000			02597nam a22002537a 4500
003			OSt
005			20260121142656.0
008			260121b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780197688144 (HB)
040			_ckul
082			_a335.4 _bWIL/M
084			_2Colon Classification
100			_aWills, Vanessa Christina _98493
245			_aMarx’s Ethical Vision
260			_aUSA: _bOxford University Press, _c2024
300			_axv, 298p.
520			_a"The communists do not preach morality at all"; this line from The Communist Manifesto might seem to settle the question of whether Marxism has anything to offer moral philosophy. Yet, Marx issued both trenchant critiques of "bourgeois" morality and thundering condemnations of capitalism's "vampire-like" destructiveness. He decried commodity-exchange for corroding our ability to value one another for who we are, not how much our lives could be traded away for. He expressed apparently ethical views about human nature, the conditions necessary for human flourishing, and the desirability of bringing such conditions about—views that are interwoven throughout his life's work, from his youthful philosophical poetry to his unfinished masterpiece, Capital. Renewed attention to Marx's distinctively "dialectical" and historical materialist approach to conflict and change makes sense of this apparent tension in his thought. Following Marx, Vanessa Christina Wills centers labor—human beings satisfying their needs through conscious, purpose-driven, and transformative interaction with the material world—as the essential human activity. Working people's struggles reveal capitalism's worst ravages while pointing to a better future and embodying the only way there: rational transformation of our relationships to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world, so that the human condition emerges not as a burden we must bear but as life we joyfully create. The purposiveness of labor gives rise to a normativity already inherent in the present state of things, one that can guide us in knowing what sort of world we should build and that further prepares us to build it. Rather than "preach morality," the key task for moral philosophy is to theorize in the light that working peoples' struggles for survival shine on capitalism—an existential threat to humanity and the defining ethical problem of our time.
650			_aKarl Marx _91738
650			_aMarxism
650			_aDialectical Method _98494
650			_aMarx's Ethical Vision _vEthics _98495
650			_aMoral Theories _98496
942			_2ddc _cBK
999			_c755365 _d755365