Paul Wolf interrogates the discourse on moral philosophy’s utility for revolutionary Marxism.
One prominent criticism of Karl Marx, and of the many “Marxisms” out there, is that they lack a robust moral theory. There are many ways to interpret this complaint, but I’ll settle on a relatively boring, untechnical version of it: Marxism might explain how the economy and class conflict works, but it provides no reason for either class to “do” anything. The language of Marxism might explain that the ruling class exploits the working class, but the word “exploit” is a technical term denoting surplus-value extraction – we need a separate argument which explains why exploitation is immoral. Marxism predicts that workers will resist given a certain amount of exploitation and immiseration, but it doesn’t explain why they should.
There are several strategies one could employ to meet this apparent challenge. You could dig into Marx and find textual evidence that he not only explained capitalism and how it works, but that he also thought it was bad (though of course, when one digs far enough, one will also find that Marx also had a lot of positive things to say about capitalism too.) Another option is trying to find the implicit moral theory in Marxism by interpreting Marx’s positions on history, human nature, what he thought counted as exploitation, and so on. Lastly, you could argue that even if Marx didn’t commit Marxism to a moral theory, he should have.1 You could then expound upon which moral theory you think best explains why workers ought to resist capitalism and pursue revolution to usher in socialism.
The purpose of this essay is to explain that this apparent challenge is just that – apparent. It is not a challenge for anyone; it’s a non-problem. Digging up Marx’s opinions on capitalism is fascinating history, and it is surely valuable for that reason, but it’s irrelevant to whether Marxism entails a specific moral theory. The final two strategies are beset by the same problem: there is no consensus on which theory is implicit in Marxism, and independently of Marxism, there is no consensus on which moral theory best explains why revolutionary activity is morally required or good. Lastly, I’ll explain why I think morality theory in general should not be considered crucial to our practical deliberations.
Marxist Pseudo-Problems
I find it very strange when people assert that Marxism needs a theory of morality and that it suffers for not espousing one. In fact, it’s the only form of social theory I’m aware of that gets routinely attacked on these grounds. Max Weber is forgiven for not wedding his theories to specific moral theories, and so is Emile Durkheim. One could easily respond, “Well, maybe they should have!”, but I think there’s a good reason why these complaints aren’t made – social theory aims to explain and predict. In the case of critical social theory, the theory should also help change the world. Marx is different in that one could say his work is “critical” and is therefore obliged to provide a moral theory, but this is too quick.
People are motivated to do things for many non-moral reasons: because it is in their best interest, because they think it will be fun, or because they believe there is something intrinsically valuable about achieving something. To meet its goals, critical theory is required to move people, not necessarily to move people for the right reasons. To my knowledge, none of the prominent revolutions in history were motivated by specific moral theories. The burden of proof is on those suggesting that Marxism needs a moral theory to motivate people, especially given that Marxism has already helped motivate revolutions.
This is not to say that everyone should be brutely self-interested egoists; I’m not a moral nihilist. I’m also not a moral error theorist or non-cognitivist—moral statements are most certainly not all false, and they most certainly have semantic and pragmatic meaning. However, I do claim that the apparent absence of moral theory hasn’t prevented revolutions from happening, nor has it prevented other forms of socialist organizing. It is a non-problem: it poses no practical issues whatsoever that most Marxists are not utilitarians, Kantians, contractarians or virtue-ethicists; it quite simply doesn’t matter. However, we can (and will!) explore these problems, simply because they are fascinating.
So, What Did Marx Think?
What Marx himself thought is intriguing for hosts of scientific and historical reasons – what it can’t do is supplant Marxism with a moral theory. To explain why, I will take a brief detour into how ethical theory in general is carved up in some corners of philosophy – analytic philosophy, namely. First, I’ll mention meta-ethics, the branch of moral theory which concerns itself with the following: the truth-value statuses of moral and ethical statements, how we can come to know that moral statements are true, what makes them true or false, and the purpose of morality itself. Secondly, we have normative ethics. Normative theory concerns which things are good and criteria for right conduct – the Right and the Good. If you’ve argued about whether utilitarianism is true or whether Kantian moral theory is true, that’s normative ethics. Lastly, we have applied ethics. This involves the application of specific moral theories to real life problems – i.e. healthcare, abortion, economic redistribution, war, etc.
