AM, farmelantj at juno.com wrote:
>
>> Richard W. Miller in his book, *Analyzing Marx* argued
>> that Marxism does not attempt to apply what moral philosophers
>> would call the "moral point of view" to social systems
>> like capitalism. So therefore while for Miller, Marxism
>> does make normative judgments concerning social practices
>> and institutions, it does not necessarily make moral
>> judgments. The distinction between moral judgments and
>> other kinds of normative judgments has been long a fixture
>> of certain strands of analytical moral philosophy such
>> as reflected in the work of philosophers like Paul W. Taylor,
>> Kai Nielsen, Kurt Baier etc. So likewise, it may be
>> the case thatwhile Marx and Marxists do make various
>> sorts of normative judgments concerning capitalism
>> and other social systems, they are not necessarily
>> making moral judgments.
>
> 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?
Because it stands as an objective barrier to the Progress of History, comrade!
Leszek Kolokowski, in his wonderful but scathing history of Marxism, shows how this tensions over the role of moral judgment in Marxism (about which Marx himself was both ambiguous and ambivalent) was a major point of divergent interpretation during the formative Second International period. So it came as no surprise that it was at the heart of the split of 1917-1920. The "positive/objective" interpretation of Marxism was a major factor that led to the disaster of Leninism.
SA