<i>Marx's Ethical Vision</i> by Vanessa Christina Wills New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 320 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp>: 9780197688144

Vanessa Wills's Marx's Ethical Vision is a timely, wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, and provocative book. It is a sympathetic exposition of its subject-matter: Wills wants to exhibit Marx's ethical vision in a way that shows it to be coherent, attractive, and relevant to contemporary moral philosophy and politics. Along the way, she interprets myriad themes in Marx's thought, including his conception of human nature and its metaethical significance, his critique of alienation in capitalism, his ideal of the “rich” and “social” individual, his view of the role of freedom and agency in history, his conceptions of ideology in general and of morality and religion in particular, and his critiques of specific moral theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. Wills says that the book is written not only for Marx scholars and moral philosophers but also for those “in and out of the academy” who might find Marx's ideas inspiring as calls to political action (x). I think the book is suitable for both types of readers, with two caveats. The presentation is sometimes framed around extensive engagement with secondary literature, in a way that I suspect will make parts of the book less accessible to non-academic readers—though perhaps this is just a matter of taste. More importantly, on occasion, certain key Marxian concepts or views are presupposed without being fully explained. The most significant examples of this are the concepts of the forces and relations of production, which are presupposed without being defined in the chapter on ideology, and Marx's economic theory of capitalism, which Wills does not discuss systematically or in detail. The latter is a sensible omission given Wills's focus on Marx's fundamental ethical framework, but it does have the consequence that some of the specific ethical judgments about capitalism that Wills attributes to Marx are not fully motivated within the book. Generally speaking, therefore, I think the book will be most valuable to readers, whether in or out of the academy, who have at least some prior familiarity with Marx or Marxism, or those who combine Wills's book with complementary readings on historical materialism and Marx's theory of capitalism. If there is one claim that the book as a whole aims to establish, it is that Marx had an ethical—indeed, a moral—vision. Marx infamously suggests that all morality is a form of ideology, comparable to religion, that will disappear under communism. He also criticizes “utopian” socialisms that aim to bring about a communist revolution by means of moral exhortation, and advocates instead for a “scientific” socialism that shows how capitalism itself produces the social conditions for such a revolution. These views might lead one to think that ethical or moral judgments play no serious role in Marx's own thought. I sense that this “amoralist” understanding of Marx is Wills's most important foil in the book, the misconception (as she sees it) that she is most keen to correct. Following Bernard Williams, moral philosophers sometimes use the word ‘morality’ more narrowly than ‘ethics’, reserving the former for a distinctively modern form of thought. Aristotle, for instance, had an ethical system, in this terminology, but not a moral philosophy; Nietzsche rejected morality but perhaps not ethical thought as such. Wills, for her part, makes certain claims about morality—namely, that it is ideological and that communism will abolish it—that I believe she never explicitly affirms about ethics. Strictly speaking, however, she does not distinguish morality from ethics. Ethics, for Wills, is ought-thought: it “concerns questions about what we ought to do, how we ought to live, and how we ought to treat one another” (4), as well as questions about how the social world ought to be arranged (53–4). For most of the book, she characterizes morality exclusively in the same way (27–8, 56–8, 73), and in many contexts she seems to use the terms interchangeably. According to Wills, Marx takes morality thus understood to be a form of ideology, but in a non-pejorative sense. Ideologies, she argues, are simply those forms of thought through which human beings understand and respond to social conflicts that arise only in class societies—principally, conflicts between the forces and relations of production (18, 24) and between classes themselves (220). Such forms of thought are historically transient, since they are associated with historically transient social relations, but they are not necessarily illusions that should be rejected here and now (18–28). it does follow immediately from the claim that morality is a form of the social consciousness of class antagonisms, that the total resolution and abolition of these antagonisms would produce material circumstances in which the forms of consciousness uniquely corresponding to class society could finally, in Marx's words, “completely vanish.” (220) This account, however, does not yet explain why Marx would have thought of morality as ideological, that is, as a response to problems that arise only in a class society. This is by no means a straightforward proposition. After all, the claim, as Wills interprets it, is not merely that specific domains of ought-thought—such as those involving concepts like theft, contract, and fairness—are ideological. Rather, all ought-thought is supposed to be ideological. In order to see how Wills motivates this sweeping claim on Marx's behalf, it will be useful to turn to her conception of his moral theory. According to Wills, Marx endorses many particular moral judgments, most obviously judgments to the effect that we ought to do what we can to oppose capitalism. She goes further, though, and reads Marx as a systematic ethical or moral theorist in roughly the style of, say, John Stuart Mill. That is, she reads him as identifying a single fundamental principle from which we can derive judgments about how particular agents ought to live and act, given information about their particular circumstances. The fundamental ethical principle for Wills's Marx is that “we ought to do that which promotes human flourishing” (46; compare 128). The relevant ideal of flourishing is grounded in a conception of human nature (46–9), and Wills also describes Marx's ethical principle in terms of “help[ing] human beings to realize their nature” and promoting “the expansion of human powers and the satisfaction of human needs” (54; compare 73, 128). Wills develops a rich account of Marx's conception of human nature, to the details of which I cannot do justice here. I will note merely that on her view, that nature has both physiological and social, and both ahistorical and historically emergent features (see especially Chapters 3 and 6). According to Wills, Marx argues that capitalism systematically thwarts the unimpeded and undistorted performance of essential human activities, and the unimpeded and undistorted development of essential human powers and satisfaction of essential human needs (e.g., 65, 81–4, 118, 125). It therefore thwarts human flourishing. At a certain point in history, however, it becomes possible to replace capitalism with communism, which would enable human beings to flourish fully. At this point—and no earlier—Marx's ethical theory entails that “human beings ought to work to promote communism” (58), each doing what she can to contribute to this endeavor in light of her particular circumstances and abilities (54–7). In this way, the theory, when combined with knowledge of specific historical circumstances, yields moral judgments in the form of “specific claims about how human beings ought to behave in the concrete” (55, emphasis Wills's). These judgments, according to Wills, apply at every level of human agency, both collective and individual: “Adopting Marx's ethical vision, it is possible to make moral judgments not just about what a class or society as a whole ought to do, but also about individual agents and their actions.” (58). In metaethical terms, there is, as Wills points out, something Aristotelian about the theory she attributes to Marx. It purports to bridge the Humean gap between judgments about what is and judgments about what ought to be, by purporting to derive judgments about how human beings ought to live from descriptive judgments about human nature (46–53). I think it would be importantly misleading, however, to describe Wills's Marx simply as an Aristotelian, for at the first order his theory really amounts to a form of consequentialism—a decidedly un-Aristotelian view. It is true that Aristotle himself defends an account of human nature, from which he derives an ideal of human flourishing. For Aristotle, however, flourishing is not fundamentally a goal to be “promoted.” The fundamental goal is not to promote flourishing but simply to flourish. If the phronimos necessarily promotes the flourishing of others, this is because a flourishing life necessarily involves friendship and the exercise of other-regarding virtues such as generosity, not because we fundamentally and generally ought to do whatever promotes human flourishing. From a Marxist point of view, the turn to consequentialism makes a certain amount of sense. For according to Marx, we live in conditions that make human flourishing impossible. In such conditions, an ethical theory needs to give us more than a description of a good human life and an exhortation to lead such a life. Such an exhortation would be impossible to follow. Instead, what we must do in such conditions is to promote the conditions that make flourishing possible. One way to motivate the theory that Wills attributes to Marx, then, is as what might happen to Aristotelianism in a social world that is acknowledged to be radically non-ideal. I do wonder, though, whether Wills overplays her hand in attributing to Marx a consequentialist moral theory with such general scope. Certainly, Marx had a conception of human flourishing, associated with a conception of human nature. Certainly, he thought capitalism undermined human flourishing. Arguably, he thought that capitalism should be overcome for that very reason. But it is a large leap from affirming these statements to affirming the general principle that “[t]he answer to the question of how a person should act” (59) in any given situation is that she should do whatever promotes human flourishing. Indeed, it is not obvious that Marx had or was even interested in a general principle for answering this question at all. Be that as it may, Wills's reading of Marx as a moral theorist informs her explanation of why Marx would think of morality as a form of ideology that communism will abolish. At several points in the book, Wills makes the following argument on Marx's behalf (26–8, 66, 73, 215, 225). Moral thought is essentially a way of thinking about and trying to overcome the gap between what is and what ought to be. In our time, there is such a gap. Communism, however, will close it: “Morality is an attempt to theorize and close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Marxism is a theory that posits that the world can be made what it should be.” (213) Once the gap is closed, morality will disappear. Wills takes great pains to emphasize that this means not merely that people will no longer find it useful to think about moral facts. It means, more radically, that there will no longer be any such facts to think about: “No gap, no fact of the matter about what ought to be done to close the gap.” (225). The first premise of this argument is the claim that moral thought is exclusively concerned with closing the is/ought gap and becomes empty if and when that gap is closed. This is a more controversial claim than Wills suggests. Kant, for instance, takes ought-thought to be applicable to any rational agent who could conceivably fail to act well. In that case, the very possibility of an is/ought gap is enough to generate material for ought-thought. If he is right about this, then ought-thought will continue to be applicable to human beings even in a communist society as Wills's Marx envisions it. One reason to think that Kant is right is that we engage in ought-thought not only with a view to closing gaps between what is and what ought to be, but also with a view to preventing such gaps from opening up. In a communist society, such thought might take the following form: “We ought (not merely to bring about but) to maintain social arrangements that promote human flourishing; our current arrangements do so; therefore, we ought to maintain our current arrangements.” I do not see how the mere disappearance of the actual gap between what is and what ought to be would make such thoughts empty. Yet they are straightforwardly thoughts about what people ought to do. The second premise of the argument is that there will