You could do some biographical digging to find textual support for Marx thinking exploitation was bad and revolution is good, but it would be difficult to find him explaining exactly why. Marx did not engage in producing normative theory for us; Marx didn’t consider applied ethics either. Where things get interesting is with meta-ethics, which Marx did engage.
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby”;2 such a statement seems to be about the “nature” of rightness rather than a theory of “which acts are right”. I won’t belabor the point with torrential quotations; the point is that Marx’s ethical reflections are taking place at a higher level of abstraction than normative theory. Marx’s thought was principally about the functional role that morality plays in society, and how morality’s development or change was constrained by economic development. You will never find a sustained defense of anything approximating a normative theory. Though there’s no textual evidence for this, given his philosophical background, it’s likely that he was familiar with Hegel’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative as an “empty formalism” – not substantively action-guiding.3 For Marx, it doesn’t seem like anyone is in dire need of a theory which tells them what to do.
“Marx never said it, but it’s in there – I promise!”
So, we come to the second strategy, taking two forms in practice: either abstracting toward a coherent Marxist moral theory, or construing which moral theories Marxism may already “entail”. The former strategy is weaker than the latter – to raise the standard to logical entailment is to let oneself off easy. Of course Marxism doesn’t literally entail an entire moral theory – that standard would be impossible to meet. Attempting to abstract such a moral theory out of the disparate comments Marx made – on human nature, ethical systems, history, economics, etc. – would be a more satisfactory hermeneutic. A weaker thesis is normally more defensible, but this strategy works against itself in its looseness of standards.
The idea that accepting or understanding Marxism grants one a distinctive, implicit moral standpoint is simply not in line with history. Alasdair MacIntyre said it best:4
[T]he claim of Marxism to a morally distinctive standpoint is undermined by Marxism’s own moral history. In all those crises in which Marxists have had to take explicit moral stances-that over Bernstein’s revisionism in German social democracy at the turn of the century or that over Khruschev’s repudiation of Stalin and the Hungarian revolt in 1956, for example-Marxists have always fallen back into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism.
Am I telling on myself here? Citing a philosopher who has witnessed self-espoused Marxists become Kantians or utilitarians – isn’t this simply a case of Marxism implying a moral theory? Quite the opposite is true! MacIntyre’s verbiage here is not arbitrary; look closer: “Marxists have always fallen back into [these theories]” (emphasis ours.) This implies a retreat from Marxism because it failed to provide something necessary; much of After Virtue laments the “moral impoverishment” of Marxism.5 However, I do not believe that the moral theory it lacks is actually necessary at all. Therefore, I do not see Marxism as impoverished.
What, perhaps, is lamentable, is that the morality which Marxists most often retreat to is conventional, classical liberalism — i.e. Utilitarianism and Kantianism (but I won’t discuss that further here). It would not be fair to someone who thinks this strategy works if I did not consider another way of thinking about this. Surely, Marx’s early reflections on species-being and other inherited Feuerbachian concepts mean something, don’t they?6 They do – they are salient reflections on ethical life! They are also, however, meta-ethical reflections; they do not delineate an applicable moral or ethical system.
A popular maneuver around this problem is to distinguish ethics from morality: to say something like, “Marx had an ethical theory, not a moral theory.”7 This assertion must rely on the same textual support as the claims to outline Marxism’s implicit moral theory; that is, “evidence” that is indeterminate, decontextualized, and fragmented. The distinction may be worth something – and I think it is, for unrelated reasons – but it doesn’t solve the problem, insofar as it doesn’t provide a particular theory.
This strategy reserves a “Hail Mary” play, something like: “Well, what Marx says here sounds an awful lot like what [insert philosopher] says..” An example: in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx argues that certain arrangements – defects, as he calls them – will be necessary under the first phase of communist society:8
This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view.
Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
One could argue that Marx sounds a bit like John Rawls invoking the difference principle here; I agree that it sounds like the difference principle, but Marx notes that the above conception of right is, in fact, bourgeois right.9 What is more, Marx does not sustain a defense of this principle with moral argument, he asserts that it is an inevitable consequence of economic and cultural development of capitalist society. My point here is that whatever affinities Marx might share, sometimes, with certain moral philosophers, it is never to justify a normative theory or a theory of justice. In this case, Marx is making a meta-ethical point about where conceptions of justice come from, as well as a historical prediction about how these conceptions will change over time.
If anything, the early Marx is most similar to Aristotle, simply because of Feuerbach’s and Hegel’s close philosophical affinities with Aristotle. It’s clear that some version of human freedom to develop one’s capacities and human flourishing matter to Marx. Marx sometimes even takes pains to explain the differences between bourgeois freedom (the freedom to buy and sell things), and the type of freedom he is talking about. There are two problems: what a normative theory does is explain why these things matter, not merely that they do matter and a theory of the Good would explain which capacities are worth developing and what constitutes human flourishing. These are questions normative theory cannot be silent on; a normative theory which does not answer these questions is empty.
Of course, this does not mean I disagree with Marx’s view that freedom involves the ability to develop one’s capacities and that flourishing involves more than the kind of “happiness” that the utilitarians were talking about.10 Quite the contrary – I think he’s right! I just don’t have a theory which explains why. Marx’s reflections on these matters, as they exist for me, are what some in philosophical circles would call a “Moorean-Fact”. That is, I am far surer that these things matter than I am of any of the premises of fishy philosophical arguments which argue the contrary. Personally, I think someone needs a good theory to explain why the development of one’s capacities and human flourishing don’t matter—that is a far more unintuitive and strange statement.
“Fine, it’s not there – but it should have been!”
In my opinion, G. A. Cohen offers the most plausible defense of the idea that regardless of how Marx chose to argue or make his points, socialists can and should apply normative moral philosophy. Specifically, demonstrating via sound argument that capitalism as such is an unjust social arrangement is a good idea – regardless of whether we can find such argumentation in Marx’s writings.11
Marxists do not believe merely that this or that capitalist society, or even every capitalist society, is unjust because of its particular origin. Marxists believe that capitalism as such is unjust, that, therefore, there could not be a just formation of capitalist private property, and that thesis requires moral rather than historical argument.
What Cohen is saying here is instructive. It isn’t sufficient to reflect on historical instances of political brutality to generate an argument which supports a theory of justice – a string of cases a theory does not make. What needs to be shown is that capitalism as such is unjust, regardless of actually existing capitalism’s historical trajectory. If one’s aim is to produce moral theory, then he is assuredly right.
This view faces problems – once we abstract away from history, our complaints become abstract too. That is, let’s say we don’t hinge our opposition to capitalism on Marx’s depictions of British primitive accumulation, which involved the violent expropriation of resources from the propertyless — this is just an example; there are many more scattered through Marx’s Capital. We are then forced to make abstract complaints about the nature of private property rather than discrete instances of injustice.
What’s wrong with our complaints being abstract? You take an abstract complaint like “the existence of private property is incompatible with categorical imperative” or “according to the principle of utility, the means of production should be held in common; therefore, private property should be abolished” and apply it to different concrete cases — problem solved! This is also too quick. Moral disagreement is a fact of life – for every argument supporting the claim that private property violates the categorical imperative, there is an equally plausible argument suggesting that it does not, and so on. There is no empirical way to settle this – whether something violates the categorical imperative depends on how one interprets the rule. The same goes for the principle of utility. One could simply dig their heels in and say that their view on the matter is correct, but there is no set of meta-philosophical assumptions that everyone must accept which guarantee we must settle on a single interpretation of any normative theory or its constitutive principles.
Let’s say we try to let normative ethics pick up Marxism’s slack. We are left with a proliferation of competing theories: happiness, welfare, justice, fairness, flourishing, virtue, and just about every other garden-variety ethical concept one could think of. Marxism will simply inherit all of the same theoretical conundrums which liberal moral philosophy has no hope of solving, and it will provide no tools to help us solve them. Thankfully, I do not think any of these need solving!
