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Justice, Exploitation and the End of Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

This paper is a small contribution to two large subjects. The first large subject is that of exploitation—what it is for somebody to be exploited, in what ways people can be and are exploited, whether exploitation necessarily involves coercion, what Marx's understanding of exploitation was and whether it was adequate: all these are issues on which I merely touch, at best. My particular concern here is to answer the two questions, whether Marx thought capitalist exploitation unjust and how the answer to that question illuminates Marx's conception of morality in general. The second large subject is that of the nature of morality—whether there are specifically moral values and specifically moral forms of evaluation and criticism, how these relate to our explanatory interests in the same phenomena, what it would be like to abandon the ‘moral point of view’, whether the growth of a scientific understanding of society and ourselves inevitably undermines our confidence in the existence of moral ‘truths’. These again are issues on which I only touch if I mention them at all, but the questions I try to answer are, what does Marx propose to put in the place of moral judgment, and what kind of assessment of the horrors of capitalism does he provide if not a moral assessment?

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987

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References

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35 I am indebted for discussion to Onora O'Neill, Stephen Clark and the other participants at the Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference in Belfast, also to Steven Lukes, Jenifer Hochschild and Jim Griffin, and to the Balliol Cerberus Society and the Politics Department at Princeton University. From the vast literature on all aspects of Marx and Marxism I would single out as particularly helpful Buchanan, (1982)Google Scholar, Elster, (1985)Google Scholar, Roemer, (1982)Google Scholar and (1986), Lukes, (1985)Google Scholar and Wood, (1981).Google Scholar