in fact be no gap between what is and what ought to be in a communist society. The principal reason why Marx might have affirmed this claim is obvious enough. Communism, as “a society based on the needs of human beings” (26), will be massively more conducive to human flourishing than capitalism; the communist revolution can thus be expected considerably to reduce the gap between what is and what ought to be. Even if we accept these views, however, the claim that communism will eliminate the is/ought gap is extraordinarily optimistic. After all, there may be impediments to human flourishing other than capitalism, and it is hardly obvious that communism will remove them all. What reason, then, might Marx have had to believe that the is/ought gap will entirely disappear? For Wills's Marx, what we morally ought to do is to promote human flourishing in general (and not just our own). Many moral philosophers have thought that the primary or fundamental obstacle to the pursuit of this sort of end is that it all too often conflicts with our desires, especially those connected with our perceived self-interest. In one way or another, we often simply do not want to do what is required to promote human flourishing. On Wills's interpretation, Marx expects communism to eliminate this conflict between desire and morality—the conflict between what we want to do and what we ought to do (26–7, 189, 213–14, 224–26, 236–38). Marx holds out the possibility that when human beings alter their society to do away with the exploitation and degradation of human beings, they will also effect an alteration so profound that it will make prosocial forms of human interaction habitual, customary, and natural. (238) Critics who wonder whether the kinds of naturalized and habitual forms of prosocial human behavior Marx imagines for communist society could ever take place are quite right to point out that a human being is neither an angel nor a saint, nor could she be. But Marx's theory requires neither that she be nor that she become so. (237–38) That said, I think Wills's book also contains a second and subtler argument for Marx's claim that communism will abolish morality. This argument also appeals to the idea of prosocial motives, but without requiring us to accept the strong claim that communism will close the is/ought gap. For most of the book, as I have said, Wills speaks of morality simply as ought-thought. In the fascinating final chapters, however, she sometimes seems to suggest additionally that moral thought essentially takes the form of distinctively “external, alien command[s]” (236, compare 224–26). She seems to associate this externality with the idea of a distinctively moral form of motivation, which is divorced from an agent's own natural and habitual desires (213–18, 237–38). Wills does not say whether she takes the externality of moral prescriptions to be a feature of ought-thought as such or whether she takes it to distinguish moral thought from other forms of ought-thought, but either position seems defensible. The conception of morality as a set of prescriptions with a putative authority and motivational power external to desire is fairly commonsensical. It is worth noting, though, that it is not altogether neutral from the point of view of moral philosophy. It is certainly at home in the Kantian tradition, but much less so in the Humean and neo-Aristotelian traditions. What Wills's Marx has to say about morality in this particular sense therefore promises to speak more directly to moral philosophers of a Kantian persuasion than to Humeans or neo-Aristotelians. In any case, this more or less Kantian conception of morality makes room for the following un-Kantian argument. In a communist society, people's thoroughly prosocial motives will already incline them to promote human flourishing in general. Insofar as they feel called upon, and call on one another, to pursue this end, then, this call will not take a distinctively moral form. It will appeal not to the authority and motivating power of a moral law external to desire but to ends or values that these people already care about, by virtue of their own habitual desires. Distinctively moral thought, in the sense of a command external to desire, will thus play no role in such a society. It will be abolished. I suspect that Wills has something like this argument in mind when she says, for instance, that “[i]n fully developed communism, there is no social form taking the shape of a command that human beings ‘follow’, even if only unwittingly” (226). If so, however, I think she should have distinguished the argument more clearly from the previous argument based on the idea of closing the is/ought gap. For unlike the previous argument, the argument from moral motivation does not require that the members of a communist society always already be living exactly as it would be good for them to live. It merely requires that, if they find themselves failing to do so, they will feel called upon, and will call on one another, to correct course entirely on the basis of concerns internal rather than alien to their natural and habitual desires. It both exists as an external command for the ruling classes, whose class interest disinclines them to follow it, and is already abolished as an external, alien command for those whose position is such that they cannot free themselves without freeing all of humanity, as well. (236; compare 44, 193–94) It strikes me that this view is in tension with parts of Wills's earlier account of Marx as a systematic moral theorist. According to that earlier account, Marx thinks of morality as “thoroughly historical” yet “universal” (66). He affirms moral judgments that are historically specific but, at a given time, apply to all human beings: most saliently, the judgment that “in the present historical moment, human beings ought to work to promote communism” (58). By the end of the book, on the other hand, Wills has come to the conclusion that these judgments do not, qua moral, apply to the working class at all, at least if we understand morality, as she sometimes does, in terms of prescriptions alien to natural and habitual desire. According to Marx, the working class constitutes almost the entirety of humanity. Of almost the entirety of humanity, then, Marx does not think that they morally ought to work to promote communism. I wish Wills had explored this tension, for it seems to suggest that there is an important sense in which Marx had no general moral theory after all.