What’s Left of Moral Philosophy?
It might be thought that I am being a “vulgar scientific Marxist” here. I admit the essay up to this point does in fact give that impression. At this stage, I’d like to argue that I do not think moral and ethical theorizing are useless, and that there is a place for such reflection in our lives. My argument will perhaps only be mildly controversial: I do not believe Marxism needs to supply the theory. What is more, I will argue that we need not be bothered by the absence of historically transcendent moral principles.
I want to be careful here: I am not arguing that there are no moral principles, which would be wrong. If you ask people if they have such principles, they will assuredly say “Yes, I do!” I also do not think that our actions ought not to be guided by those principles — rules and heuristics are useful! What I do want to claim, however, is that no set of moral principles can explain all our intuitions about what constitutes the Good and what conduct is Right. I also claim that the reliability and legitimacy of our moral and ethical judgment does not depend on the existence of historically transcendent moral principles.
These are relatively modest claims without immediate implications for anyone anxious about having a reason for being a Marxist and doing things which they believe Marxism requires of them. If I am very controversial at all, it will be in stating that if anyone is required to do anything — and I believe people are morally required to do certain things — Marxism is not the legislator.
What could guide us to be Marxists then? I want to entertain the idea that if you are a Marxist, and you believe revolutionary activity is morally required, you were not guided to it by rules at all. You may in fact follow certain rules, or at least behave in accordance with them, but I believe most are implicitly driven by concerns unrelated to rules. The concern is broadly more existential and involves answering the question “How should I live?”, not “Which actions are Right?” or “Which things are Good?” We have but one life, and we must live it.
It’s at this stage where I think William James sums up humanity’s philosophical predicament beautifully:12
On the one hand, so far as [our speculations] retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty barrenness. The most they can say is that the elements of the world are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to answer by his own wit. . .
We are thus led to the conclusion that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth. It is a monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the absolute loss and casting out of real matter. This is why so few human beings truly care for philosophy. The particular determinations which she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and authoritative as hers.
What does the moral enthusiast care for philosophical ethics? Why does the Æsthetik of every German philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
There is a truly vexing question at hand here: there is a massive gulf between moral philosophy and life “as you live it”. Morality and ethics alike become silent when we need it most or under-determine what we ought to do during situations that are the most morally agonizing. It is easy for moral theory to state what people — in the abstract — ought to do generally; but no one ever needed a theory for that.
Yet there is, in fact, a pressing need to decide what kind of people we ought to be, or at least, what kind of person you ought to be. The problem with aiming to be the kind of person which “maximizes happiness” or “follows the categorical imperative” is that these are not “kinds of people” at all. In fact, someone who wants to “abolish private property” is not a kind of person either. These descriptions say nothing about who this person is, or whether it would be morally valuable to be like them, deliberate like them, value the same things in the same way as them, and so on.
What if we wish to answer questions about whether the projects we devote our lives to are worth it? How much sense does it really make to ask if getting involved – in tenant organizing, or mutual aid, or canvassing for socialist politicians – does maximize total world utility? Sensible people rightly do not ask themselves whether such goals conform with prevailing moral theory, nor do they behave in a way which is consistent with doing so. The question, I bet, we often ask ourselves – without appealing to any rules – is if the people we respect, admire, and look up to engage in activities like tenant organizing, mutual aid, canvassing, political education, and so on. We wonder if they find those activities worth doing, and we look to others to see how much of our lives we ought to dedicate to these causes, and why they matter at all. We inherit the reasons for doing them from the practices themselves; we are motivated to act on such reasons by the vicissitudes of our emotions and circumstances of our lives.
As James pointed out, moral theory ignores the circumstances peculiar to our lives. And, when it doesn’t, it asks us to assume that dreadful, impossible standpoint philosophers often attempt to wax poetic about — sub species aeternitas — the view from nowhere. There is no such view! As Bernard Williams put it,13
[T]his is not a good species to view [the world] under. If we are not agents of the universal satisfaction system, we are not primarily janitors of any system of values, even our own; very often, we just act, as a possible confused result of the situation in which we are engaged.
