Contemporary Conversations: Vanessa Christina Wills on Marx's Ethical Vision

In this lively interview with philosopher Vanessa Wills, we discuss her recently published book, Marx's Ethical Vision, which argues that Marx's historical materialism contains a coherent and consistent moral picture of social transformation grounded in a view of human nature and the conditions of human flourishing. Contra the amoralist reading of Marx, Wills critically reconstructs, drawing from the entire range of Marx's corpus, an unflinching concern for normative ends that emerge as the dialectical product of human interaction with the natural world. For Marx, the necessity for morality is grounded in the existence of class domination and antagonism and will only disappear with the final dissolution of class society. Until then, we will still need to take seriously the gap between the existing state of things and the way things out to be, while remaining vigilant against forms of ideology that mystify or naturalise conditions of life that thwart the unleashing of human potentiality, freedom, and individuality.Find out more about Professor Wills's book here:https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marxs-ethical-vision-9780197688144?cc=us&lang=en&Become a paying subscriber to our Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes, early access releases, and future bookish merch: https://www.patreon.com/MoralMinorityFollow us on Twitter(X).Devin: https://x.com/DevinGoureCharles: https://x.com/satireredacted

This episode inaugurates a series of episodes exploring the existentialist approach to modern philosophy by considering the most well-known work of the melancholic, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is a genre-bending blend of aesthetic criticism, biblical exegesis, and critical ethics. It is perhaps the most profound deliberation on the concept of faith in the history of philosophy. Firmly rooted in post-Kantian ethical universalism, Fear and Trembling attempts a first approximation at defining the relation between faith, deliberative choice, passion, and the limits of rational morality. It is a work that challenges our received notions of faith as immediate certainty or intuition and takes us to the limits of human understanding. Faith, for Kierkegaard, as exemplified in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is a matter of passionate interiority that defies intelligibility. In faith, we are gripped with an anxiety whose object is the paradox that tempts us to trespass the bounds of our understanding and our conventional ethical worldview. True faith is a rare human achievement that places the singular individual in an absolute relation to the absolute. Can the conviction of a passionate interiority which unifies a life around a singular decision be justified? Can passion or a purely personal virtue be reconciled with the public demands of ordinary social morality? Are there instances in our ethical life where our commitments force us to become an exception?

To complete our series on Dialectic of Enlightenment, we take an extended look at the famous chapter on the culture industry. The function of the culture industry, or the sphere of production concerned with creating entertainment and art is to inure and train consumers to acquiesce to the dominant ideology expressed through its culture products. The tendency of this process, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is to reproduce sameness, conformity, and eliminate the thought of rebellion against the status quo. The culture industry is a totalizing system that continuously creates desires by the management of consumer preference, while foreclosing the means of actually fulfilling these desires. Some have argued that this analysis is no longer applicable to a digital age characterized by a fragmentation of mass media and infinite streams of information. In this episode, we ask to what extent does the internet age continue to stifle authentic creativity and individuality and reproduce formulaic entertainment? Finally, we pose the question of whether rebellion is still possible within a system that anticipates and absorbs the gesture of rebellion. 

In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 2, we focus on the final completed fragment, "Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,' which analyzes the concept and instrumentalization of antisemitism in fascist political currents. Adorno and Horkheimer, over the course of seven theses, interweave insights from Freudan psychoanalysis, Marxist theories of reification and class struggle, and Nietzchean analyses of power to argue that antisemitism is a recurrent symbolic structure for the mobilisation of repressed violent urges.  This structure casts whomever is unassimilable to the dominant order in the role of scapegoat for the ills of the wrong society.  It is this shared feeling of impotence of a purportedly rational order to resolve the inherent contradictions of "the wrong society" that leads to the unleashing of irrational forces of destruction. The enlightenment is premised upon the promise of universal humanity and general emancipation, but the capitalist order keeps this nascent potential on the other side of the dialectic as a promise deferred. Is it possible to break the spell?

In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 1, we discuss the meaning of Enlightenment as the advancement of thought and ask how we square the traditional narratives of historical progress and emancipatory potential with the pernicious effects of rationalised management, social alienation, and the homogenisation of political possibilities under the logic of Enlightenment. As argued by Adorno and Horkheimer, the destructive trajectory of the enlightenment project can only be understand by its purported point of departure—myth. By posing itself in opposition to myth it recapitulates the impulse of myth to subsume the multiplicity of the world under the dictates of unitary, abstracting logic. By detaching ourselves from the influence of nature and attempting to master it, we have enslaved ourselves more surely to the claims of the “natural” and “objective” and left ourselves exposed to the forces of irrationality that the Enlightenment supposedly had left behind. Is there a way to preserve the emancipatory potential of Enlightenment in the face of our radically circumscribed political present?

