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More on Marxian Morality: Reply to Professor Allen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1979

Hilliard Aronovitch
Hilliard Aronovitch*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Extract

Professor Allen acknowledges that Marx's writings underdetermine the nature of his ethical views and that, with due caution, "the attribution of ethical views to Marx will have to be inferential; they will not be supportable merely by direct quotation" (p. 379). I am therefore rather puzzled by Allen's unease with the general nature of my project and by his repeated insistence for more direct texts. I confess that I am also somewhat surprised that Allen's exegetical concern has led him in dealing with the moral theory I have adumbrated to ask for the most part just, Is it Marx? and not also, in any detail, Is it true? I think it is clear though, by inference, that Allen has his doubts on the latter score, but what I must deal with are the various questions or problems Allen has regarding my attributions to Marx and the implications I find in his texts. There are as I see it four such questions, though each is perhaps the heading for a cluster of ones.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 387 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 Capital Vol. I, tr. S. Moore and E. Aveling (Moscow: Progress, 1974), p. 571 n.

2 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 303.

3 Capital, Vol. I, p. 460.

4 Ibid., p. 454; cf. p. 458.

5 The point is obscured by Allen's equating (p. 380) what Marx says with something he does not say and which is essentially the opposite. Marx does say, as Allen notes, that Ricardian political economy “expresses moral laws in its own way”. Marx does not say, and it would contradict the foregoing to say, that Ricardian political economy is ethically neutral.

6 Capital, Vol. III (Moscow: Progress, 1974), p. 820.

7 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in op. cit., p. 296.