We are not on metaphysical clean-up duty. We are real people with actual needs, thoughts, and first-personal concerns. It raises the question as to what kind of authority morality has over other factors which influence practical deliberation; this question has important implications for what kind of people we want to be, and what kinds of concerns we hope move us. To be motivated by the right features of a situation is more important to the functioning of our interpersonal relationships than we might initially think. What is more, we are often rightly motivated by non-moral considerations.
Consider the following scenario put forward by Bernard Williams.14 He asks us to consider a choice a man has between saving one person or two people. The “one” person in this scenario is his wife. The other two are strangers. The dictates of moral theory ask us to deliberate impartially — flip a coin; who are we to make it such that the other two people don’t even have a shot at survival? But of course, we also have moral duties to our loved ones, and a utilitarian, with enough elbow-grease, could argue that it would be better if all people were motivated to save their loved ones than if they were cold calculators.
There is a sense in which the way moral theory allows us to act on our preferences for our loved ones is strange – as if one’s love for their spouse ought to be interrogated before a metaphysical court tribunal. Williams’s point is only that at some point “one reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view, and they also run the risk of offending against it.”15 I want to reflect on something more emotionally harrowing than this, though.
Consider the man saves his wife. What of the morning after? Wracked with survivors’ guilt, knowing her life came at the cost of two others, she asks, “Why did you save me?” What if the man responded, “It was a hard decision — saving you. I considered flipping a coin, but I knew that couldn’t be right. What if we were all such ruthless calculators? We can act on our preferences too” Such an explanation borders on inhumanity! Perhaps his wife, in this case, should be counting her blessings that the universal value system ruled in her favor. This kind of interaction is a recipe for heartbreak. Note that there is no room in the explanation for saving someone because you love them; moral theory leaves us with one thought too many.
Susan Wolf sums up my sentiment well: “I don’t know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them. . . moral perfection, in the sense of saintliness, does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive.”16 What does Wolf mean by this? Surely, she does not mean that it would be better for us to be “bad” people? No, this is not what is meant or implied by Wolf; nor Williams, for that matter, when he complains about the hegemonic authority morality aims to have over our motivations for action and deliberative rationality. His point is that there is something wrong with how the person in the above thought experiment thinks, behaves, and more importantly, feels. The wrong kinds of things are salient to him in certain situations.
It seems intuitive that not only should the man have been motivated to save his wife because he loves her, but it should also not occur to him to put her life up to the flip of a coin. The question of what kinds of things should motivate us and which features of situations speak to us as morally and ethically salient are bound up with the concept of the virtuous person. A virtue is a disposition to act, feel, and perceive in a certain way reliably. A kind person can be relied on to act kindly in the right situations, to the right degree, and for the right reasons.
The virtuous person is sensitive to all and only those things which are salient to the situation at hand. I am borrowing this account from John McDowell; to put things in his terms:17
The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity. . . [A] kind person need not himself classify the behavior he sees to be called for, on one of the relevant occasions, as kind. He need not be articulate enough to possess concepts of the particular virtues; and even if he does, the concepts need not enter his reasons for the actions which manifest those particular virtues. It is enough if he thinks of what he does, when—as we put it—he shows himself to be kind, under some such description as “the thing to do”.
I’ve come far afield. The details of contemporary moral philosophy that is itself opposed to the hegemony morality has over our lives are not really of any deeper concern for this essay. The point here is that another view is plausible, and another way of conceptualizing morality’s role in our lives can present itself as reasonable.
Circling Back to Marxism
It might be asked if the detour I took has any bearing on the first half of this essay — a reasonable question, because I haven’t made it obvious. Again, does Marxism need moral theory? Is it held back because it doesn’t have an obvious one? What if the correct moral philosophy doesn’t consist of a neat set of codifiable rules which churn out all and only the correct actions and none of the wrong actions? I have taken the long road to give a (somewhat shameless) plug for the Aristotelian conception of ethics and practical rationality.
