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College

College of Arts and Sciences

Major

Philosophy, Political Science

Faculty Mentor

Matthew Rellihan

Faculty Editor

Avery Snelson

Student Editor

Emma Travis

Abstract

This paper examines whether morality in Marxist theory is inescapably ideological—merely an expression of bourgeois class interests—or whether it can serve as a material force for liberation. I argue that although Marx lacks explicit moral theorizing, his critique of capitalism nonetheless relies on a coherent implicit moral framework. This framework can be identified through Marx’s analyses of alienation, exploitation, and class domination, each of which presupposes normative commitments to human dignity, social agency, and collective self-determination. Marx’s critique of bourgeois morality therefore does not entail the rejection of ethics; rather, it reveals the possibility of a historically grounded, emancipatory moral framework, arising from within material conditions. Building on Steven Lukes’s conception of Marxism as a “morality of emancipation,” Vanessa Wills’s account of proletarian moral consciousness, and Charles Mills’s critique of racialized ideology, I show how Marx’s implicit moral commitments can be reconstructed for the purpose of reconfiguring what counts as fairness and grounding it within revolutionary transformation.

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