Karl Marx the moral philosopher

Vanessa Wills

One of the first kinds of questions that really interested me was the universality of values. How is it that people from very different moral communities can talk to each other, develop shared values, and have ways of life that are consistent and compatible, even though they have very different worldviews? Understanding how values ​​can become universal through people working together, talking together, working together, theorizing together — that has always interested me.

In my early years at university I approached these questions from a philosophy of language perspective and thought about language communities. The first academic philosopher I had read years before was (Ludwig) Wittgenstein, so that sent me down a certain path. I was mainly interested in questions of philosophy of language, but with a very normative slant.

Then in 2003, the US declared war on Iraq. I discovered that I simply did not have the theoretical framework to understand how our leadership in the US could do something so unwise and immoral; unwise because it seemed clearly destined to lead the world down a path of more war and endless conflict — which it did — and immoral for the obvious reasons. So I simply did not find much that could help me resolve this confusion that I had about the war. I was very much against it and got involved in anti-war activism and started going to protests, and soon I was organizing protests. I went from being someone who had only been to one or two political protests before the invasion to being an organizer.

When I went to anti-war protests and got involved in that movement, I met socialists and started talking to them. I was very interested in what they had to say about the role of class, about the role of power, and about materialism. They talked about materialism in a way that no one had talked about in my philosophy classes. In seminars, materialism was mostly an abstract metaphysical argument about the fundamental metaphysical stuff of the universe, which is very interesting. But what interested socialists was historical materialism. They talked about how people in capitalist society tend to have idealistic worldviews and tend to think that the ideas in our heads play the most important role in determining reality; they tend to think, in various ways, that abstract concepts are a driving force of reality. I came to the conclusion that what plays the most important role in shaping these things is the set of material forces, and how people interact with their world to provide for their basic needs.

Once that was explained to me, I began to see the idealistic nature of so much mainstream discourse. When it comes to war, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, all their interests are very different from mine, so there is no reason for me to identify my interests with theirs or, more importantly, vice versa. I had already moved away from the philosophy of language and was working in this area called metaethics. Metaethics is concerned with the question of what we are trying to do when we ask ethical questions. Do we want to discover abstract, eternal, universal, mind-independent, human-independent facts that are sort of “out there” about morality? Or are we socially constructing and constituting for ourselves what is moral or immoral when we engage in ethical inquiry and ethical practice?

I took the more normative side of these debates and asked the socialists I spoke to, “What does Marxism say about ethics?” And they said, “Read (Leon) Trotsky’s Their morals and ours.” Trotsky claims that the ruling class has their morality and we have our morality, but he left me cold because he seemed to be reproducing the same puzzle. It wasn’t enough for me to say, “Great, this is the morality that’s in my interest, and this is the morality in yours, and let’s just fight it out,” even though that’s ultimately what people have to do politically. I had to reconcile those two things, so I switched gears and decided to write my dissertation on Marx and ethics.