If we shift our thinking away from believing normative theory is necessary for Marxism to have practical importance or persuasive power among workers, the types of questions we begin asking ourselves about politics and personal conduct radically change. What kinds of people do we want to be? What does it mean to be a good Marxist? What have our heroes done, and what have they failed to do? What kinds of harrowing moral dilemmas did they face and how did they solve them? The history of Marxism itself is the guide here – not unreadable articles in Public Affairs Quarterly or Utilitas.
I cannot provide answers to the question about what it means to be a revolutionary or a Marxist. These questions are beyond me. But I can say that the answers to those questions do not hinge on any particular doctrine in moral theory and nor should they. I will leave this on a bit of a somber note though. The history of Marxism is not lost on Alasdair MacIntyre, and his pessimism about Marxism was informed by it. He states things rather harshly,18
Many socialists will argue that the dominant contemporary world view is a Marxist one, that Weber is vieux jeu, his claims fatally undermined by his critics from the Left. . . I will say that as Marxists organize and move toward power they always do and have become Weberians in substance, even if they remain Marxists in rhetoric; for in our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form. And if this is true of Marxism when it is on the road to power, how much more so is it the case when it arrives. All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely.
His statements about power “co-opting absolutely” seem platitudinous to me; still, the point is well-made. Empirically, the observation that Marxists shift towards a Weberian, and then ultimately classically liberal, conception of the individual and world (and the system of values it implies) as they move into power is true. Marxists have an enormous task ahead of them: to meet this challenge head-on.
I believe meeting this challenge is worth more to people who self-describe as Marxists than taking pains to chastise the internet’s moralizers. Yes, the cultural atmosphere of contemporary leftism is choked with puritanical, anal-retentive asceticism, causing many leftists’ inability to tolerate intercommunication without suffering from emotional exhaustion or anxiety. This problem, I think, is a manifestation of the former problem, the Weberian conception of the world has no conception of a well-adjusted Marxist much less a well-adjusted person—there are only people to be managed—on the interior he remains silent. Perhaps Marxists should speak louder about what kinds of people we ought to be and speak louder about the resilience that is required for moral and ethical growth.
- Cohen, Gerald A. “Freedom, justice and capitalism.” New Left Review 126, no. 1 (1981): 3-16.
- Tucker, Robert C., ed. “The marx-engels reader.” (1978) – Critique of the Gotha Program. P. 531.
- Wood, Allen W. “The Emptiness of the Moral Will.” In GWF Hegel, pp. 307-336. Routledge, 2017. For a critique of the charge that the Categorical Imperative is an empty formalism please see Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the kingdom of ends. Cambridge University Press, 1996., p. 67.
- MacIntyre, Alasdair. After virtue. p. 261, A&C Black, 2013.
- Ibid. p. xviii
- Tucker, Robert C., ed. “The marx-engels reader.” (1978) – Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. P. 77.
- Blackledge, Paul. Marxism and ethics: Freedom, desire, and revolution. State University of New York Press, 2012.
- Tucker, Robert C., ed. “The marx-engels reader.” (1978) – Critique of the Gotha Program. P. 530-531.
- Rawls, John. “A theory of justice.” Cambridge (Mass.) (1971). P. 76
- For a good summary of the difference, see Sayers, Sean. Marxism and human nature. Routledge, 2013. P. 14-36.
- Cohen, Gerald A. “Freedom, justice and capitalism.” New Left Review 126, no. 1 (1981): P. 15 (3-16).
- James, William. The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. Vol. 6. Harvard University Press, 1979. See: The Sentiment of Rationality.
- Smart, John Jamieson Carswell, and Bernard Williams. Utilitarianism: For and against. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- Williams, Bernard. Moral luck: philosophical papers 1973-1980. Cambridge University Press, 1981. p. 17
- Ibid. p. 18
- Wolf, Susan. “Moral saints.” The Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 8 (1982): 419-439. p. 419.
- McDowell, John. “Virtue and reason.” The monist 62, no. 3 (1979): 331-350.
- MacIntyre, Alasdair. After virtue. A&C Black, 2013. p. 109.