Hegel provided a new approach to the ancient problem of reconciling morality and self-interest. Whereas others had accepted the problem as part of the inevitable nature of things and looked for ways around it, Hegel looked at it historically, seeing it as a problem only in a certain type of society. Instead of attempting to solve the problem as it had existed up to his time, he contemplated the emergence of a new form of society in which it would disappear. In this way, Hegel claimed to have overcome one great problem that was insoluble for Kant.
Hegel also believed that he had rectified another key weakness in Kant’s ethics—namely, the difficulty of giving content to the supreme formal moral principle. In Hegel’s organic community, the content of one’s moral duty would be determined by one’s position in society. One would know that his duty was to be a good parent, a good citizen, a good teacher, merchant, or soldier, as the case might be. This ethics has been characterized as “my station and its duties,” after the title of a well-known essay by the British Hegelian F.H. Bradley (1846–1924). It might be thought that this is a limited, conservative conception of what one ought to do, especially when compared with Kant’s principle of universal law. Hegel would have replied that because the organic community is based on universally valid principles of reason, it complies with Kant’s principle of universal law. Moreover, without the specific content provided by the concrete institutions and practices of a society, Kant’s principle would remain an empty formula.
Hegel’s philosophy has both a conservative and a radical side. The conservative aspect is reflected in the ethics of “my station and its duties” and even more strongly in the significant resemblance between Hegel’s detailed description of the organic society and the actual institutions of the Prussian state in which he lived and taught for the last decade of his life. This resemblance, however, was in no way a necessary implication of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. After Hegel’s death, a group of his more radical followers known as the Young Hegelians hailed the manner in which he had demonstrated the need for a new form of society to overcome the separation between self and community, but they scorned the implication that the state in which they were living could be this society. Among them was a young student named Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx
Marx was often portrayed by his followers as a scientist rather than a moralist. He did not deal directly with the ethical issues that occupied the philosophers so far discussed. His materialist conception of history is, rather, an attempt to explain all ideas, whether political, religious, or ethical, as the product of the particular economic stage that society has reached (see materialism). Thus, in feudal societies loyalty and obedience to one’s lord were regarded as the chief virtues. In capitalist societies, on the other hand, the need for a mobile labour force and expanding markets ensures that the most important value will be freedom—especially the freedom to sell one’s labour. Because Marx regarded ethics as a mere by-product of the economic basis of society, he frequently took a dismissive attitude toward it. Echoing the Sophist Thrasymachus, Marx said that the “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” In The Communist Manifesto (1848), written with Friedrich Engels (1820–95), he was even more scornful, insisting that morality, law, and religion are “so many bourgeois prejudices behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”
Karl Marx.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
A sweeping rejection of ethics, however, is difficult to reconcile with the highly moralistic tone of Marx’s condemnation of the miseries that the capitalist system inflicts upon the working class and with his obvious commitment to hastening the arrival of the communism that will end such inequities. After Marx died, Engels tried to explain this apparent inconsistency by saying that as long as society was divided into classes, morality would serve the interest of the ruling class. A classless society, on the other hand, would be based on a truly human morality that served the interests of all human beings. This does make Marx’s position consistent by setting him up as a critic, not of ethics as such but rather of the class-based moralities that would prevail until the communist revolution.
Marx’s earlier writings—those produced when he was a Young Hegelian—convey a slightly different, though not incompatible, impression of the place of ethics in his thought. There seems no doubt that the young Marx, like Hegel, regarded human freedom as the ultimate goal. He also held, as did Hegel, that freedom could be realized only in a society in which the dichotomy between private interest and the general interest had disappeared. Under the influence of socialism, however, he formed the view that merely knowing what was wrong with the world would not achieve anything. Only the abolition of private property could lead to the transformation of human nature and so bring about the reconciliation of the individual and the community. Theory, Marx concluded, had gone as far as it could; even the theoretical problems of ethics, as illustrated in Kant’s division between reason and feeling, would remain insoluble unless one moved from theory to practice. This is what Marx meant in the famous thesis that is engraved on his tombstone: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” The goal of changing the world stemmed from Marx’s attempt to overcome one of the central problems of ethics. The means now passed beyond philosophy. Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a literary and social critic, not a systematic philosopher. In ethics, the chief target of his criticism was the Judeo-Christian tradition. He described Jewish ethics as a “slave morality” based on envy. Christian ethics, in his opinion, is even worse, because it makes a virtue of meekness, poverty, and humility and requires one to turn the other cheek rather than struggle. It is an ethics of the weak, who hate and fear strength, pride, and self-affirmation. Such an ethics, Nietzsche asserted, undermines the human drives that have led to the greatest and most noble human achievements.
Nietzsche, FriedrichFriedrich Nietzsche.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Nietzsche thought that the era of traditional religion was over. (His paradoxical way of expressing this point, “God is dead,” is perhaps his most widely repeated aphorism.) Yet, what was to take religion’s place? Nietzsche adopted Aristotle’s concept of greatness of soul, the unchristian virtue that included nobility and a justified pride in one’s achievements. He suggested a “reevaluation of all values” that would lead to a new ideaclass="underline" the Übermensch, a term usually translated as “superman” and given connotations that suggest that Nietzsche would have approved of fascism and particularly German Nazism (National Socialism). Nietzsche’s praise of “the will to power” is taken as further evidence of his proto-Nazi views. This interpretation, however, owes much to Nietzsche’s racist sister, who after his death compiled a volume of his unpublished writings, arranging them to make it appear that Nietzsche would have endorsed Nazi ideals. In fact, Nietzsche was almost as contemptuous of pan-German racism and anti-Semitism as he was of the ethics of Judaism and Christianity. What Nietzsche meant by Übermensch was a person who could rise above the limitations of ordinary morality, and by “the will to power” it seems that Nietzsche had in mind self-affirmation and not necessarily the use of power to oppress others.
Nevertheless, it must be said that Nietzsche left himself wide open to those who wanted his philosophical imprimatur for their crimes against humanity. His belief in the importance of the Übermensch made him talk of ordinary people as “the herd,” who did not really matter. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he wrote with approval of “the distinguished type of morality,” according to which “one has duties only toward one’s equals; toward beings of a lower rank, toward everything foreign to one, one may act as one sees fit, ‘as one’s heart dictates’”—in any event, beyond good and evil. The point is that the Übermensch is above ordinary moral standards: “The distinguished type of human being feels himself as value-determining; he does not need to be ratified; he judges ‘that which is harmful to me is harmful as such’; he knows that he is the something which gives value to objects; he creates values.” In this Nietzsche was a forerunner of existentialism rather than of Nazism—but then existentialism, precisely because it gives no basis for choosing other than authenticity, is itself compatible with Nazism (see below Existentialism).