Abstract

Three main theses are defended: Kant's ethics is a social ethics; his ethics leads to a socialist ethics; and this socialist ethics constitutes a suitable platform for criticizing Marx's view of morality and bringing it to a higher level. ;Kant holds that we have such social duties as seeking the republican state and international peace. These duties follow from the more comprehensive duty to promote the highest good or moral society of co-legislators. What grounds Kant's social ethics is that the moral society is the end embedded in the different formulations of the categorical imperative. ;His theory of moral feeling offers a conceptual apparatus for examining four emotive components of the commitment to change society in light of the moral ideal: indignation about the present state of the world, enthusiasm engendered by progressive political events, solidarity with the victims of repression, and hope for progress. ;Kant's historical writings seek to support this hope. He proposes the regulative idea that the dialectic of self-interest pushes humanity toward the realization of the political ideals, setting the stage for the moral society. More promising is his argument that progressive events such as the French Revolution intimate that humanity is taking a moral interest in improving its condition. ;Kant maintains that the moral society cannot be expressed in an institutional form. The neo-Kantian socialist Cohen improves and expands his view in arguing that all our institutions must be modelled after the ideal of the community of co-legislators. This means that capitalist enterprise must be transformed into the cooperative. Cohen's cooperative socialism is compared to worker-control socialism. ;Kantian socialist ethics and Marx share a common evaluative perspective, but Marx denies that morality is important for action toward the socialist ideal. His denial is rooted in a dogmatic understanding of the idea of progress which contradicts his notion of the primary of praxis and lends itself to ideological abuses. Marx's idea of progress must be reinterpreted as a Kantian regulative idea, so that the repressed role of morality in his work can be explored and further developed. This Kantianization of Marx shows that Kantian socialist ethics offers a promising moral program for socialist theory and praxis