Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 15:56:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: morality



I rather suspect that James H and I have reached an impasse. I regard
justice as a system of principles for distributing the benefits and
burdens of society in a fair way, one that's more or less acceptable to
the people who live in it. In a class society, justice puts limits on the
what the dominant groups can get away with and what the subordinate groups
have to put up with. In a classless society, there would be no such
groups, so justice would merely be a system of limits on how much anyone
can get away with how much anyone has to put up with.

James H thinks that justice--not capitalist justice, but any justice--is a
reflection of the market; so that the only justice is capitalist justice.
There was no justice before capitalism, just primitive and personalized
impositions and local entitlements. This would come as a surprise to
Aristotle and Plato, who had a lot to say about dikiosune, generally
translated as justice, which Aristotle understood, roughly (in taking
about distributive justice) to mean giving to each his own. I would have
thought that was recognizably about justice as we understand it. It would
have mystified the Romans: Justinian's Code largely is about justice. And
it would have puzzled Glanville and the early common law judges in
medieval England, who thought they were doing something that had something
to do with justice.  Etc.

James also thinks that the only capitalist justice is the official justice
of the capitalists. If the workers propose an alternative radical justice,
a different way of distributing benefits and burdens, they are simply
reproducing capitalist justice in some deformed and inadequate way that
somehow, if it were fully realized, would go beyond justice altogether. It
wouldn't be a system of distributing benefits and burdens and giving to
each his own, I guess. I don't know why he thinks this. All he offers in
support of the proposition is the rather implausible dictum that any
justice is just an ideological reflection of the market. Why this would
be I cannot guess.

Maybe the worry is the old complaint that any talk about rights is
necessarily individualist and atomizing, the sort of thing Marx says about
"the Rights of Man" in On the Jewish Question. Of course Marx there
restricted his comments to the critique of the French revolutionary Rights
of Man conception and the particular content of these, which were
unabashedly a capitalist justice. But James thinks for some reason that
any justice is like that.

To change subjects, James objects to my argument that slavery was unjust
and immoral even in slave society. I had conceded that this must be vis a
vis a feasible alternative; in ancient society, some form of less unfree
labor, but hardly a society of associated producers, not attainable from
ancient Athens. He says:
> 
> I think you unwittingly give voice to the unserious nature of your
> argument here. 'Bonded labour is a good thing' is surely no less testing
> a proposition than 'slavery is a good thing'. 

This is a reasonable objection. I would say that as a first approximation
slavery is a worse thing. In a more complex way I would argue, as I did in
my paper "Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium,, and Justice" that the
reality or even the likelihood of generalized resistance to slavery or
bond labor, even in situations where there is no immediately feasible
alternative to them, are enough to establish that these forms of
domination are unjust on their own terms. This is because those terms
involve a commitment to the notion that the social order acknowledges
and reconcile's everyone's legitimate interests--that in the deepest sense
is what justice is--and resistance to domination gives that claim the lie.

> >By the way the _notion_ that slavery was bad was not
> >foreign to the ancient world. One finds it clearly in Homer (7th C, BC)
> >and even more clearly in Euripedes (end of 5thC BC). 
> >
> I don't know but I suspect they mean that the condition of slavery is a
> misfortune, not that the institution of slavery is immoral.

Maybe in Homer. Clearly _not_ in Euripedes.

> >ends in themselves."
> 
> Marx, a keen critic of both Bentham and Kant would have seen those
> alternatives as smuggling a specific, partisan goal (ie the market) into
> their universal principles. Kant's 'treating other as ends in
> themselves' implies a prior alienation between subjects, who must
> thereby jealously guard there rights against others. What initially
> strikes you as a universal principle is only an idealisation of the
> mutual hostility of the market. On Bentham Marx makes an aside to the
> effect that his rational calculus of the greatest good is but the profit
> and loss ledger rendered in pedantic English philosophy.

I don't buy it, despite the personal commitment of both Bentham and Kant
to capitalism. Utilitarianism tells us to maximize overall social welfare.
If socialism is what does this, then we should have socialism on
utilitarian grounds. J.S. Mill was a socialist for this very reason.
Bentham thought the facts were otherwise, but utilitarianism doesn't
itself commit us one way or the other. As for Kant, serious arguments can
be made that he ought to have been a socialist. Marx's own ethic draws
from the same Rousseauean roots as Kant's, via Hegel in his case, and it's
plausible that we can only treat others as ends in themselves and not as
means only in socialism precisely because capitalism requires us to treat
others as means only. (Ourselves too, which Kant would also forbid.) 

Granted, there are bourgeois aspects to both utilitarianism (which, by
the way, cannot be reduced to Bentham) and Kantian moral theory.
Utilitarianism pictures human beings as a collection of appetites, not as
free agents. Kant pictures us as free agents, all right, but also as free
not in our social relationships, but only transcendently, apart from all
real social relationships and indeed apart from the empirical world
altogether. I myself am neither a utilitarian nor a Kantian: my moral
philosophy starts, as I said before, from Hegel. Nonetheless my point is
that one can't read off concrete commitments to bourgeois political
philosophy from premises which have an admixture of bourgeois ideology.

We got into this in the first place because I had insisted that James'
dichotomy between abstract moralizing and whatever he thinks Marxist
morality involves is false. It's a truism that any moral theory worthy of
serious consideration will acknowledge that what's right will vary with
circumstances. That's consistent with saying that they may be limits such
that there are things we may not do no matter what. It's also consistent
with the recognition that there may be circumstances in which there is no
right thing to do, only less wrong ones.

Changing subjects again, and considering my concrete example about justice
I had said:

> >we're not going to get very
> >far in getting interacial solidarity if Black workers think that the white
> >workers hate and despise them and defend their interests only insofar as
> >it promotes the interests of white workers.
> 
> On the contrary. That is a more realistic foundation for solidarity than
> pious ideas about justice that are never realised.
> >

This confuses the notion of solidarity with the idea of a temporary
coalition of interests. We might make alliance with the liberal
bourgeoisie to defend democracy against far-right authoritarian attacks
because democracy furthers our interests, although we don't care for the
liberal bourgeoisie and would just as soon overthrow them. That's not
solidarity. In such a coalition each side will trust the other only so far
as one is convinced that there is a coincidence of interests, and that's
not necessarily very far.

Likewise Blacks are not going to trust whites who hate them and support
the interests of Blacks only insofar as that support furthers the
interests of whites. Neither will the resulting coalition be very stable,
if it occurs at all.

--Justin Schwartz






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