This episode discusses the German sociologist Max Weber's Vocation Lectures. In these lectures, Weber outlines a secular conception of the meaning of a vocation, the role of passion in politics and scholarship, and the kind of ethically responsibility that confronts us given the unavoidably violent nature of modern politics. Weber characterises modernity as the instrumentalization of reason and scientific knowledge towards the end of a kind mastery or control over the natural world.  In a secular world, how do we decide what matters to us or what ends to pursue?  If the nature of politics depends upon a desire for power, how do we motivate individuals of strong convictions to pursue politics and yet keep the lust for power in check? Weber doesn't necessarily offer satisfactory answers to these questions, but invites us to face the painful and frustrating choices of political action in a disenchanted world with clear-eyed dignity.

In Shame and Necessity,  Bernard Williams interrogates what we can still glean about the universal character of human action and the notion of responsibility from a study of the Ancient Greeks. William provides a philosophical interpretation of the historical circumstances of the Greek understanding, expressed in the tragedies, of agency, responsibility, and the role of luck in human affairs.  His claim is that our modern concept of moral responsibility does not deserve its presumed role as a paragon case of human action. A theory of action need not be exclusively a theory of distinctly moral motivation. The Greek ethical sensibility differs from our modern one in emphasizing shame rather than guilt as the fitting response to agents as causes. Shame is directed at the failure to be seen by others and ourselves as individuals worthy of our established character. Importantly, for Williams, our concept of guilt as inextricably tied to moral responsibility does not represent a progressive development in our moral consciousness, but a contemporary prejudice. Can modernity dispense with metaphysically deep concepts like free will and still account for our ethical lives? What is the scope of our distance from the Greeks?

This episode turns to Christine Korsgaard's Tanner lectures, "The Sources of Normativity," to explore how morality might be rationally vindicated from within the nature of practical rationality. Korsgaard's project is an iteration of the Enlightenment's attempt to ground morality in human nature. Korsgaard suggests that the correct moral theory will not merely provide an explanation of our moral natures, but also be justified in the light of our status as reflective animals. Her constructivist account of normativity will conceive of obligations as integral to our sense of identity, which in turn depends on our status as deliberative agents who must act upon some principle. Is the source of normativity a product of the correct application of moral concepts to the sphere of action?  Are values the product of our self-legislating will? Can we understand unconditional obligations as derived from our shared identity as human beings? 

This episode examines Alasdair MacIntyre's attempt to explain the existence of interminable moral and political disagreement as a symptom of the disarray of our inherited moral concepts.  MacIntyre contends that the best way to unify our disparate and competing concepts of right, obligation, and virtue is to understand them as emerging from determinate social conditions. What modernity lacks or has forgotten in its instrumental use of moral concepts is that normative questions like "what ought we to do?" and "what does justice require ?" are only intelligible against a background of shared communal goals. In the absence of any shared conceptions of human nature and our ultimate ends, morality is unmoored.  MacIntyre proposes that a reinvigorated account of the virtues embedded in the narrative unity of a human life is our best bet for breaking the apparent incommensurability and confusions of contemporary moral debates.

In this episode, Devin and Charles climb down from the heights of Nietzsche's critique of conventional morality in order to take a brief detour into the domain of twentieth-century analytic metaethics. Together they explore the historical context, motivating forces and access the viability of moral realism—the view that our moral claims have objective validity.  The discussion focuses on  the social conditions driving analytic philosophy's turn to logical and semantic analysis and how this leads to divergent views on the meaning/use of moral statements and the ontological status of moral claims.  A version of moral realism known as intuitionism is explored through an overview of W.D. Ross's seminal work, The Right and the Good. Intuitionism claims that we come to learn moral truths as self-evident in analogous fashion to truths of mathematics and logic. Does this prima facie implausible view hold water? What does Ross's analysis of right action tells us about our obligations to our self and others? What virtues does his account of a plurality of duties and intrinsic value have over alternative theories like utilitarianism?